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From the New York Times, Thursday, August 7, 1986, p. A10. Computer Failure Snarls Chicago Air Traffic WASHINGTON, Aug. 6 (UPI) — The main computer used by air traffic controllers at Chicago Center, the Federal Aviation Administration's busiest facility, failed Tuesday, delaying hundreds of flights, an agency spokesman said today. The failure, which lasted two hours, during which a backup computer operated, caused no safety-related incidents, a spokesman, Robert Buckhorn, said. The incident at 2 P.M. was caused by the failure of a computer element that feeds the computer radar information and other data critical to tracking and directing flights in the crowded Chicago airspace, agency sources familiar with the breakdown said. In Chicago, agency sources said some of the main computer's functions were restored Tuesday afternoon. Mr. Buckhorn said the problem was completely corrected at about 6 A.M. today. [Anybody know further details about this? HP]
>From: Graeme Hirst <gh%ai.toronto.edu@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA> >Subject: Re: Laserprinter dangers > >The one exception I can think of is my city tax and water bills, which have >(on plain colored paper) the most ornate laser-printing imaginable — which >required some amazing hacking on the Xerox 9700. Duplicating this would be >of the same level of complexity as forging pre-printed stock ... This is less of a problem than you might imagine — Any good laser printer has a page control language, such as PostScript on the Imagen laser printer at my office, that can output bitmap images. And with the availability of graphic input devices like digitizing cameras and image scanners, the problem of entering ornate output formats is due more to the price of the input devices than the actual input itself. And even if you have to put the paper through twice, once for the fixed ornate work, and once for the text of the bill itself, the result is going to look like the real thing. And with some of the page layout packages like InterLeaf, the whole output can be laid up for each page on a single pass, at the expense of speed of output (InterLeaf eats an amazing amount of CPU time). Simply having a complex output format isn't enough to prevent forgery -- all that will happen is that the forgers will have to resort to the same technology that created the image in the first place. Sean Malloy, Naval Personnel R&D Center, malloy@nprdc
Mr. Rosa's recommendation that expert systems be used in order to identify potential spies certainly has some chilling Orwellian overtones, and also highlights certain misconceptions about expert systems. The cross-correlation of credit histories, bank records, major purchase receipts, customs logs, and so on, is certainly a monumental task, given the size of the databases involved if such a program were applied on a national scale; but this sort of problem seems to me to be within the reach of ordinary database query systems. In my opinion, a program which performs such searching operations is not an expert system, but a (smart) database manager. Calling it an expert system does not make it one. Chris McDonald points out another important problem; "suitability", in terms of whatever criteria are employed, does not necessarily imply guilt. For example, if I were to design the criteria, I might direct the program to search for frequent overseas travellers with multiple bank accounts and expensive automobiles. Of course, the resultant list of "suspects" would be huge, and would probably contain a great number of prominent business executives. Certainly, this is a facetious example, but extending and refining the criteria will only partially reduce the list. Given the initial (huge) size of the search space, I wonder whether the reductions would ever be sufficient to reduce it to a humanly-manageable size. I speculate that a case-by-case examination of the list would simply not be feasible. Finally, the public at large (apparently including Mr. Rosa) does not seem to understand that expert systems are built to embody the knowledge of human experts. (Perhaps this will eventually change; but I am as yet unaware of any self-taught expert system.) System architects spend a great deal of time querying human experts to find out how they reason about the problem space, and then attempt to construct a system that (loosely) mimics that process. To a large extent, the efficacy of an expert system depends upon the expertise of those whose collective experiences were tapped to build it. If a spy-catching expert system is to be reasonably successful, then at least one human expert must be found...but is there one? Is there at least one person whose acumen is comparable with, say, the medical diagnostic skills of the physicians involved in the Mycin project? My intuition says that there is not. (But I'll hedge my bets by observing that if the U.S. government actually had such a person in their employ, they'd be unlikely to publicize that fact.) It seems to me that Mr. Rosa is invoking the modern magic buzzword "expert system" as if he expects a team of software engineers to solve national security problems for him. Given the limited (impressive, but limited) success that expert systems have enjoyed in such highly restricted problem domains as mineralogical prospecting and computer system configuration, I doubt that they'd be much help in such a wide-open area as espionage. Rich Kulawiec, pucc-j!rsk, rsk@j.cc.purdue.edu, rsk@purdue-asc.arpa
Survey of Computer Professionals Regarding Computerized Voting Please return to TOPCAT::HYDE on Digital's Engineering Net by Tuseday, August 12th. 1) Would you trust a computerized voting system if did not allow you to monitor how it worked nor did it allow you to inspect the ballot it cast for you? YES, I would trust it NO, I not would trust it 2) Would you trust a computerized voting system if did allow you to monitor how it worked, but did not allow you to inspect the ballot it cast for you? YES, I would trust it NO, I not would trust it 3) Would you trust a computerized voting system if did not allow you to monitor how it worked, but it did allow you to inspect the ballot it cast for you? YES, I would trust it NO, I not would trust it 4) Would you trust a computerized voting system if it allowed you to monitor how it worked and allowed you to inspect the ballot it cast for you? YES, I would trust it NO, I not would trust it [Presumably Kurt will share the results with us. A sequence of four answers (YES or NO) will suffice. PGN]
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