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MIT Plans Workshop on Information Standards
The Total Data Quality Management Program at MIT's Sloan School of Management will conduct a workshop on data and information quality standards immediately after the 1997 MIT Conference on Information Quality. The workshop will be held on Sunday, October 26th, between 1:30 and 3:30 PM. Those who atttend the conference (which will be held October 24-26 at MIT) are encouraged to confer informally about DQ/IQ standards.
Among the workshop participants will be statisticians and quality professionals with significant experience in formulating and implementing ISO 9000 quality standards. We anticipate this workshop will pave the way for a follow-up conference on data quality and information quality standards. In order for the field of Information Quality to advance and to encompass areas like industry, law, and other activities, we believe it is important to begin designing an information standards process as soon as possible.
You don't have to attend the IQ 1997 Conference to participate in the workshop. But IQ 1997 is an inexpensive way to see what's happening in the expanding fields of data quality and information quality. For more information, go to MIT's web site: (http://web.mit.edu/tdqm).
On Line, High-Tech Sleuths Find Private Facts
According to a front page article in the September 15th issue of The New York Times, large amounts of high-quality personal data about Americans are routinely recovered from databases by private investigators who then sell it to various clients. Such personal data is typically amassed from law-enforcement computer files that are supposed to be off-limits to civilians, electronic surveillance equipment, telephone scams, private telephone records, airline travel records, credit reports and medical records.
According to the article, the investigations industry is a booming global business. Practitioners range from multinational blue-chip business investigation firms to upstart Web sites that offer personal data at bargain rates. They all benefit from lax American privacy laws that make the lines betwen legal and illegal data hard to discern. Much of the information used by investigative firms is obtained from law enforcement officers and agencies, often illegally. Large investigative agencies may employ former investigative reporters, former top officials of the DEA, FBI, and CIA, and hundreds of former police officers, retired FBI agents, and former Cold War spies. State and local governments are also selling digitized public records to raise cash.
Although there are a number of privacy bills pending in Congress, it is uncertain whether any of them will provide significant relief frrm privacy abuses. The Times article does not discuss data fabrication, impersonation, or quality of data in databases. The article was written by Nina Bernstein.
Many Carbon Monoxide Detectors
Fail to Perform in Laboratory
Tests
An article in The New York Times on September 11th questions the safety and accuracy of home carbon monoxide detectors. According to the Times report (written by Matthew Wald) many carbon monoxide detectors sold in department stores and hardware stores sound alarms for no reason (false positives) or fail to sound an alarm (false negatives) when a high concentration of carbon monoxide is present - according to recent laboratory tests. Consequently, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is drafting tougher standards that may make millions of detectors currently in use obsolete.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Underwriters Laboratories, and the Gas Research Institute (which is funded by the natural gas industry) continue to discuss developing new standards for detectors. There is a difference of opinion among the three organizations about how serious the deficiences in present carbon monoxide detectors are. The tests may not have have accurately guaged detector performance under typical household conditions. Detector manufacturers maintain there are no significant problems with detector performance. Newer standards and newer detector technology may make carbon monoxide detectors reliable under a wide range of conditions. The article appears on page C2.