Design bugs in everyday life

A long time ago, I think it was in the book "Information Rules", I read a great example of a pure inefficiency, a problem where everyone involved is worse off than they could be under a simple alternative scenario. At a deli or coffee shop, where coffee is served in disposable cups, it's better if the covers are the same size for different size cups (i.e. the circumference of the top of the cups is the same whether the cup is small, medium or large). Otherwise, people will waste time because they picked the wrong size cover and have to pick again, others will also waste time as they wait for them to get out of the way, some lids get wasted, the counter gets messier, etc. Many small problems arise from having different size lids.

It's a striking example because the difference between the right and wrong solution is so trivial. It's a design error, and if you realize it early on, the fix is virtually free but later it's very costly. Nothing new in that, that's exactly the nature of software bugs and it's not surprising that similar "bugs" exist elsewhere. But what really fascinated me in this example is that the bug, doesn't get fixed even in subsequent versions! You still have many coffee places that have different size cup covers, for decades, for no good reason.What a fascinating bug! It should have been crushed years ago and yet it continues to hang around generation after generation.

Since then, I've noticed other examples of design bugs in every day life that are surprisingly resilient. Some, like the one above, probably survive because the inefficiency occurs in such tiny increments, we don't appreciate the cumulative cost. Others survive because all they need is one chance to get into the system and then they are locked in forever. Here are a few random ones that I can think of right now:

• Typographical Fonts where l (lower case L) and I (capital i) are hard to distinguish.... It seems like if you are designing a font, making letters distinct would be one of your first requirements, so how do these fonts survive, and even thrive? Imagine all the damage that has been done throughout history because someone misread a "l" as an "I"... it's hard to estimate but it must be huge. Maybe it caused a shipwreck at some point!
  
• Alphanumeric key mapping on phones: a neat old idea which allows you to make memorable words out of phone numbers, like 1-800-FLOWERS. But let's look at that mapping on our phones We have 2: ABC, 3: DEF, 4: GHI, 5:JKL, 6: MNO, 7 : PQRS, 8:TUV, 9 : WXYZ , and 1 and 0 have no letters. This leaves a small doubt in a some cases: when you see O is it really an O which makes it a 6 or is it a zero? Similarly if I see a I, I'm not sure if I should dial a 4 or a 1. That's a bug in the design. The fix would obviously have been to assign I to 1 and O to 0, and then assign all the others alphabetically 4: GHJ, 5: KLM, 6: NPQ, .... with a nice side effect that now all the keys would have three letters on them (instead of two of them having 4 letters, or omitting Q and Z like they did in some old phones). Again a trivial fix but the design bug got locked-in, became the standard, and now it will never be fixed. Imagine.... maybe some lives were lost because someone wasted precious seconds by dialing a 4 instead of a 1!
  
• Bank ATMs that give the cash before returning the card; it seems obvious that will cause a lot of people to leave their card behind which in turn is a huge cost for the bank and the customer! The fix is to design the machines to always return the card first and then proceed with the withdrawal or deposit. Fortunately this last bug seems more prevalent among older machines than newer ones, which hopefully means it's on it's way to extinction...
  

$135B: pros and cons

Last week, a friend pointed me to the following story:

"Italy’s financial police (Guardia italiana di Finanza) has seized US bonds worth US 134.5 billion from two Japanese nationals ...."

My first thought .... well not my first, the first was of course: "WTF?!!", but the second or third thought was "this could be terrorism!" A deliberate attack on the ability of the US govt to finance itself, by shaking confidence in the debt instruments.

And of course I expected it to be huge news. The biggest case of counterfeiting in history and a new kind of terrorism etc, etc. Yet, I searched and searched, and there was barely any mention of it anywhere else that day and the next day! No follow-ups, no debunking, nothing. In fact even the initial story is completely absent from mainstream news. Why the silence, what's going on? Where are all the experts and the pros? Then when you think about it... it makes sense. If it really is an attack, an attack on the very essence of money -- confidence, that's exactly how you would want to respond isn't it? Is it possible that say all the reporters who called the US Federal Reserve for comment got a quiet very high level response saying: "please bury this story", and did so? After all it is well known that major US news organizations have in the recent past complied when the US government asked them not to reveal national security secrets that they knew.

Today a week later, there are still very few stories about it on the web, and zero from the major US news organizations, nothing from the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN et al.

Here's a good blog post theorizing that the bonds must be counterfeit, and likely designed to be caught.

Florida 2000

I was reading Super Crunchers a little while ago. I got to this passage which is one of those things that are deceptively low-key but then make you go WTF? A big WTF?!! Such a big one in fact that I am quoting it here. At the end of a section about data mashing the author adds the following cautionary tale (pp. 138-139):

Yet the art of indirect matching can also be prone to error. Database Technologies (DBT), a company that was ultimately purchased by ChoicePoint, got in a lot of trouble for indirectly identifying felons before the 2000 Florida elections. The state of Florida hired DBT to create a list of potential people to remove from the list of registered voters. DBT matched the database of registered voters to lists of convicted felons not just from Florida but from every state in the union. The most direct and conservative means to match would have been to use the voter's name and date of birth as necessary identifiers. But DBT, possibly under direction from Florida's Division of Elections, cast a much broader net [...] Its matching algorithm required only a 90 percent match between the name of the registered voter and the name of the convict. In practice this meant that there were lots of false positives [....] For example the Rev. Willie D. Whiting, Jr., a registered voter was initially told that he could not vote because someone named Willie J. Whiting, born two days later, had a felony conviction. The Division of Elections also required DBT to perform "nickname matches" for first names and to match on first and last names regardless of their order -- so that the name Deborah Ann would also match the name Ann Deborah, for example.

The combination of these low matching requirements together with the broad universe of all state felonies produced a staggeringly large list of 57,746 registered Floridians who were identified as convicted felons. The concern was not just with the likely large number of false positives, but also with the likelihood that a disproportionate number of the so-called purged registrations would be for African-American voters. This is especially true because the algorithm was not relaxed when it came to race. Only registered voters who exactly matched the race of the convict were subject to exclusion from the voting rolls.

[...] What makes the DBT story so troubling is that the convict/voter data seemed so poorly matched relative to the standards of modern-day merging and mashing.

Note that this book is all about number crunching, not politics, and overall very optimistic, gung-ho even. But this brief passage, specifically the things that I have highlighted in bold above, gave me pause... It's been bothering me for a couple of weeks.

Clearly, technically, DBT made a blatant mistake as the author concludes. But how come? Why did the government of Florida give directions that led directly and predictably to the "mistakes"?First of all, why allow any false positives at all? It's perfectly possible to get to almost zero false positives if you tolerate more false negatives, i.e. err on the safe side. In fact, in legal terms, that's the rule: "innocent until proven guilty" -- not 90 percent, but beyond a reasonable doubt. How could they accidentally forget this principle when it came to denying basic rights like voting? Second, in addition to the bias mentioned in the passage, it seems obvious to me that African Americans have a higher frequency of occurence of the same names. So not only did they err on the unsafe side, but the way in which the error expanded happened to be doubly targeted at a particular demographic group -- how come? Oh and who ran the state government of Florida at the time, and who benefited from those errors? Those are rhetorical questions by the way. But it's still surprising. Anyway it's history now...

Speaking of history, the title of this post comes from the name of a disco in Nairobi way back in the day. The first time I ever heard about the concept of a nightclub was when we drove by Florida 2000 one day, and I asked what's that place? I was too young to even think about going in but it was a fascinating thing -- it actually looked like a flying saucer.

And speaking of flying saucers, I wonder what it must be like for kids to not have the "Year 2000" in the future... Which reminds of a song by Fela and Roy Ayers.