> “The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”
Slide 1: 48-point font
Don't go forward with reentry
* 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
White boards are... ok... better than powerpoint but still fail to sell it like a chalkboard does. I think it is the noise.
PowerPoint gets used because it requires less effort from the audience. They sit back and zone out like couch potatoes. Scrap the PowerPoint and throw the technical report at the managers. Any of them who complain or otherwise don't read it are incompetent and should be fired on the spot.
I teach in a classroom that had blackboard that had stood the test of time for decades. When it was replaced with a whiteboard, things went downhill. The markers dry out quickly, without much notice, so that students often have trouble reading the material. And the whiteboards get harder to erase year after year.
I guess the advantage of whiteboards is that a variety of colours can be used. But some students have deficiencies of colour recognition, so that's not really helpful. (I never used coloured chalk, for the same reason. Maximal contrast is the key.)
And the noise. That click drag click of chalk. Students after the transition to whiteboards told me that they really missed that. It enlivened the lectures. And when students were writing down notes, they knew to look up when they heard the sound.
Back to the point about the "visual show" and doing slides in real time. Yes, yes, yes. Once in a while I need to show something on the projector. The moment I turn it one, I see students start to disengage.
I don't think PowerPoint is the problem in and of itself, but rather its use as a crutch to compensate for poor communication. Of course, even among scientists, few can count themselves at Feynman's level in terms of communication skills. Maybe this is a skill that NASA scientists need to brush up on, perhaps with Pluralsight courses or something? lol
I'm not making the argument and I'm not interested in engaging with this quibbling, I'm just explaining how the article said the expert who conducted the investigation found a problem with their use of PowerPoint. If you have a problem with that conclusion, then take it up with the investigation report, not me. I would be fascinated to see you provide a rebuttal of it.
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.
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"
"We checked the test data: possible to damage tiles significantly" "Foam that hit wing was way bigger than the tests"
Obviously you can miscommunicate via any medium, but I think the author's point here (which I agree with) is some mediums lend themselves to specific types of miscommunication.
And a whiteboard from across the room is likely to be thin enough lines to give me big problems.
Saying “more testing must be done before deciding to re-enter” would be equally valid.