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The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

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Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#151

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #148
GiorgioG wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, some companies have gone to extremes. I now have to MFA and provide a pin-code to authenticate. I have to do this several times a day. It's fucking mind-boggling how I can get anything done in a day when I spend so much time verifying who I am. I'm waiting for the next innovation...require a drop of my blood to log in.

Why is that extreme? I have to provide a pin code using MFA to my bank to authenticate, and their sessions are a lot shorter than your average developer or operator session. And their actions impact far more than just my own account. Is it inconvenient? Yes. Does it work? Yes. Is it perfect? No, absolutely not but it is a useful layer in the cake.

[deleted]

Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#152

Post by cxr »

alberto-m wrote: post #140
hydrox24 wrote: post #5

This article (as it makes clear) owes it's analysis at least largely to what Tufte has written about the Challenger disaster (1986) and Columbia Disaster (2003). He wrote about the Columbia one more fully in the second edition of The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint. Given that the link in the article to his report on his website is now broken, people might be interested in teh few page grabs that he has included in the…

> the few page grabs The full report (2003 edition, low-res) is available on ResearchGate. It appears to be a lawful copy, uploaded by the author himself. Fascinating reading, indeed. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/208575160_The_Cogni...

That link is the chapter "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" from Tufte's book Beautiful Evidence, and it does mention Boeing's slides in the Columbia incident, but the main work that the author of this blog post cribbed (and failed to grasp) is a more detailed essay by Tufte called "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science: Assessing the Quality and Credibility of Technical Reports".

https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/powerpoint-does-rocket-...>

Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#153

Post by cxr »

andrewflnr wrote: post #85
stinkbeetle wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the medium is not conducive to dense amount of technical information that readers are expected to use to make or understand decisions. Other similar mediums like a chalkboard were not singled out because the problem was identified with PowerPoint specifically. And it wasn't a choice of mediums all with similar problems, but slides vs papers. From the article, > “The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint b…

But the problem, if anything, was that too much dense information was conveyed at all . Based on the analysis in the post, of the engineers had replaced that slide with one that said "Don't go forward with reentry", that might have saved lives better than any change in medium. To be clear, I'm in favor of abolishing PowerPoint for any non-ephemeral use, but the problem here was focus and framing of the info.

> Based on the analysis in the post

The analysis in the post is dogshit and misrepresents the review board's actual conclusions.

> But the problem, if anything, was that too much dense information was conveyed at all

That's totally opposite to what the members of the review board identified as the problem.

Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#154

Post by notahacker »

xp84 wrote: post #89
andrewflnr wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the problem, if anything, was that too much dense information was conveyed at all . Based on the analysis in the post, of the engineers had replaced that slide with one that said "Don't go forward with reentry", that might have saved lives better than any change in medium. To be clear, I'm in favor of abolishing PowerPoint for any non-ephemeral use, but the problem here was focus and framing of the info.

I agree completely. My deck would have been: Slide 1: 48-point font Don't go forward with reentry Slide 2: 24-point font * Our foam collision dataset from experimentation only included pieces below X cu in. * Evidence points to this piece being at least Y cu in - 200 times more massive * Catastrophic damage to the wing cannot be ruled out This would have been a great PowerPoint, and I'm not convinced handing them onl…

Yeah, a slide like that would have been fine; fundamentally the slide is exactly like an academic paper in that some of the most interesting implications are just banal statements of the numbers in the data and qualifiers. In fact, the slide is much better than the academic paper... it doesn't contain much in the way of irrelevant data and qualifiers.

In practice Tufte and bloggers and commenters are retconning messages engineers not possessing foreknowledge of what was going to happen didn't wish to convey. The slide isn't supposed to say "no reentry" not because engineers don't know how to say no using PowerPoint, but because what the engineers are actually saying by selecting those points for consideration is "damage is theoretically possible but not in our simulations which test data suggests are actually on the conservative side; the test data is only at a very small scale though". If they'd dumbed it down, the slide would have said "it could go wrong but the limited data we've got suggests it won't"

Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#155

Post by michaelt »

jacquesm wrote: post #148
GiorgioG wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, some companies have gone to extremes. I now have to MFA and provide a pin-code to authenticate. I have to do this several times a day. It's fucking mind-boggling how I can get anything done in a day when I spend so much time verifying who I am. I'm waiting for the next innovation...require a drop of my blood to log in.

Why is that extreme? I have to provide a pin code using MFA to my bank to authenticate, and their sessions are a lot shorter than your average developer or operator session. And their actions impact far more than just my own account. Is it inconvenient? Yes. Does it work? Yes. Is it perfect? No, absolutely not but it is a useful layer in the cake.

Requiring a user to MFA once per day per device is normal for a work account - but that's already a lot compared to services like gmail.

After all, workers are mostly working in an access-controlled office or their private home; and your endpoint protection will be ensuring they're connecting from a company-issued laptop and that they have screen lock on a timer and a strong password.

I'm already validating something-they-know (FDE password) and something-they-know (OS password) and something-they-know (SSO system password) and something-they-have (company laptop). And once a day I'm validating another something-they-have (TOTP code/Yubikey).

Asking people to provide the second something-they-have several times a day seems like security theatre to me.

Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#156

Post by salawat »

arethuza wrote: post #125
jacquesm wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but first it has to go horribly wrong. Same for security. After the breach there is plenty of budget.

Many years ago I had a fascination with security and fancied becoming the CISO for the multinational I was working for at the time - my boss at the time, the CIO, said the role would really have no power and would be there as a sacrificial lamb should there actually be a serious security breach. This rather put me off the idea.

Head of Quality Assurance is often also treated as ablative armor for existing management.

Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#157

Post by michaelcampbell »

jacquesm wrote: post #117
dclowd9901 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how the thankless jobs of quality assurance become so critical so quickly. And I mean that ironically of course. To folks out there: do the important work, not the glamorous work, and you'll not only sleep well, but you might actually matter as well.

Yes, but first it has to go horribly wrong. Same for security. After the breach there is plenty of budget.

I worked in security for a while, but luckily on the vendor side and not the consumer side. The old yarn in that area is when everything (security wise) is fine, management asks you "What are we paying you for?". When it inevitably turns pear shaped they ask, "What are we paying you for?"

Fun times.

Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#158

Post by michaelcampbell »

arethuza wrote: post #125
jacquesm wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but first it has to go horribly wrong. Same for security. After the breach there is plenty of budget.

Many years ago I had a fascination with security and fancied becoming the CISO for the multinational I was working for at the time - my boss at the time, the CIO, said the role would really have no power and would be there as a sacrificial lamb should there actually be a serious security breach. This rather put me off the idea.

The Risk Management manager character played by Demi Moore in the "Margin Call" movie is another example of this in the financial industry.

Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#159

Post by inetknght »

renewiltord wrote: post #11

Another example of "guy can't spell" => "he's retarded". If you can't get everything right, you probably got lots of things wrong. It also shows why software engineers are superior engineers. The history of software engineering has some single-digit kills, at most 20 in total. Meanwhile, shuttle engineers are supposed to be the best in the aerospace business and they've lost some 13 or so? All aerospace would be put…

> One day, I will teach them real engineering: It is Rails backend with React frontend. Zero kills. Life above all.

Buddy, if you think that is "real engineering", you've got a lot of things to learn.

Even in software engineering, rails and react aren't really engineering. Real engineering includes calculations -- data structures, algorithms, data structures, and user interfaces designed to work with people who are deaf or blind. You wanna tell me that rails is performant? Have you done calculations? You wanna tell me react's algorithms are well-defined in memory and time? Have you ensured that your "software" is usable by people with disabilities?

Re: The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)

#160

Post by dpstart01 »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #22
hydrox24 wrote: post #5

This article (as it makes clear) owes it's analysis at least largely to what Tufte has written about the Challenger disaster (1986) and Columbia Disaster (2003). He wrote about the Columbia one more fully in the second edition of The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint. Given that the link in the article to his report on his website is now broken, people might be interested in teh few page grabs that he has included in the…

If you haven't read it, I highly suggest you read Feynman's addendum to the Challenger disaster report: https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm The words "a safety factor of three" will live with me for every day of my life.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
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