On Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:36:35 +0530 Roshan Mathews <rmath...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 8:22 AM, srid <sridhar.ra...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > But Ghose raises an important point about it also being a > > cultural issue. Heh, wish there was a well-researched Wikipedia > > article on this topic! > > > There is a hypothesis presented in Malcolm Gladwell's book > Outliers, on cultural factors causing airline accidents. But > then others[1] disagree, as with most social arguments it's hard > to come to any conclusion. [...] Interesting that you should bring that up. I read Outliers a few months ago, and while it made some interesting points, I was frankly not very impressed by it, as also another best-selling book with a somewhat similar outlook, Freakonmics. I think that Gladwell jumps to conclusions way too readily. In this particular incident, without any more data than in the book, I felt that the blame for the crash that Gladwell lays at the feet of cultural factors affecting the Avianca crew, could have equally well been pointed the other way: At the "famously rude" New York ATC. The NTSB report cited in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_52 is more even-handed. One of the really scary possibilities is that the crash was because of a linguistic misunderstanding. Regards, Gora _______________________________________________ BangPypers mailing list BangPypers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
