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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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February 10th, 2004

unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Tuesday, February 10th, 2004 12:57 am

Robert Cringely has another good article on PowerPoint abuse, making the observation that because of the manner in which Powerpoint (intended as a visual aid, not as a means of communication in itself) is misused to become the message instead of aiding the message, with the resulting loss of information because you can only fit so much on a Powerpoint slide, we have largely ceased to communicate without realizing it.  Giving a Powerpoint presentation, we are not speaking, and sitting in the meeting room staring at the presentation, we are not listening.  Between the presenter relying on the slides to serve in place of data, and the audience expecting to derive insight from the slides, little communication is occurring.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a PowerPoint slide is not, and when we rely on PowerPoint slides instead of actual communication, the author comes out of the meeting room convinced he conveyed his message, and the audience leave convinced that they understood what he meant; and both are wrong.

unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Tuesday, February 10th, 2004 06:12 pm

Operations are underway in Uruguay to raise the German Deutschland-class heavy cruiser (aka "pocket battleship") Admiral Graf Spee, scuttled off Montevideo by Captain Hans Langsdorff on December 17, 1939 after being heavily damaged in the Battle of the River Plate and trapped by a Royal Navy task force.