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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)

#161

Post by gregmac »

the_snooze wrote: post #154
cryptonector wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 P…

Yeah, this is a good idea.

I'd add a tip: start writing your notes in the speaker notes and leave the slides blank, instead of the other way around (which is kind of what PowerPoint's UI pushes you towards). Only create the actual slide content after refining your speaker notes once or twice.

For me, at least, I find it's much easier to add content to the blank slide than it is to refine (aka: erase words from) the sentences I initially type out. I tend to like slide content that is graphics (photos, screenshots, graphs, diagrams), titles, or lists of short headline-style text (1~3 words).

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

#162

Post by sumanthvepa »

I’ve seen a lot of management consulting decks, and they tend to be very information dense. But a lot of effort is put into making sure that the each slide conveys exactly the message that the consultant wants to convey. Also the slides are designed to be read and used outside of the actual presentation, often as reference material.

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

#163

Post by endymi0n »

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…

This. I remember the day when I casually asked my cofounder, an amazing storyteller, how his day was.

He answered: „Awesome. I had 8 slides this morning. Now I have three.“

That day, something fundamentally clicked in me.

I learned that day that condensing and sharpening information towards a punchline is real, hard and meaningful work.

Or, as Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”

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

#164

Post by dr_orpheus »

pdonis wrote: post #55
giantg2 wrote: post #13

Another NASA screw-up that they're trying to pin on the vendor engineers, just like Challenger. The title is not reassuring. Conservatism in engineering is essentially about creating safety margins through conservative estimation. The title is saying we need to be careful because a tile was likely penetrated. Hell, if I remember correctly they were reporting that there was known tile damage on the news before reentry…

> Another NASA screw-up that they're trying to pin on the vendor engineers, just like Challenger. And, for context, Edward Tufte, whose review of the slides is being referenced in this article, is the same one who misunderstood and misrepresented what the actual issue was during the briefing the night before the Challenger launch, in his paper reviewing the presentation the engineers made then. Edit: previous HN disc…

Yeah, its very hard to say that Challenger was because of a miscommuncation from the vendor engineers. They wrote out directly [0] "Recommendations: O-ring temperature must be > 53F at launch", and the temperature of the air at launch was 36F and measurements on the solid rocket boosters (where the o-rings are located) got down to 25F and 8F [1].

But their recommendation was challenged by the NASA SRB managers. And after an offline discussion the SRB vendor came back and had changed their opinion that it was safe. And the NASA SRB manager never brought up the o-ring temperature concern to the rest of the management team.

[0] https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v1p90.jpg

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...

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

#165

Post by oconnor663 »

The title presumed that the crew could have been rescued if NASA had recognized that reentry was impossible. But that's far from clear. This article goes into fascinating detail about how difficult it would have been to prepare a rescue mission on time: https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue...

One huge issue, beyond whether a rescue mission would've been possible, is whether it would've be ethical. If NASA knew that Columbia was stranded in orbit, then it would be knowingly sending a second crew up on a vehicle with the exact same potential problem, with no time to mitigate it. I'm sure a rescue crew would've volunteered despite the risks, but anyway the point is that "the slide that killed seven people" is erasing all of these questions.

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

#166

Post by cryptonector »

crdrost wrote: post #156
cryptonector wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Video is of course not necessary, just sufficient.

It should be so, but that means writing different materials, one for the actual presentation, and one for everyone who couldn't be there. It would be better to have the video.

Mind you, for accessibility and general user-friendliness, you want both. But audio/video is a great help because there will be things that the off-line materials miss.

> It would be preferable if more presentation media had a “front of card/back of card”

Yes. PowerPoint and the like generally have a public / presenter distinction, but we want three distinctions: online / off-line / presenter.

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

#167

Post by cryptonector »

the_snooze wrote: post #154
cryptonector wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 P…

Presenter notes though are intended to help the presenter, and their form is not great for users who missed the presentation. As well, the presenter often does need presenter notes that are terse and not suitable for the public. We need slides that are shown at the presentation, slides not shown at the presentation but which are public, and presenter notes.

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

#168

Post by cryptonector »

gregmac wrote: post #161
the_snooze wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 P…

Yeah, this is a good idea. I'd add a tip: start writing your notes in the speaker notes and leave the slides blank, instead of the other way around (which is kind of what PowerPoint's UI pushes you towards). Only create the actual slide content after refining your speaker notes once or twice. For me, at least, I find it's much easier to add content to the blank slide than it is to refine (aka: erase words from) the s…

Nice, I like that!

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

#169

Post by mkipper »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #79
brimble wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PowerPoint decks for the upper tiers of an organization can take on a whole different character. I shit you not that it's common to pass them around in email as if they were a document format, even for information that is never intended or expected to be presented. As if they were PDFs or something. It's crazy. [EDIT] There's also a kind of horrendous, illegible house style some places, that's expected to be how thes…

@DefenseCharts has a great collection of these for anyone interested. https://nitter.net/DefenseCharts

The defense industry really is the GOAT when it comes to slide decks.

Nothing gets the creative juices flowing like sitting through an 8 hour presentation of a deck with 200 slides, which are really just 10 different slide decks from 10 different departments stitched together, mostly containing quotes copied from actual design documents and pasted into bullet lists

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

#170

Post by phicoh »

bumby wrote: post #158
phicoh wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wer…

So in your opinion, the slide said that with the impact of the foam it would have been very unlikely that the tile would have failed? In that case the inpretation by NASA of the slide was correct.

Which is weird because slide also mentions that a small increase in energy can have a disproportional effect.

I find it weird that they would rely on their model (for extrapolation) when they know that the behavior of the tiles is non-linear. If they knew that the real world was outside their testing parameters and they decided not to test, then that sounds to me like a very serious ommision.

I.e., it is weird to extrapolate tests to something 600 times bigger. Certainly if it is about impact on ceramics.

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