Edward Tufte has a famous essay on the Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, which should be required reading for anyone involved in communicating basically anything. I think Rand has already linked to this essay elsewhere, but I’ll link again just for emphasis. There’s an excellent, if a little technical, essay here which covers some similar issues in word processing (hat tip to an anonymous commenter on this post).
Some More SubOrbital Day News
SubOrbital Day went off pretty smoothly today. We basically walked around in teams briefing Senate staffers on issues of importance to the emerging suborbital launch services industry (see below for our talking points, which pretty much cover everything we talked about). The message was well received for the most part.
We were a little disorganized due to the fact that the principal players are busy building hardware (woohoo!), but everything came together in the end. One kind of cool thing that happened while I was briefing Landon Fulmer, a legislative correspondent for Sam Brownback – the door to the conference room opened up and in walks General Pete Worden, who is working as a Congressional Fellow in Brownback’s office. While I was recovering from my surprise, Pat Bahn (who was my teammate) showed up from his previous appointment (we’d split up to make up some lost time). Fortunately Worden and Pat know each other, as evidenced by the fact that Worden offered to deliver Pat’s canned SubOrbital background briefing. He did an excellent job of it, too. It’s nice to have people who really get it in positions of influence.
I had a similar surge of hope when Steve Parker, a Legislative Fellow in Bill Nelson’s office, started asking about the Black Armadillo. Very encouraging, especially considering we were meeting in a room covered with Space Shuttle pictures – I thought making the SubOrbital pitch would be like trying to sell Linux to Bill Gates. A pleasant surprise indeed.
It was nice to catch up with the SubOrbital Institute usual suspects, though Neil Milburne of Armadillo wasn’t there, most likely since they are building and testing hardware at a furious rate. There’s going to be some interesting news in the coming months, not just related to the X Prize. Unfortunately I can’t divulge everything, but stay tuned.
“Powerpoint Engineering”
Thomas James points out this little article from Government Executive:
The biggest lesson, Roe said, is to curb the practice of “PowerPoint engineering.” The Columbia report chided NASA engineers for their reliance on bulleted presentations. In the four studies, the inspectors came to agree that PowerPoint slides are not a good tool for providing substantive documentation of results. “We think it’s important to go back to the basics,” Roe said. “We’re making it a point with the agency that engineering organizations need to go back to writing engineering reports.”
Thomas wonders if there will be slides available of the report…
This is not just a problem for NASA–in my recent experience of the past couple years (in which I’ve fallen off the “recovering engineer” wagon and done some consulting for both large and small companies), it’s endemic in industry as well (partly because contractors come to reflect their customer’s culture). Back in the olden days, when I was a technical supervisor, I was a stickler for well-written technical memoranda. Now they don’t even seem to exist, let alone exist in a useful form, and few engineers seem to know how to write any more.
I absolutely agree that this is a major problem in the industry, but it’s not going to change until upper management decides to make it happen, and unfortunately, being upper management, they’ll probably remain addicted to briefing charts, and not even understand the problem. We’ve forgotten how to write, and they’ve forgotten how to read.
“Powerpoint Engineering”
Thomas James points out this little article from Government Executive:
The biggest lesson, Roe said, is to curb the practice of “PowerPoint engineering.” The Columbia report chided NASA engineers for their reliance on bulleted presentations. In the four studies, the inspectors came to agree that PowerPoint slides are not a good tool for providing substantive documentation of results. “We think it’s important to go back to the basics,” Roe said. “We’re making it a point with the agency that engineering organizations need to go back to writing engineering reports.”
Thomas wonders if there will be slides available of the report…
This is not just a problem for NASA–in my recent experience of the past couple years (in which I’ve fallen off the “recovering engineer” wagon and done some consulting for both large and small companies), it’s endemic in industry as well (partly because contractors come to reflect their customer’s culture). Back in the olden days, when I was a technical supervisor, I was a stickler for well-written technical memoranda. Now they don’t even seem to exist, let alone exist in a useful form, and few engineers seem to know how to write any more.
I absolutely agree that this is a major problem in the industry, but it’s not going to change until upper management decides to make it happen, and unfortunately, being upper management, they’ll probably remain addicted to briefing charts, and not even understand the problem. We’ve forgotten how to write, and they’ve forgotten how to read.
“Powerpoint Engineering”
Thomas James points out this little article from Government Executive:
The biggest lesson, Roe said, is to curb the practice of “PowerPoint engineering.” The Columbia report chided NASA engineers for their reliance on bulleted presentations. In the four studies, the inspectors came to agree that PowerPoint slides are not a good tool for providing substantive documentation of results. “We think it’s important to go back to the basics,” Roe said. “We’re making it a point with the agency that engineering organizations need to go back to writing engineering reports.”
Thomas wonders if there will be slides available of the report…
This is not just a problem for NASA–in my recent experience of the past couple years (in which I’ve fallen off the “recovering engineer” wagon and done some consulting for both large and small companies), it’s endemic in industry as well (partly because contractors come to reflect their customer’s culture). Back in the olden days, when I was a technical supervisor, I was a stickler for well-written technical memoranda. Now they don’t even seem to exist, let alone exist in a useful form, and few engineers seem to know how to write any more.
I absolutely agree that this is a major problem in the industry, but it’s not going to change until upper management decides to make it happen, and unfortunately, being upper management, they’ll probably remain addicted to briefing charts, and not even understand the problem. We’ve forgotten how to write, and they’ve forgotten how to read.
“…To Serve Its Own Citizens…”
The conventional wisdom is that we lost the battle of Fallujah, by pulling back and letting a former Ba’athist general take over. In that context, reader Mike Puckett points out this very encouraging news.
With this kind of good news, combined with the bringing to heel of Al-Sadr, it’s easy to see why the quagmirists in the media want to keep the focus on Abu Ghraib.
“…To Serve Its Own Citizens…”
The conventional wisdom is that we lost the battle of Fallujah, by pulling back and letting a former Ba’athist general take over. In that context, reader Mike Puckett points out this very encouraging news.
With this kind of good news, combined with the bringing to heel of Al-Sadr, it’s easy to see why the quagmirists in the media want to keep the focus on Abu Ghraib.
“…To Serve Its Own Citizens…”
The conventional wisdom is that we lost the battle of Fallujah, by pulling back and letting a former Ba’athist general take over. In that context, reader Mike Puckett points out this very encouraging news.
With this kind of good news, combined with the bringing to heel of Al-Sadr, it’s easy to see why the quagmirists in the media want to keep the focus on Abu Ghraib.
Go Read Those Guys
Boy, ask and ye shall receive. A few more posts like that, on a regular basis, Andrew, and I could retire. Unfortunately, this blog has a lousy pension plan.
And after y’all have read Andrew’s post on Suborbital Day, head over to The Space Review, where Jeff Foust explains, once again, why we shouldn’t build a new heavy-lift vehicle.
The Saturn 5 proved that heavy-lift vehicles can enable human exploration of the Moon. It
SubOrbital Day
Today is SubOrbital Day, a lobbying event for the SubOrbital Institute. I’ve cut ‘n’ pasted the talking points for the day below the fold. I’ll post more later, possibly tomorrow if the evening wrapup is especially festive. We’ll be walking around Capitol Hill briefing Senate staffers on the issues below, trying to encourage them to take action that will make it easier for you and me to get into space.