OVER-RELIANCE ON POWERPOINT LEADS TO SIMPLISTIC THINKING NASA's Columbia Accident Investigation Board has fingered the agency's over-reliance on Microsoft PowerPoint presentations as one of the elements leading to last February's shuttle disaster. The Board's report notes that NASA engineers tasked with assessing possible wing damage during the mission presented their findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide so crammed with bulleted items that it was almost impossible to analyze. "It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation," says the report. NASA's findings are echoed in a pamphlet titled "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint," authored by information presentation theorist Edward Tufte, who says the software forces users to contort data beyond reasonable comprehension. Because only about 40 words fit on each slide, a viewer can zip through a series of slides quickly, spending barely 8 seconds on each one. And the format encourages bulleted lists -- a "faux analytical" technique that sidesteps the presenter's responsibility to link the information together in a cohesive argument, according to Tufte, who concludes that ultimately, PowerPoint software oozes "an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch." (New York Times 14 Dec 2003)
-- ______ (_____ \ _____) ) ____ ____ ____ ____ | ____/ / _ ) / _ | / ___) / _ ) | | ( (/ / ( ( | |( (___ ( (/ / |_| \____) \_||_| \____) \____) Kevin Waterson Port Macquarie, Australia -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
