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Monday, September 29, 2003


Did PowerPoint help kill Columbia?
"When the bullets are flying, no one is safe," writes John Schwartz in the NYT. But he means PowerPoint bullets, not lead.

Before the fatal end of the shuttle Columbia's mission last January, with the craft still orbiting the earth, NASA engineers used a PowerPoint presentation to describe their investigation into whether a piece of foam that struck the shuttle's wing during launching had caused serious damage. Edward Tufte, a Yale professor who is an influential expert on the presentation of visual information, published a critique of that presentation on the World Wide Web last March. A key slide, he said, was "a PowerPoint festival of bureaucratic hyper-rationalism."

Among other problems, Mr. Tufte said, a crucial piece of information — that the chunk of foam was hundreds of times larger than anything that had ever been tested — was relegated to the last point on the slide, squeezed into insignificance on a frame that suggested damage to the wing was minor.

The independent board that investigated the Columbia disaster devoted an entire page of its final report last month to Mr. Tufte's analysis. The board wrote that "it is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation."
PowerPoint has become sort of like kudzu – it’s everywhere, and you can’t kill it.

Update: If you missed it the last time I linked to it, here is the PowerPoint version of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Ugh!

by Donald Sensing, 9/29/2003 06:56:22 AM. Permalink |  





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