How to Use Bad Data for Good
There are ways to intentionally use bad data to discover important things.
In a comment from Richard I. Garber on my post about maps and trusting technology, comes this bit of wisdom:
Sometimes the map might be wrong on purpose. When I was growing up in Pittsburgh I noticed that the city map from Gulf Oil always contained a fictitious road connection in Schenley Park between Schenley Drive and the middle of a horseshoe bend on E. Circuit Road. It probably was one of a set of errors for letting them detect if someone had copied their map.
Back when I was a student the printed directory for Carnegie Mellon University used to contain a set of phony names with real addresses, and phony addresses with real names. Those features were for detecting who was reselling it as a commercial mailing list. One of my friends was renamed Wadza Duckworth, and another had his computer science department address relisted as being an always-locked storage closet within a room in Wean Hall. Any time those ringers got mail the sender got a cease and desist letter from an attorney.
Which reminds me of the legend of green M&Ms. There’s a popular story, perhaps true maybe not, about various stars like J-Lo or Mariah Carrey. As the story goes, they ask for crazy things in their contracts, like only having green M&Ms in their dressing room. That story, if it’s false, is likely a mutant version of a different M&M story tied to the band Van Halen, that is true.
In their prime, Van Hallen put on massive and complex light shows at their concerts. They had complicated stage equipment and their contracts with the arenas they played in on tour stated very specific requirements. To help them see how well their technical specifications were followed, they added a clause that no brown M&Ms should appear in their dressing room. It was an easy way to test if the entire contract had been read. Upon entering the dressing room and discovering a brown M&M, they’d know instantly that they should check every detail of their tech requirements (Story verified on Snopes).
The lovely, delightful John Green has written a YA novel featuring such deliberate mistakes in maps as a plot point. The book’s title is Paper Towns, http://johngreenbooks.com/paper-towns/. I loved it!
The M&M story is great … I had only seen it on This is Spinal Tap, and given the Stonehenge scene they were not checking the staging very well.
I and a few acquaintances have been known to plant snarky comments in formal reports to see if people are reading. Of course, I rarely get a response.
Typos and broken links also work to see if people are reading your Web Content. I only hear about these on the more high volume pages.
I am glad to hear more about the M&Ms on Snopes. The David Lee Roth retelling is a classic.
My editor does the same thing with job listings. He will put in a small request for something, like address to a particular person (who doesn’t exist) or ask to attach a resume in 12pt Times Roman only, double spaced or a cover letter with three paragraphs only or some other goofy request… and any that do not comply just gets thrown away unread. If an applicant won’t read the entire ad, they probably won’t listen to anything else asked of him/her on the job. It’s way more than satisfying his large ego; jobs are all editing and software writing so an errant semi-colon or typo matters a big deal.
And are those typos just to check if we read your post meticulously?
Japanese companies used faulty capacitors to bankrupt their Taiwanese rivals who were stealing the Japanese designs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague#Cause_of_the_failing_capacitors