Re: Page Security Score proposal

Hi all,

I'll offer a couple counter-points on list:

 - North Carolina may be backwards, but every restaurant here must proudly 
display their "cleanliness score" - it's presented as both a letter grade 
(A is good ... C is ... um ... bad) and a number ... 92.5 is generally ok, 
100.0 and boy you could eat off their floors.  Patrons don't have to think 
too hard - the report card from the last inspection of the restaurant is 
presented in a way that people have been familiar with since grade school. 
 Do I know how the calculation was computed? no.  Do I know what went into 
it? no.  But I do look at it and use it as a "cue".

 - it is my sense that people can understand analog-style guages 
(speedometers, tachometers, temperature scales and so on).  And they can 
get a feel for the difference between "low", "low-medium", "medium", and 
so forth.  So some indicator with many gradations seems like it should be 
interpretable without alot of book learning to go along with it (whether 
that be a number scale, a color rainbow scale, or a speedometer-style 
needle meter).

- on Dan Schutzer's observation about people not being able to process 
more than between 3 and 7 items.  I feel that a single "meter" with many 
gradations is still one meter (counts as 1 in the things to be 
understood/interpreted).  If we tried to put up 6 meters and asked our 
users to use those together to try and get a feeling for the site, then 
yes, this would fall into the situation of too much information to process 
(unless you're an airline pilot or astronaut).

- on the topic of whether we could ever get the computation "correct" - 
I'm not sure it really matters if we get it correct or not.  I could 
envision that some people (not the general populus) would get a kick out 
of coming up with their own calculations and offering them to their 
friends and neighbors.  And if this were wildly successful, someone else 
would gather up all the various calculators and offer a "super-calculator" 
that would summarize those.  This could even leverage collaboration-style 
social networking capabilities ("I trust my 3 favorite friends and I value 
their calculations.  My 'guage' is based on their guage values.").  In the 
end, the anomolies in different calculations would smooth out.  (Hey, it 
almost works for the Bowl Championship Series - as one off-the-wall 
example).

So I still like the idea.

Regards,
Tim Hahn
IBM Distinguished Engineer

Internet: hahnt@us.ibm.com
Internal: Timothy Hahn/Durham/IBM@IBMUS
phone: 919.224.1565     tie-line: 8/687.1565
fax: 919.224.2530