Spectacular footage of the B-2 Stealth bomber taking a dive on takeoff and crashing into billions of pieces (and greenbacks). Umibot is most interested in the underlying reasons for this catastrophe–the accident was preventable and not due to human error. A faulty data sensor was feeding exaggerated information about moisture content. This was complicated by incorrect airspeed readings. The crew safely ejected but had no chance to remediate the situation. The narration in this video is didactic:

Once could attribute this to simple bad luck, but in the case of large-scale systems, there’s probably (or should be) something else at work. The esteemed Don Norman (an adviser to UMI) has written extensively about this phenomenon. His editorial, “Human Error and the Design of Computer Systems,” from the ACM in 1990, states it clearly.

While UMI’s work does not have life- or national security-threatening undertones, the cost of bad data is still relevant. We wrote about this in a post last year (”How is Storm Tracking Like Local Search?”)–just as an automobile’s performance will be constrained by the inputs, an application’s value will be directly tied to the data flowing through it. Ian also spoke on The Design of Data in a 2006 conference.

-Thanks Treough