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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)

#191

Post by rayiner »

gcthomas wrote: post #151
greggman3 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reflowable text is fine for conveying information on a tiny screen, but that’s about it.

When your screen is bigger than a page, reflowing the text is almost never what you want because long lines are hard to read. Thus even though computer screens aren’t limited to the size of a sheet of paper, you want to wrap your lines at paper-width (or better, book width) anyway.

Note that programmers typically define an effective page width for source code by enforcing an 80-100 column limit.

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

#192

Post by earleybird »

pklausler wrote: post #174
endymi0n wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It was Blaise Pascal in his Lettres Provinciales .

For an in depth review of the phrase: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

I am partial to Woodrow Wilsons' variation on the theme; something resonates when I'm asked to for a development/programming estimate.

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

#193

Post by Cosmin_C »

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 work in the medical field and my brain cells have been constantly assassinated for years by bad presentations. Every once in a while I find unicorns - people who tell a story, teach and present using Powerpoint/Keynote slides as support - conveying information that is hard to put into words -> a photograph, an animation, some simple flowcharts to refer back to whilst talking about what is really the subject of the matter.

I've seen Powerpoint since medical school evolve from trying to squeeze as much information as possible on slides to utter nonsense and hundreds of words per displayed page. Heck, just stay home and automate your presentation to display the slides and mail them to your students instead, don't do this.

I've also been guilty when having to turbo half ass wing a teaching session of stuffing a lot of text in my slides. But I was aware this was not appropriate and I always tried to not be "that person". However, when you have 30 million presentations per day around the world, this is almost impossible to do.

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

#194

Post by [deleted] »

zelos wrote: post #44
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…

Maybe, but I don't think anyone can deny that it is an appalling slide. I count 3 spelling and grammatical errors alone. It looks like the bad "before" example in a presentation skills workshop. This was created by engineers working on life and death issues involving billions of dollars of hardware.

[deleted]

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

#195

Post by cxr »

zelos wrote: post #44
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…

Maybe, but I don't think anyone can deny that it is an appalling slide. I count 3 spelling and grammatical errors alone. It looks like the bad "before" example in a presentation skills workshop. This was created by engineers working on life and death issues involving billions of dollars of hardware.

> Maybe, but I don't think anyone can deny that it is an appalling slide. I count 3 spelling and grammatical errors alone.

The slide from the post that you're referring to (which is 16:9) is a fabricated, probably created for this post, and is not a faithful copy of the actual deck that was presented in 2003. The actual slide—complete with a Boeing watermark, sans some of the errors and presentation issues we can see in the blog post, and in 4:3, of course—can be seen in Tufte's book.

Who knows why the slide in this post was fabricated (and why the author failed to indicate this fact anywhere).

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

#196

Post by nunez »

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…

There is a great example of this from the fine folks at ITA Software (now Google Flights). Their founder wrote basically a paper on the challenges of writing airline ticket optimization software…in PowerPoint. The slides are thin on information but the speaker notes explain everything.

Since seeing that, I double-down on making my speaker notes tell the story for those that couldn’t be in the room.

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

#197

Post by gambiting »

hbn wrote: post #173
gambiting wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I definitely remember reading a full analysis about what would be required to actually launch a second shuttle in time to rescue them, and it would require nothing less than war effort for an operation never attempted before, and of which literally every single part would have to work first try, with no delays, and even then there was barely enough time to do it.

If this is true then it's increasingly bold of this article's author to blame the deaths of 7 astronauts on a single engineer for not getting the information hierarchy correct on a powerpoint

I think this is the right summary:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue...

Basically yeah, it could have been done, but only by pulling out one of the other shuttles out of active maintanance, skipping a whole bunch of repairs and necessary checks, launching in record time, and actually managing a situation where there are two shuttles in orbit, something NASA wasn't exactly prepared for at the time.

And the biggest question of all - what if the second shuttle becomes damaged in the exact same way on the way up?

That's not to say that NASA shouldn't have at least attempted a rescue. Knowing anything about the way US approaches situations like this, it would have been a "no expenses spared" effort and they would at least try. But unfortunately it's extremely likely that the second shuttle would have also been lost on the way, with crucial maintenance and checks skipped just to make it space worthy in time.

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

#198

Post by andi999 »

oconnor663 wrote: post #165

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 ethi…

Actually the Hubble repair mission STS 125 (after the Columbia accident) was planned with a rescue mission on standby. So NASA answered the question if they would think it were ethical.

https://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts125/090508sts400/

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

#199

Post by andi999 »

ciphol wrote: post #159
wizzard wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if both foams were from the same batch?

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

#200

Post by carlmr »

Graffur wrote: post #93
carlmr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the communicator your job is to ensure that the audience gets your message. This slide is so comically bad that I wouldn't expect anyone to understand the gravity of the situation after seeing it. If this was a presentation done in high school they would have gotten a failing grade. And I think we can expect more from university educated people.

But it's not a high school presentation done for the sake of doing a presentation. It's not an audience who will review the performance. It's giving information to _professional_ _experts_ who are _responsible_ for consuming that information.

>it's not a high school presentation

I agree, we can expect more from the presenters here.

Experts are humans, experts get bored, experts can't necessarily follow your bad presentation.

Underneath it all we're smart monkeys, not robots. You can't force yourself to pay attention indefinitely. It's not in our biology.

No matter how smart you are if you hear hours of presentations in a day, you will only take home a certain maximum amount of the stuff that seemed important.

If you're a presenter, and you have something life-and-death important to say, you should repeat it, you should put it into simple words, you should use appropriate language, voice and maybe even pictures to make it clear.

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