Dealing with the fact that shipping's wobbly

Sailing into the glorious future of data and measurement? Well, reality's a bitch.

By Ryan Skinner (email)

We trust numbers and data, but do we trust them too much? Countless are the tales of squirrely AIS signals. Innumerable are the accounts of bad sensor readings. Endless are the examples of weather forecasts that didn't.

Yeah, OK, everything in life is uncertain. But, hey, let's face it. Shipping's more uncertain than just about anything else.

Onboard the ship, wave motions will bang just about any wiring or circuitry senseless in just a few years. If not, why would solid-state be a point?

On the bridge, ship officers are now (or should be) trained to be wary of basically everything that bleeps, flashes and flickers on the array of panels before them. The tired old joke is tired for a reason: The best display is that big friggin' piece of glass between you and the elements.

In the office, managers know that they need to take just about everything with a grain of salt. Your planned maintenance system telling you to buy more freon? Maybe the engineer entered the wrong figure last time he made an order. Maybe you need to call/email him.

And even on the commercial end, there's uncertainty. Just as there's a Paris, Texas, it seems that brokers relying on AIS reports about where a ship should be, might be thinking of another port with the same name.

So what? So maybe we need systems that take uncertainty better into account.

I recently heard someone in the ECDIS community tell me that the Navy version of ECDIS includes a little ring around soundings and items on the screen. If the ring is full, there's a very high likelihood that the data is correct. If it's only half-way, it'd be a good idea to proceed with caution, or check other data sources.

And a couple of entrepreneurs I talked to today explained that they've created an information service for ship-brokers that pushes relative uncertainty along with the information it provides (more on that in a coming post).

More and more suppliers (of products and services) in the shipping industry are building their offering on top of data. If they're not offering a user interface that indicates the reliability of that data, they may be doing their customers and their brand a real disservice. Even the financial crisis has been partly pinned on bad data.

Another issue is how users respond to this kind of uncertainty, when it is available. It's fine that users are made aware of uncertainty, but it's more important to understand how they act on it. Ironically, the systems that are installed, partially, to provide a surrogate for experience, provide data that require experience to interpret.

A certain amount of uncertainty will simply never leave us. Shipping's wobbly - more so than most other industries. Might as well make a virtue of it, and become experts in data confidence, analysis and interpretation.

Comments

[BrianSJ]

Lots of systems need an indication of end-to-end information assurance. Survey quality is a good example. Container weights might benefit from a +/- figure.