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Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

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Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#141

Post by toyg »

captainmuon wrote: post #134
codeflo wrote: post #29

Linked from Tufte’s article, I found this interesting comment from someone’s experience at Microsoft: [1] > Attempting to have slides serve both as projected visuals and as stand-alone handouts makes for bad visuals and bad documentation. Yet, this is a typical, acceptable approach. PowerPoint (or Keynote) is a tool for displaying visual information, information that helps you tell your story, make your case, or prov…

I don't know. Over time, I've learned to appreciate the kind of slides physicists make, which follow all the "worst practices". They are very dense, with lots of plots and text. They are like, I imagine in the olden days, when people would draw things on blackboards or print out their plots, and sit around them and interpret them. They are the material, and what the presenter does is walking the audience through the…

Your boss must have been traumatized by some salesman.

PPTs are great, when they have been written by someone who knows what to communicate and how to do it, which involves knowing your audience. For boffins, slides that are denser than average but lighter than what they would otherwise have to read, are just fine. For the layman, one better err on the side of simplicity and direct impact.

> PowerPoint is something you do to a customer or to the board, not to your colleagues

That is bullshit borne of insecurity. If one can be persuaded so radically by a presentation, one's convictions are pretty weak to begin with.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#142

Post by josefx »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #109
krisoft wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The title is saying we need to be careful because a tile was likely penetrated. It is a godawfull title. I believe that is how it reads to you but it totally reads the opposite to me. I read the title and it translates in my head as “we reviewed the test results and they suggest that the tiles are built sturdy enough to not get penetrated”. Exactly because what you say the word “conservatism” means to me that a sys…

I read the title as saying "be careful when predicting tile penetration" based on one of the first point they make being that the method used to predict penetration "overpredicted penetration of tile coating significantly". Though in fairness they then have sub points that kind of contradict this conclusion rather than support it. But honestly this slide would make more sense if several of the sub points where top le…

> based on one of the first point they make being that the method used to predict penetration "overpredicted penetration of tile coating significantly".

That point read to me as if they completely overestimated the damage.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#143

Post by arrow7000 »

D13Fd wrote: post #74

PowerPoint is not the problem, it's poor presentation of information. Yes, you can de-emphasize information in a powerpoint presentation, just like you could with a chalkboard, overhead slides, or any other way of presenting information to a group. So what?

Yes that was the point. Nobody is blaming PowerPoint the program.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#144

Post by zeruch »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #81
codeflo wrote: post #29

Linked from Tufte’s article, I found this interesting comment from someone’s experience at Microsoft: [1] > Attempting to have slides serve both as projected visuals and as stand-alone handouts makes for bad visuals and bad documentation. Yet, this is a typical, acceptable approach. PowerPoint (or Keynote) is a tool for displaying visual information, information that helps you tell your story, make your case, or prov…

100%. One of the things I'm drilling into my team (we do a lot of slides!), is you have to decide - are you making slides for: 1. presentation - should be sparse, key, anchoring data that enables people to ground themselves while they listen and pay attention to YOU or 2. Reference - dashboard and background and details and density If a deck may be used for both purposes, intentionally or not (e.g. we expect it to be…

"resist the urge to do a hybrid slide, and if at all possible make presentation slides at front, reference/supplementary slides at back."

This has been my SOP for years, but its amazing how resistant some folks are to it (like $NUMBER_OF_SLIDES is the sole measure of quality...with "more slides are bad, mmmkay" being the default). I fought with my last boss on this endlessly, as I would rather have many slides with small digestible chunks of info that I could scaffold my presentations through at a brisk clip, and they preferred as few slides as possible, with dense text and charts, that they would elaborate on in long exposition.

I always got better positive feedback, to no avail. My decks would be 'edited' into a compacted slop-fest. Drove me batty.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#145

Post by PaulHoule »

toyg wrote: post #141
captainmuon wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. Over time, I've learned to appreciate the kind of slides physicists make, which follow all the "worst practices". They are very dense, with lots of plots and text. They are like, I imagine in the olden days, when people would draw things on blackboards or print out their plots, and sit around them and interpret them. They are the material, and what the presenter does is walking the audience through the…

Your boss must have been traumatized by some salesman. PPTs are great, when they have been written by someone who knows what to communicate and how to do it, which involves knowing your audience. For boffins, slides that are denser than average but lighter than what they would otherwise have to read, are just fine. For the layman, one better err on the side of simplicity and direct impact. > PowerPoint is something y…

I've been taught that if you are selling high tech products to C-levels at the biggest companies you want to have highly information dense slides (e.g. condense 2 slides into 1, then condense 2 of those slides in 1) but also have them well organized so you can make a presentation that drives home a few key points.

Personally I am a big fan of powerpoint for making "boxes and lines" diagrams about how a product works, what process we're using, things like that. I love making stuff like

https://www.slideshare.net/paulahoule/making-the-semantic-we...

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#146

Post by bumby »

phicoh wrote: post #137
bumby wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably correct, and I have doubts that those types of problems are easily fixed because they're rooted in human psychology. It's interesting to me that the "big" incidents seem to occur every 15-20 years, almost as if there is a new professional cohort who has to learn the hard way. I do think clear communication is a necessary, but insufficient, element of fixing that problem.

One thing I wonder about with these kinds of accidents: to what extend does operational experience work its way back to requirements of components. For example, if regularly pieces of foam are hitting the tiles after launch, was that part of the specs for the tiles to handle that? Did anybody go back, take a worst case scenario of a piece foam hitting a tile (size, speed, etc.) and verify that the tiles could handle…

They'll generally use a Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA). So in this example, designers would identify all the ways a tile could fail and the consequence and probability of that failure. They then go through the process of mitigating it. The order of precedence for mitigations is 1) remove the hazard, 2) engineer around the hazard, 3) administrative controls (like standard procedures), 4) personal protective equipment. The iterate around this until the risk is within an acceptable range. All those mitigations become requirements.

So let's say they identify a tile failure mode as "tile struck by object". They assign a worst-case severity to that. Let's say they knew how bad it could be and they assign a severity as "loss of crew." Then they have to identify all the ways the tile could be struck and assign probabilities to that even happening. They use a matrix that maps the severity and probability to arrive at a risk classification. If the classification is higher than their threshold, they add mitigations that either reduce the severity or the probability (or both) until it's within an acceptable risk range.

There's lots that can go wrong with this process, though. You obviously have to be able to identify the failure modes. Is there some off-the-wall failure that nobody could foresee? Maybe. Then you have to have good enough data to objectively determine the risk. In this case, I wonder if all the previous foam strikes led them to discredit the risk as being improbable/negligible to cause that failure mode. Add to that, the PowerPoint seemed to imply the model they used is too conservative (it was believed to overestimate the actual penetration). I know people involved on some hypervelocity testing of the foam and they were legitimately surprised at the way the foam acted when it was fired at higher speeds. So in this case, the risk was probably unknown beforehand, although they assumed they understood the risk sufficiently. To quote Mark Twain, "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so."

That's just one system on an immensely complex machine. It's easy to sit back with hindsight and say "Well, they shouldn't have made a decision until they did additional testing to get the data." But if they did that to every system on the Shuttle, it likely wouldn't have left the ground. In practice, engineers deal with all kinds of other cost and schedule constraints.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#147

Post by bumby »

giantg2 wrote: post #110
lostcolony wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tufte is not an employee of NASA. He is an employee of Yale, and a thought leader in information design. HE was the one saying the slide design is poor, and doing so not in the interest of assigning blame, but in the interest of highlighting ways to communicate better. To say that "the slide doesn't have any issues" is laughable on the face of it. But it's immaterial; your claim is that "NASA just ignored the enginee…

I understand that he's not a NASA employee. Do you think it's fair to claim that the slide killed 7 people? I don't. Could it be worded better or have a better layout - sure. But there's no problem with that slide that would support the claim that 7 people died because of it. The information was there. As you said, it is a 2 way street. Slides are accessories. Do you have the conversation that unfolded during this sl…

There was serious consideration to sending Atlantis as a rescue mission as Columbia was not in a position capable of rendezvousing with the ISS to use the later as a lifeboat. To your point, subsequent missions were required to have a formal rescue mission outlined.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#148

Post by sklargh »

jquery wrote: post #28
sklargh wrote: post #7

I give Tufte's (admittedly imperfect) thoughts on this deck and David Foster Wallace's This is Water ( https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/ ) to every new member of my team to read and make it apparent that I expect them to have command of each document's implications.

Losing DFW is such a tragedy for mankind. Are there any living thinkers on his level?

Not in the literary space.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#149

Post by vmception »

gmiller123456 wrote: post #22

Kinda pointless to show the slide without the audio of the presenter to go with it. Unless we're thinking the presenter just read the slide verbatim with no extra context, and no questions were asked, which would essentially defeat the purpose of having a presenter and audience present at the same time. I know I've seen presenters actually do that, but the author didn't provide any indication that that's what happene…

Thats my conclusion too, the article says there are too many words, and then says there are too little words

"SOFI and ramp mean the same thing, whats the reader to dooooo"

"Significant is used 5 times... without explanation!"

"There are 100 words!"

Yes, we need to know how the presentation went, and we also. need to know what NASA would have alternatively done and if it was honestly considered at all or even feasible

On a side note, its crazy that a couple tiles compromise the entire vessel, but I understand that the heat would travel across the inner metal. Its still crazy to think there isn't some other kind of dissipation measure possible.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#150

Post by vmception »

mannykannot wrote: post #64
gmiller123456 wrote: post #22

Kinda pointless to show the slide without the audio of the presenter to go with it. Unless we're thinking the presenter just read the slide verbatim with no extra context, and no questions were asked, which would essentially defeat the purpose of having a presenter and audience present at the same time. I know I've seen presenters actually do that, but the author didn't provide any indication that that's what happene…

Indeed, and the article leaves out other relevant issues, such as where else the question was discussed, and also when - the article rather glibly suggests a rescue mission could have been launched, but that would have been a very risky action in its own right, even if it had been started on the day of the launch; it remains uncertain whether Columbia's oxygen could have been stretched out long enough even then. Ther…

> It is never just one thing.

Especially when Boeing is involved

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