Can Systems Engineering account for a corrupt heart?

I was reading a Washington Post editorial a few weeks back, dealing with the tragic events around the July 23rd train accident in China.  What got me was the line:

"the government was forced to admit that a design flaw was partly to blame for the accident, and not only a lightning strike"

Looking into this further I found another article which details more issues:

"workers on duty were inadequately trained and had failed to notice or fix the malfunction."

What concerns me is the idea that these design flaws and training failures could be caused by "corruption accusations against high-ranking railway officials."

Style vs Substance?

Where's the fight?

Every now and then I get an invitation in the mail to partake in a one day seminar for Edward Tufte's “Presentation Data & Information.” I've never been able to go but the invitation I receive has a wonderful reproduction of an 1869 information map by Charles Joseph Minard. On one graphic, Minard depicts multiple variables: size of the Napoleon's army, temperature, location, time in months and direction of army’s movement on a map. It really is a well thought out graphic and it inspires me to create better and more informative graphics.