31–40 of 204 posts
> This allowed NASA managers to imply a hierarchy of importance in their head: the writing lower down and in smaller font was ignored These managers were REALLY that braindead? These are NASA managers in charge of life-or-death decisions, and their dull eyes glaze over as spittle puddles underneath them because they're too stupid to read one whole entire paragraph worth of text without ignoring subheadings because th…
In general, we give people too much of a pass for not bothering to read what they are supposed to (and I myself am guilty of this as it seems like it preparedness for meetings is useless as nobody else reads even on the rare occasions I do speak). That is part of the reason Powerpoint is everywhere. You cannot assume that people have read anything before the meeting, you cannot assume they will read during the meetin…
I mean, NASA is the one who called in the vendor engineers to answer questions they had. If you didn't get answers to those questions, or if the answers weren't clear enough for you, then NASA needs communicate that. You can't get the information you want if you don't ask the questions. Everyone here is blaming a slide deck (that had the information on it!) instead of asking how NASA could have ignored that information. Slide formatting is a pitiful excuse for lack of due diligence by the recipients of that briefing - the people responsible for the safety of the at-risk personnel.
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…
Right, but you can create such a thing with a word processor. Just change the page size or orientation.
Sure, the page breaks might not default to where you want them, but you can add page breaks wherever you want, and don't need to create a text box for each paragraph.
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…
It’s a wall of text. It should have had a single sentence in bold giant font:
WE HAVE NEVER TESTED AN INSULATION COLLISION AT ANYTHING CLOSE TO THIS LEVEL
This is not just a normal, routine presentation. This is an all hands on deck emergency and discussion. And NASA isn't just a bunch of MBA's, but rather people who have spent their entire careers immersed in this kind of stuff.
No matter what is one the slide, I expect that the audience asks detailed questions. Even if the slide has just a big thumbs up emoji, I suspect you would still get a lot of really hard questions.
Think about presentations on programming, where someone in the audience points out that the example code on the slide is incorrect/won't compile/undefined behavior
I would expect a bunch of geeks (which I think would be there at NASA) to scrutinize the slide and try to find any flaw in the logic. Especially when the lives of people they deeply care about are on the line.
If they are so cavalier about human life that they just skip the details of the slide while making literal life and death decisions, it speaks of a very deep culture rot that goes far beyond PowerPoint.
Then they would have been fired unceremoniously and replaced with engineers that knew better than to make their bosses look bad. (who themselves would then, of course, been held responsible for apparently preventable deaths).
Stop blaming the engineers for this stuff. This is the fault of the timeline chasers.
I've seen presentations with Powerpoint that suck the life out of you and also ones that inspire and excite. It's not the tool, it's the presenter and how they wield the tool. Reading word for word off a text-heavy deck in a monotone with no images or diagrams is a recipe for disaster. I tend to have my decks (back when I was doing presentations) be relatively text-lite and involve images/diagrams that back up my tal…
That's true, but it's also how much time the presenter had to put the presentation together. Was he already 6 weeks behind on a dozen (meaningless) deadlines when he found out he had to give a presentation tomorrow morning at 8 AM?
In general, we give people too much of a pass for not bothering to read what they are supposed to (and I myself am guilty of this as it seems like it preparedness for meetings is useless as nobody else reads even on the rare occasions I do speak). That is part of the reason Powerpoint is everywhere. You cannot assume that people have read anything before the meeting, you cannot assume they will read during the meetin…
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.
If someone wrote "I approved the landing as the title of the slide did not seem alarming", that person would be resoundingly rebuked. That would be an outrageous official rationale and the person would be regarded as lazy and negligent.
But that is practically what happened and what we excuse.
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…
The people making the decisions, whether they listened to the presentation or not, perhaps gave too much credence to what was on the slide. The audio portion is temporal, even if recorded. You're there in the moment listening, but it doesn't necessarily last.
But the slide is "eternal". Always there to be referenced, or passed along. The slide was going to be viewed repeatedly over a longer time frame. Biasing the memory of those who may have been at the presentation, and serving as a "single" source of truth for those who did not.
As much as PP is meant to be a visual AID, most folks are actually pretty lousy at using it that way, and PP has morphed, even if unintentionally, as an artifact of record.
I'm as guilty as the next guy wanting to skim the PP deck rather than listening to the presentation. I can skim a deck in 5m, vs sitting for 60m listening.
Similarly for technical papers. Read the intro, the summary, skip to the end, read the conclusion. Only if any of what I read is actually interesting will I dig deeper in to the paper.
> this foam, falling nine times faster than a fired bullet Wouldn’t the foam initially be travelling as fast as the spacecraft? So it’s just the time between it’s release and hitting the wing to accelerate.