Jinn of Quality and Risk

Here is a disastrous twist to the expression Death by PowerPoint. Edward Tufte: The 3 reports concerning the possible tile damage on the Columbia prepared by the Boeing engineers have become increasingly important as the investigation has developed. The reports provided the rationale for NASA officials to curtail further research (such as photographing the Columbia with spy cameras) on the tiles during the flight. Here is a close analysis of an important slide from a Boeing report. ... On this single slide, in a PowerPoint festival of bureaucratic hyper-rationalism, fully 6 different levels of hierarchy are used to classify, prioritize, and display 11 simple sentence... Read it all. [via Signal vs Noise]

See also: Faulty epistemology and the loss of the Columbia 

Good news at BBC News: From October [2003], a European Union directive will make unsolicited e-mails illegal across member states and the UK government is planning to have its legal framework in place at the same time. Unlimited fines for spammers. Suggestion: allow victims to sue for compensation; that should raise the cost of spamming! 

International Herald Tribune: Chinese health officials Wednesday dramatically increased their estimates of the number of cases and deaths in China caused by a new mystery pneumonia that international health officials believe originated here late last year. Officials in Guangdong Province, the center of China's epidemic, reporting an estimated 792 cases and 31 deaths as of the end of February, a rise from the 305 case and 5 deaths they had previously reported. Moving from their previous 1 in 60 death rate (1.7%) to a very alarming 1 in 25 (4%). Chinese authorities are still refusing to reveal the number of cases in March.