Information Archaeology

The New York Times recently ran a front page story about a U.S. Justice Department report on the agency's diversity efforts. The final assessment was posted on the web last month, but over half of the report was "blacked out." Obviously, a scandal in the making: the agency responsible for enforcing U.S. civil rights laws censors a highly critical report and then publishes the report on the web, deleted sections and all...

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Edward Tufte: The Dispassionate Statistician II

In a recent interview (here and here) with Edward Tufte by Dan Nadel (I.D. Magazine, November 2003), I was surprised to read Tufte saying that he discovered how "horrifying" PowerPoint was while doing a Google search for people who were teaching his work. In other words, he recognized PowerPoint as evil when he saw his own work projected through its lens — and worse still, that it was "contrary to my work on analytical design."

Tufte has a long and distinguished career, but his reputation was really cemented by his analysis of the Challenger crash in 1986 (well documented in Visual Explanations,1997). After the recent Columbia tragedy, with O-rings replaced by destructive foam, Tufte again wants to blame bad information design...

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