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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)

#151

Post by gcthomas »

greggman3 wrote: post #136
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…

What's are "screen-shaped pages"? My screens are all kinds of ratios and orientations. I wish pdf would die. It's a left over vestage of a paper world. It's also left over from a non-connected, non-international world A4 vs US Letter. PDF really has no place in this smartphone first world

Pdfs are terrible for letter style docs on phones (reflowable text is better, say in emails), but they are great as slides. Certainly easier to distribute or display than proprietary PPT editors.

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

#152

Post by cryptonector »

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…

Most slide decks I ever see I see long after they are presented. As a result I want slide decks to stand alone -- that or else video to be published instead of slide decks.

As a presenter I have to worry about whether my slides will be seen w/ or without video of my presentation. Therefore I try to make my slide decks able to stand alone, though I admit this is not great.

The common pattern now instead is to make colorful and near-content-free slide decks where the presenter simply speaks with colorful backgrounds. I am terrible at crafting such slide decks -- well, I've not tried. This pattern works while presenting though, and I should probably adopt it. Or perhaps I should adopt the Jeff Bezos approach.

What presenters and audiences need is a commitment to publish video of presentations, including Q&A segments. And video has to be playable at 2x speed.

(Yes, almost every video I watch I watch at 2x speed. Where platforms allow faster playback speeds I've even gone faster. Speech is extremely low-bandwidth. This does mean I've to backtrack more often than I'd like, but it's still better this way. I pay attention more when speech is faster -- up to the point where I can't follow, of course, and which I shy away from.)

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

#153

Post by phicoh »

bumby wrote: post #146
phicoh wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 equi…

This issue is not that they had to ground the Shuttle until they had the data. The issue seems to be that foam was hitting the tiles with parameters outside their test database.

Why didn't they go back and test with 'real world' foam sizes?

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

#154

Post by the_snooze »

cryptonector wrote: post #152
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…

Most slide decks I ever see I see long after they are presented. As a result I want slide decks to stand alone -- that or else video to be published instead of slide decks. As a presenter I have to worry about whether my slides will be seen w/ or without video of my presentation. Therefore I try to make my slide decks able to stand alone, though I admit this is not great. The common pattern now instead is to make col…

>Most slide decks I ever see I see long after they are presented. As a result I want slide decks to stand alone -- that or else video to be published instead of slide decks.

I use presenter notes precisely for what you're describing. My actual slides are sparse, but I distribute slides with full presenter notes so all the main points get across in a written form after the fact, without distracting from the talk.

In Powerpoint, I use the "print to PDF" function and tell it to generate pages containing slides with notes.

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

#156

Post by crdrost »

cryptonector wrote: post #152
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…

Most slide decks I ever see I see long after they are presented. As a result I want slide decks to stand alone -- that or else video to be published instead of slide decks. As a presenter I have to worry about whether my slides will be seen w/ or without video of my presentation. Therefore I try to make my slide decks able to stand alone, though I admit this is not great. The common pattern now instead is to make col…

Video is of course not necessary, just sufficient.

What you want are the talk notes, something you can read to understand what the shape of the talk was, what context each image came out in. The video of the actual talk substitutes quite nicely for these notes.

It would be preferable if more presentation media had a “front of card/back of card” approach where the card itself specifies how long it thinks it should be on the screen (evaluable over “timing runs”), bullet points for the speaker and readers of the printed form, as well as the image that will be shown.

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

#157

Post by the_snooze »

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…

>My experience outside of academia is that people use PowerPoint exactly for persuasion.

It happens in my corner of academia too, and I'm all for it. When I give a talk, I'm trying to persuade people to read my paper and ask me interesting questions about the work. The paper has all the gory details. The point of my talk isn't to duplcate the written text, but to make it accessible enough that people want to learn more.

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

#158

Post by bumby »

phicoh wrote: post #153
bumby wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 equi…

This issue is not that they had to ground the Shuttle until they had the data. The issue seems to be that foam was hitting the tiles with parameters outside their test database. Why didn't they go back and test with 'real world' foam sizes?

I can only speculate.

I would push back on the idea that they would not have to ground the Shuttle. If they thought the foam could cause a loss of crew, they would ground the Shuttle until they fully understood the problem. That's exactly what happened in the aftermath of Columbia.

>Why didn't they go back and test with 'real world' foam sizes?

That's exactly what they did after the incident (while the Shuttles were grounded). If you're asking why didn't they do that beforehand, my assumption is they already had a model that they felt they could use. According to the subject PPT slides, they even thought that model was overly conservative. In addition, while foam-shedding was out of spec, it was considered "in family" meaning that they knew of the issue and felt like it was not a flight safety issue. Both their physical and mental models of the phenomena were, at best, incomplete but they didn't know that at the time.

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

#159

Post by ciphol »

wizzard wrote: post #92
WillPostForFood wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://spaceflightnow.com/columbia/report/rescue.html Atlantis was already scheduled for launch 41 days after Columbia. Columbia had ~30 days of air. NASA believed that Atlantis prep could have been accelerated and launched in time to attempt a rescue.

And could have had the same problem as Columbia. There was no quick fix to ensure Atlantis didn't meet the same fate.

Judging by previous flights, the chance of a Columbia problem occurring on any given flight (like that of Atlantis) was around 1/200. Would you take a 1/200 chance of losing your life to save someone else's? Many people would.

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

#160

Post by dr_orpheus »

PaulHoule wrote: post #131

Diane Vaughn's The Challenger Launch Decision misattributes responsibility for the disaster to the meeting in which a similar slide was shown. When the shuttle design was finalized in the late 1970s they knew it had a 2-3% chance of a hull loss per launch. They were still planning to launch it 50 times a year so that would have meant losing a shuttle and crew every year! The shuttle had hundreds of critical flaws and…

You can broadly say that both Challenger and Columbia disasters can be attributed to failures in communication. But the Rogers Commission Report (presidential commission for investigating Challenger) doesn't really show quite the same scenario.

At the Flight Readiness Review for the solid rocket boosters before launch the engineers of Morton Thiokol (the solid rocket booster manufacturer) objected to launch because of the detrimental effect of the cold temperatures on the o-rings in the solid rocket boosters. They had never launched in that cold of temperatures before and previous test data had shown erosion of the seals on previous flights. These concerns were not communicated by the Morton Thiokol management or NASA present at that flight readiness review to any of the higher level managers that got final approval on launch.

For Challenger it was a known issue and people specifically said "don't do this".

[0] https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v1ch5.htm

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