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The HN post title is severely misleading. From the linked article: "There was a fault in the system which, when a female passenger checked in for t
by salicideblock 5y ago
The HN post title is severely misleading. From the linked article:
"There was a fault in the system which, when a female passenger checked in for the flight and used or was given the title ‘Miss’, caused the system checked her in as a child. The system allocated them a child’s standard weight of 35 kg as opposed to the correct female standard weight of 69 kg."
So titling it "Root cause: adult females checked in as 'Miss'" is wrong.
The linked article does not even have the word "root".
- kjrose 5y agoAbsolutely. The issue was the assumption that anyone who used the term miss would be a child and not an adult which is an incredible oversight.
- iudqnolq 5y agoNot according to the company, which remedied the issue by running a batch script to change people's title to Ms if the other records indicated they were adult females. Apparently the people who check in after the batch script runs the night before takeoff can be safely ignored.
- Grustaf 5y agoThis is a workaround based on the existing programmer error. It doesn't indicate that "ms" is correct in any way, just that it gives the correct result.
- iudqnolq 5y agoYes? How does that relate to what I said?
- Grustaf 5y agoYou said that since they solved it by changing miss to ms, that means that miss was actually wrong. This is not true. Besides the fact that miss does NOT mean child, what they did was a workaround. They solved it that was because it was simpler. It doesn't indicate that they think miss = child is correct. Most likely they didn't even have access to the code.
- anamexis 5y agoWhat is severely misleading about it?
- ethanbond 5y agoThe cause of the error was an engineering decision, not user input.
- lm28469 5y agoThe problem wasn't "female" checking in as "Miss" but "Miss" attributes being mapped to "kid" attributes
- CoastalCoder 5y agoFrom the article, checking in as "miss" was entirely appropriate. That's not where the mistake was made. The mistake was how their software reasoned poorly about passengers with "miss" as their honorific. So it's more appropriate to say that checking in as "miss" was what exposed the problem, not that it was the root cause.
- jfengel 5y agoThe mistake seems to be in looking at the honorific field at all. It's not the miscalculation; it's the fact that it's completely useless for male passengers who make up half of the flight.
- anamexis 5y agoWell, sure, but I wouldn't call it "severely misleading." It led me right to the point. Anyways, title is changed now.
- Grustaf 5y agoYeah, the issue was not that they were checked in as "miss", which presumably was correct - there is no indication that these women were married, or preferred "ms" - but that the software incorrectly interpreted "miss" as meaning "child".
- Someone1234 5y agoAnd also why it did: Cultural norms were different between the unnamed country the software was created in, and used (with one using "miss" exclusively for young women, and the other not).
- Alex3917 5y agoIt's interesting because while Miss technically just means that a woman is unmarried, in practice it's only used for children. Similar to how Master technically just means an unmarried male, but I doubt anyone on here has been called that since second or third grade.
- rectang 5y agoThis violates the HN guideline, then, to "don't editorialize" in article titles.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoThere is no article title though. Unless you consider "Boeing_737-8K5_G-TWAG_04-21" to be a title.
- Someone1234 5y agoThe original report has no title. Unless you think the title should be: > UTC AAIB Bulletin: 4/2021 - G-TAWG - AAIB-26814 So creating a title to describe it would have always been required.
- rectang 5y agoYou can come up with a title without editorializing. "Boeing screws up again" would also have been wrong and editorializing.
- nightpool 5y agoWhile it would be more correct to call it the proximate cause, I don't know if I would call it "severely misleading". Maybe mildly clickbait-y. It definitely was a cause, and as far as I can tell from the report, they didn't change the system that identified passengers with 'Miss' as children—they just changed it so that 'Miss' as a title for adults was autocorrected to 'Ms'. So to some extent, it seems like they disagree with you on what the root cause was
- Grustaf 5y agoThere is no indication that the people checked in as "miss" were not in fact miss:es. The error was elsewhere. The reason they found a workaround was that it was simpler than changing the software, not that they thought it was correct. Even if they thought it correct, it obviously isn't.
- rectang 5y agoI interpreted the title as a cheeky anti-woke poke. The double meaning, being that referring to an adult female as "miss" rather than "Ms" has long been frowned upon (because of defining women by their marital status), and because it was offensive it caused a "serious incident".
- Pick-A-Hill2019 5y agoI'm with you on that one. I also assumed that the the title had been editorialized/was click-bait until I read the pdf and the incident was filed and issued by the AAIB as a 'Serious Incident'. Which is understandable given that the flight was 1,244 kg overweight at take off due to a programming error that assumed a 'Miss' = 35 kg / passenger instead of the correct average weight of an adult female of 69 kg. True that the actual incident was a lot different than the title suggested (and I assumed) but taking off a ton heavier than what the manifest stated is a ‘bit of a problem’ to use the English art of understatement.