Linked from Tufte’s article, I found this interesting comment from someone’s experience at Microsoft: [1]
> Attempting to have slides serve both as projected visuals and as stand-alone handouts makes for bad visuals and bad documentation. Yet, this is a typical, acceptable approach. PowerPoint (or Keynote) is a tool for displaying visual information, information that helps you tell your story, make your case, or prove your point. PowerPoint is a terrible tool for making written documents, that's what word processors are for.
I think that’s on point for many companies. A lot of the terrible slides you see in meetings are actually intended as documentation after the fact, and few people recognize (or care) that this makes for a terrible presentation.
Ironically, I think Powerpoint isn’t such a bad tool for creating handouts. If the intended reader reads the document on their screen instead of printing it, a nice PDF with screen-shaped pages might actually be close to optimal.
You just have to be 100% clear whether you’re creating a document or a presentation.
I don't know. Over time, I've learned to appreciate the kind of slides physicists make, which follow all the "worst practices". They are very dense, with lots of plots and text. They are like, I imagine in the olden days, when people would draw things on blackboards or print out their plots, and sit around them and interpret them. They are the material, and what the presenter does is walking the audience through the material. Compared with a scientific paper, they lack all the prose and weird formal phrases that make papers hard to read. You basically just show what your colleagues need to work with, not less or more. Most importantly, you are not trying to persuade anybody.
My experience outside of academia is that people use PowerPoint exactly for persuasion. Even to the degree that when I wanted to prepare a presentation internally, one of my bosses got angry because he thought I was going to bullshit him. (PowerPoint is something you do to a customer or to the board, not to your colleagues.)
100%. One of the things I'm drilling into my team (we do a lot of slides!), is you have to decide - are you making slides for:
1. presentation - should be sparse, key, anchoring data that enables people to ground themselves while they listen and pay attention to YOU
or
2. Reference - dashboard and background and details and density
If a deck may be used for both purposes, intentionally or not (e.g. we expect it to be shared and referred to by people not attending), resist the urge to do a hybrid slide, and if at all possible make presentation slides at front, reference/supplementary slides at back.
Worst situation is when somebody uses what are effectively reference slides for a live presentation. People's attention is split between reading and making sense of dense information on screen, and the key important points you are trying to verbalize.
Most slide decks I ever see I see long after they are presented. As a result I want slide decks to stand alone -- that or else video to be published instead of slide decks.
As a presenter I have to worry about whether my slides will be seen w/ or without video of my presentation. Therefore I try to make my slide decks able to stand alone, though I admit this is not great.
The common pattern now instead is to make colorful and near-content-free slide decks where the presenter simply speaks with colorful backgrounds. I am terrible at crafting such slide decks -- well, I've not tried. This pattern works while presenting though, and I should probably adopt it. Or perhaps I should adopt the Jeff Bezos approach.
What presenters and audiences need is a commitment to publish video of presentations, including Q&A segments. And video has to be playable at 2x speed.
(Yes, almost every video I watch I watch at 2x speed. Where platforms allow faster playback speeds I've even gone faster. Speech is extremely low-bandwidth. This does mean I've to backtrack more often than I'd like, but it's still better this way. I pay attention more when speech is faster -- up to the point where I can't follow, of course, and which I shy away from.)
I work in the medical field and my brain cells have been constantly assassinated for years by bad presentations. Every once in a while I find unicorns - people who tell a story, teach and present using Powerpoint/Keynote slides as support - conveying information that is hard to put into words -> a photograph, an animation, some simple flowcharts to refer back to whilst talking about what is really the subject of the matter.
I've seen Powerpoint since medical school evolve from trying to squeeze as much information as possible on slides to utter nonsense and hundreds of words per displayed page. Heck, just stay home and automate your presentation to display the slides and mail them to your students instead, don't do this.
I've also been guilty when having to turbo half ass wing a teaching session of stuffing a lot of text in my slides. But I was aware this was not appropriate and I always tried to not be "that person". However, when you have 30 million presentations per day around the world, this is almost impossible to do.
Powerpoint even has a special mode for creating handouts, by printing a non-displayed notes section. There's no need to put the outline on the slides... other than being less effort.
Right, but you can create such a thing with a word processor. Just change the page size or orientation.
Sure, the page breaks might not default to where you want them, but you can add page breaks wherever you want, and don't need to create a text box for each paragraph.
Another NASA screw-up that they're trying to pin on the vendor engineers, just like Challenger.
The title is not reassuring. Conservatism in engineering is essentially about creating safety margins through conservative estimation. The title is saying we need to be careful because a tile was likely penetrated. Hell, if I remember correctly they were reporting that there was known tile damage on the news before reentry, but that they didn't know the extent.
"NASA felt the engineers didn’t know what would happen but that all data pointed to there not being enough damage to put the lives of the crew in danger."
If you thought they didn't know, then ask them what they do know! It's right on the slide that flight conditions are outside of test parameters and that the mass of the projectile was much higher. How the F do you work at NASA and not understand the basic principles of mass, velocity, and energy well enough for that to stand out enough to ask questions or run your own calculations...
The reason the slide is laid out the way it is, is because it's describing the thought process and creates a deductive argument for how they got to their concern. This is a presentation for a briefing for other engineers, not a conference or sales pitch. It's supposed to be formal and contain the synopsis of technical points. Using projectors for technical briefings predates the use of PowerPoint. I see nothing wrong with the layout in that context.
Edit: why downvote without a reply? NASA has a history of blaming vendors when they screw up. This looks like another example to me. The presentation format does not have any issues given the setting and target audience.
Tufte is not an employee of NASA. He is an employee of Yale, and a thought leader in information design. HE was the one saying the slide design is poor, and doing so not in the interest of assigning blame, but in the interest of highlighting ways to communicate better.
To say that "the slide doesn't have any issues" is laughable on the face of it. But it's immaterial; your claim is that "NASA just ignored the engineers from Boeing" rather than "NASA didn't understand the engineers from Boeing". Communication is a two party process, and believe it or not, NASA isn't actually incentivized to take risks that lead to loss of life and damages public perception of them; it's far more likely they didn't understand the stakes, and looking at the slide from that perspective, it's very easy to see why they would not have understood the stakes even if the Boeing engineers did.
> The title is saying we need to be careful because a tile was likely penetrated.
It is a godawfull title. I believe that is how it reads to you but it totally reads the opposite to me. I read the title and it translates in my head as “we reviewed the test results and they suggest that the tiles are built sturdy enough to not get penetrated”. Exactly because what you say the word “conservatism” means to me that a system is designed to meet the loads plus reasonable safety margin. So if the review of test data indicates conservatism that means to me that the test found the test object roboust even with a reasonable safety margin. Otherwise i wouldn’t say that it “indicates conservatism” but that it “indicates lack of safety margin”.
> The reason the slide is laid out the way it is, is because it's describing the thought process
I agree, but that is not a good thing. People think in all kind of haphazard ways, before you communicate to others it is on you to look at your ramblings and make it orderly. The penultimate sentence is the most important one that should go first “flight conditions is significantly outside of test database”. That doesn’t mean that the tile is broken, nor does it mean that it is not broken. It means that we can’t tell from our tests.
> Another NASA screw-up that they're trying to pin on the vendor engineers, just like Challenger.
And, for context, Edward Tufte, whose review of the slides is being referenced in this article, is the same one who misunderstood and misrepresented what the actual issue was during the briefing the night before the Challenger launch, in his paper reviewing the presentation the engineers made then.
Edit: previous HN discussions of Tufte's Challenger review here:
Maybe, but I don't think anyone can deny that it is an appalling slide. I count 3 spelling and grammatical errors alone.
It looks like the bad "before" example in a presentation skills workshop. This was created by engineers working on life and death issues involving billions of dollars of hardware.
I tried to read the powerpoint and it was not an easy task. The main point of the powerpoint is not supposed to be an answer to a riddle of fonts and words.
A quick and dirty re-writing of the title (and slide):
_______________
Review of Test data indicates incident is well outside of safety margins.
- Volume of ramp is 1920 cu in vs 3 cu in for test
- Once tile is penetrated SOFI can cause significant damage.
- Flight condition significantly outside of test database
>The title is saying we need to be careful because a tile was likely penetrated.
To the point of the article, I think this is the wrong takeaway, meaning the slides were not communicating effectively.
The second point illustrates this. It says the models were overpredicting the penetration. Meaning the models were conservative and the the actual penetration was likely less than what models show. They were setting the table for an optimistic outlook.
The real issue, IMO, is highlighted later in the article where there isn't sufficient fidelity in the tests to back up those claims. Tests after the incident showed the foam acted very differently at the delta-v that actually occurred.
And regarding your point about blaming contractors, the vast majority of work done by NASA is done by contractors. NASA is, to some extent, a pass-through organization that funds other organizations like Boeing, Lockheed, Honeywell, Jacobs, etc.
>If you thought they didn't know, then ask them what they do know!
This gets to the same cognitive biases that led to Challenger, EVA 23 and a host of smaller incidents nobody hears about. Data is not objectively weighed in these situations because of schedule pressure, optimism bias, etc. In this case, most launches were showing foam shedding with no issue, so it lead to a false belief that it wasn't dangerous even though it was out-of-spec. Add to that a slide that says the models are too conservative and you can see where cognitive biases may influence the decision. Lastly, most people like to think they're self-aware enough to identify these biases in real-time, but they aren't. It's also why the incident lead to a separate organization within NASA focused on safety, quality, and risk that has a segregated chain of command.
I came in knowing the outcome, and roughly the point being made, but still found the conclusion of the slide hard to suss out. There were other failures in the chain as well for sure, but I don't think this is just a hit job on NASA vendors.
No, even for an engineering slide this is apalling
I'm not so sure how many people are familiar with the term "conservatism" as used here. I'm not. Some might be aware, those who are not aware will just skip over
I read this slide a couple of times. There's no thought order, no connection between the topics (even if we assume people are familiar with the subject) and several typos.
It is not a Powerpoint fault it is a fault of whoever wrote this.
This is an issue with information hierarchy. If this is a risk (and I can't imagine what might have been a bigger risk at that mission) it needs to be brought into attention. Not added to line 4 of slide 7 and be done with it.
When engineers are not allowed to use "alarmist language" the organization often changes to use such unreadable texts.
I don't expect "foam strike more than 600 times bigger than test data" would go over well politically. You'd be telling the audience that these people will die while everybody watches. No manager want to be the messenger for that kind of messages.
In this case the vendor engineers were from Boeing - Ya know, the same company that brought us the 737MAX MCAS fiasco. I mean sure, hindsight is a wonderful thing but given the history of Boeing engineering culture since their merger with McDonnell Douglas I can see the possibility of someone gliding over something inconvenient
Diane Vaughn's The Challenger Launch Decision misattributes responsibility for the disaster to the meeting in which a similar slide was shown.
When the shuttle design was finalized in the late 1970s they knew it had a 2-3% chance of a hull loss per launch. They were still planning to launch it 50 times a year so that would have meant losing a shuttle and crew every year!
The shuttle had hundreds of critical flaws and that 'normalization of deviance' meeting at which slides like this were shown at was a routine part of each shuttle launch. For each of these unacceptable situations they had to convince themselves that, with some mitigation (or not), they could accept it. It was inevitable that something like this was going to happen and then there would be recriminations about the details of that meeting.
Every other crewed space vehicle had an escape system to get the crew away from a failed rocket. The Challenger crew survived the explosion but were killed when the reinforced crew section hit the ocean. Similarly the Colombia astronauts were killed by a thermal protection system that was "unsafe at any speed". When the first few shuttles were launched there was a huge amount of concern about tiles breaking and coming off. Once they'd dodged the bullet a few times they assumed it was alright but it wasn't...
In the literature "normalization of deviance" has turned from a formal process used in managing dangerous technology to incidents such as: surgeon takes a crap and goes to work without washing his hands, forklift operator smokes pot and operates, etc.
You can broadly say that both Challenger and Columbia disasters can be attributed to failures in communication. But the Rogers Commission Report (presidential commission for investigating Challenger) doesn't really show quite the same scenario.
At the Flight Readiness Review for the solid rocket boosters before launch the engineers of Morton Thiokol (the solid rocket booster manufacturer) objected to launch because of the detrimental effect of the cold temperatures on the o-rings in the solid rocket boosters. They had never launched in that cold of temperatures before and previous test data had shown erosion of the seals on previous flights. These concerns were not communicated by the Morton Thiokol management or NASA present at that flight readiness review to any of the higher level managers that got final approval on launch.
For Challenger it was a known issue and people specifically said "don't do this".
The title presumed that the crew could have been rescued if NASA had recognized that reentry was impossible. But that's far from clear. This article goes into fascinating detail about how difficult it would have been to prepare a rescue mission on time: https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue...
One huge issue, beyond whether a rescue mission would've been possible, is whether it would've be ethical. If NASA knew that Columbia was stranded in orbit, then it would be knowingly sending a second crew up on a vehicle with the exact same potential problem, with no time to mitigate it. I'm sure a rescue crew would've volunteered despite the risks, but anyway the point is that "the slide that killed seven people" is erasing all of these questions.
There are billion decisions in the road of design and operation of the shuttle that all contributed in some degree or other to the tragic outcome.
This article is not attempting to answer that question, there is volume of literature on that.
The primary thrust of the article is to highlight a common tool we use and how using it ineffectively can be dangerous, it does a good job of communicating that point effectively albeit with click baity title.
I and most people here wouldn't understand tile design or shuttle engineering or ethics of space risks and not something we can learn from, it is rocket science after all,
However crappy PowerPoint presentations we all use and consume and we could potentially improve communicating in our day to day professional lives even if though we don't do cool NASA kind of projects.
Actually the Hubble repair mission STS 125 (after the Columbia accident) was planned with a rescue mission on standby. So NASA answered the question if they would think it were ethical.
> There were a number of options. The astronauts could perform a spacewalk and visually inspect the hull. NASA could launch another Space Shuttle to pick the crew up. Or they could risk re-entry.
That's not how I remember it being presented to the public. The official word at the time was that there were no feasible rescue options. Yes, they could have done a spacewalk to inspect the damage but if it had been bad there still wasn't anything that could have been done. I think the main problem with launching a rescue mission was the time it took NASA to get a shuttle ready for launch.
Atlantis was already scheduled for launch 41 days after Columbia. Columbia had ~30 days of air. NASA believed that Atlantis prep could have been accelerated and launched in time to attempt a rescue.
Yeah I definitely remember reading a full analysis about what would be required to actually launch a second shuttle in time to rescue them, and it would require nothing less than war effort for an operation never attempted before, and of which literally every single part would have to work first try, with no delays, and even then there was barely enough time to do it.
That there was "no other feasible plan" than re-entry was presumably because the risk of re-entry was assumed to be low. If the risk was correctly estimated to be higher, then it seems likely the rescue plan would become feasible (since, what other choice would NASA have?)
In this specific case, though, there was a chance for a rescue. Atlantis was being prepared for launch and could have been ready with a 5-day overlap. Whether or not that was presented to the public is another thing.
Everyone here is dogging the Slide. Sure it sucks - but I DISTINCTLY remember analysis of resuce. Do a space walk and repair it; send a second shuttle (they existing crew would run out); something else.
Also, the crew had a chance to call their loved ones and "sat good bye", and the pilot was anticipating the wing melting off.
NASA knew the risk, they tried to prevent it - but the shuttle still crashed
Kinda pointless to show the slide without the audio of the presenter to go with it. Unless we're thinking the presenter just read the slide verbatim with no extra context, and no questions were asked, which would essentially defeat the purpose of having a presenter and audience present at the same time. I know I've seen presenters actually do that, but the author didn't provide any indication that that's what happened here.
Indeed, and the article leaves out other relevant issues, such as where else the question was discussed, and also when - the article rather glibly suggests a rescue mission could have been launched, but that would have been a very risky action in its own right, even if it had been started on the day of the launch; it remains uncertain whether Columbia's oxygen could have been stretched out long enough even then. There were no other alternatives.
This led to a certain realistic fatalism:
"Then [Linda Ham] delivered the sentence that would define the rest of the tragedy; a sentence that was repeated as common wisdom by almost every senior manager that I talked to over the next two weeks: ‘You know, if there was any real damage done to the wing, there is nothing we can do about it.’ As unsettling as that was, I had to agree; going back to the first shuttle flight it had been well known that there was no way to repair the heat shield in flight. Nobody, not even me, thought about a rescue mission. Why would we?" - Wayne Hale, https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/after-ten-years-d...
Once it became clear, during the investigation, that the foam impact had created a hole in the reinforced carbon-carbon leading edge of the wing, the board's chairman, Admiral Hal Gehman, insisted that a test should be performed to demonstrate that this was likely. As this meant destroying one of the few spare parts, and it had not been decided at this point to retire the shuttles, he was unsure whether this was worth doing, but what convinced him to go ahead was the number of engineers and managers who still doubted this could have happened, despite all the evidence.
The people making the decisions, whether they listened to the presentation or not, perhaps gave too much credence to what was on the slide. The audio portion is temporal, even if recorded. You're there in the moment listening, but it doesn't necessarily last.
But the slide is "eternal". Always there to be referenced, or passed along. The slide was going to be viewed repeatedly over a longer time frame. Biasing the memory of those who may have been at the presentation, and serving as a "single" source of truth for those who did not.
As much as PP is meant to be a visual AID, most folks are actually pretty lousy at using it that way, and PP has morphed, even if unintentionally, as an artifact of record.
I'm as guilty as the next guy wanting to skim the PP deck rather than listening to the presentation. I can skim a deck in 5m, vs sitting for 60m listening.
Similarly for technical papers. Read the intro, the summary, skip to the end, read the conclusion. Only if any of what I read is actually interesting will I dig deeper in to the paper.
Thats my conclusion too, the article says there are too many words, and then says there are too little words
"SOFI and ramp mean the same thing, whats the reader to dooooo"
"Significant is used 5 times... without explanation!"
"There are 100 words!"
Yes, we need to know how the presentation went, and we also. need to know what NASA would have alternatively done and if it was honestly considered at all or even feasible
On a side note, its crazy that a couple tiles compromise the entire vessel, but I understand that the heat would travel across the inner metal. Its still crazy to think there isn't some other kind of dissipation measure possible.
I think blaming the slide/presentation is severely affected by the hindsight bias - of course, knowing the outcomes, we can find loads of issues with the slide. More importantly, it is always easy to declare a "human factor" incident and blame the human for "bad slides". But the very fact that such an important decision (re-entry) was (presumably) made as a result of Boeing engineers presenting to NASA officials/managers is eyebrow raising. The fact that this type of an issue (foam hitting the tiles) was well know in advance and yet not properly addressed indicates a systemic organizational problems.
It would be great to study those organizational factors and processes that resulted in both tragedies: how the risk was managed? how NASA "drifted" into failure? I believe focusing on a slide completely misses the point.
I've seen presentations with Powerpoint that suck the life out of you and also ones that inspire and excite. It's not the tool, it's the presenter and how they wield the tool.
Reading word for word off a text-heavy deck in a monotone with no images or diagrams is a recipe for disaster. I tend to have my decks (back when I was doing presentations) be relatively text-lite and involve images/diagrams that back up my talking points. And I've seen image-heavy decks that really don't convey anything either.
PowerPoint decks for the upper tiers of an organization can take on a whole different character. I shit you not that it's common to pass them around in email as if they were a document format, even for information that is never intended or expected to be presented. As if they were PDFs or something. It's crazy.
[EDIT] There's also a kind of horrendous, illegible house style some places, that's expected to be how these documents look. The US military and any big businesses that work heavily with them are infamous for this. They routinely produce some comically terrible decks and graphics. I wouldn't be surprised if that weird, seemingly-intentionally-hard-to-read style is also present in at least some parts of NASA, especially up at the administration level.
That's true, but it's also how much time the presenter had to put the presentation together. Was he already 6 weeks behind on a dozen (meaningless) deadlines when he found out he had to give a presentation tomorrow morning at 8 AM?
> Imagine if the engineers had put up a slide with just: “foam strike more than 600 times bigger than test data.”
Then they would have been fired unceremoniously and replaced with engineers that knew better than to make their bosses look bad. (who themselves would then, of course, been held responsible for apparently preventable deaths).
Stop blaming the engineers for this stuff. This is the fault of the timeline chasers.
> Then they would have been fired unceremoniously and replaced with engineers that knew better than to make their bosses look bad
More engineers need to risk this and raise red flags, publicly, about potential lethal faults. Yes, you will suffer if you get fired; but our education as engineers (if I may include myself among those ranks despite being a software guy...) must be such that we would find _not_ raising the red flag shameful and despicable. So much so that it would seem far worse than losing one's job.
This is not just a normal, routine presentation. This is an all hands on deck emergency and discussion. And NASA isn't just a bunch of MBA's, but rather people who have spent their entire careers immersed in this kind of stuff.
No matter what is one the slide, I expect that the audience asks detailed questions. Even if the slide has just a big thumbs up emoji, I suspect you would still get a lot of really hard questions.
Think about presentations on programming, where someone in the audience points out that the example code on the slide is incorrect/won't compile/undefined behavior
I would expect a bunch of geeks (which I think would be there at NASA) to scrutinize the slide and try to find any flaw in the logic. Especially when the lives of people they deeply care about are on the line.
If they are so cavalier about human life that they just skip the details of the slide while making literal life and death decisions, it speaks of a very deep culture rot that goes far beyond PowerPoint.
IDK. I too like to think the discourse and Q&A would have signaled differently than the slide. But, this is also 2003 and people generally had not gotten great at communicating via powerpoint yet. It's still bad now, it was horrible then. A unformatted list of bullet points was obviously still an acceptable slide format which tells me a good deal of how much slide skillz these folks utilized.
So, I do believe the slide title. I feel like it could have just as easily been discussed prior to the slide, it was agreed the test was acceptable or risk was low, and so the title was just trying to indicate that "it's been pre-agreed there is no problem here" then outlines some of the concerns which were considered.
The first step they went wrong is using a slideshow in the first place. This was a time critical scenario, anyone who needed to be making decisions should have been part of the engineering discussions from the beginning. They should have been having interactive conversations going over what they knew and how they knew it. The engineers had no time to be making slides for a management and that wasn't interested enough to be in the room with them in the first place.
Slides make sense as a way to introduce the outline of concept to a broad audience in a way that requires much less effort than 1-on-1 discussions. They are not a means for coming to decisions. If you need to make a critical, life- and business-shaping decision off the back of a side deck, you should instead delegate the decision to someone who knows more than you.
In general, we give people too much of a pass for not bothering to read what they are supposed to (and I myself am guilty of this as it seems like it preparedness for meetings is useless as nobody else reads even on the rare occasions I do speak).
That is part of the reason Powerpoint is everywhere. You cannot assume that people have read anything before the meeting, you cannot assume they will read during the meeting, so you need to read it out loud to have a decent chance of it being received.
I am also not thrilled accepting the use of titles and formatting as a excuse to skim 100 words. It is just the refusal to read/comprehend on a smaller scale.
> That is part of the reason Powerpoint is everywhere. You cannot assume that people have read anything before the meeting, you cannot assume they will read during the meeting, so you need to read it out loud to have a decent chance of it being received.
I've been told—very seriously—by multiple management consultants that public and private sector executives alike won't read a damn thing unless it shows up in powerpoint format, and even then you have to walk them through point by point or they'll miss most of it. This, when the documents are coming from people they're paying tons of money specifically to tell them stuff.
The company in question (you've heard of them, if you've heard of any management consulting companies at all) quite literally had an off-shored office dedicated to producing PowerPoints decks from notes overnight, while everyone on an actual engagement was sleeping. The primary tangible output of an engagement, as I understand it, is, overwhelmingly, PowerPoint decks. It's the Final Draft of the upper-end management world—apparently, you'll be dismissed and lose face if you show up with anything else, or even send something else in an email.
As the communicator your job is to ensure that the audience gets your message. This slide is so comically bad that I wouldn't expect anyone to understand the gravity of the situation after seeing it.
If this was a presentation done in high school they would have gotten a failing grade. And I think we can expect more from university educated people.
No love for anyone questioning NASA on here. This will probably get downvoted to.
I mean, NASA is the one who called in the vendor engineers to answer questions they had. If you didn't get answers to those questions, or if the answers weren't clear enough for you, then NASA needs communicate that. You can't get the information you want if you don't ask the questions. Everyone here is blaming a slide deck (that had the information on it!) instead of asking how NASA could have ignored that information. Slide formatting is a pitiful excuse for lack of due diligence by the recipients of that briefing - the people responsible for the safety of the at-risk personnel.
I give Tufte's (admittedly imperfect) thoughts on this deck and David Foster Wallace's This is Water (https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/) to every new member of my team to read and make it apparent that I expect them to have command of each document's implications.
The title is wrong - it didn't kill 7 people. And it is stated in the article that it "helped" kill 7 people, but even that is a leap. For all we know the slide actually reduced the percentage chance of this happening by .0001%. We can't actually know. We might as well blame it on the guy that was in charge of the foam order but had an extra extra long poop in the morning that reduced his work hours that day and he ordered 24 minutes to late and in those 24 minutes it caused other companies to get foam orders in first and a really good mixture batch came out and the next was sub-par and that's what the shuttle got. Basically chaos theory.
You don't see the cultural assumptions in the slide. You don't see why defensive phrasing is used. You don't see the recriminations that people have gone through in the past.
Don't dare try to question the narrative with physics and science. A Feynman and an O ring in ice water or a Tufte on visualizations will always be hired in at certain levels. For heaven's sake never go down the rabbit hole about how often the shuttles lost heat tiles. It was the foam, unforeseen and unforeseeable.
In my experience, it's nearly impossible to convey information so accurately that the the receiver is likely to make the same decision you would make.
There is a simple low-effort high-information solution to this problem - have everyone vote (or bet) on the decision. This, more than anything else, will reveal whether or not you've reached understanding/consensus/alignment.
(This is not to say that the final decision should be made by voting, rather it's to gauge the level of consensus)
I have an issue with the title of this piece. PowerPoint did not kill anyone. There are good people out there writing PowerPoint, and they should never be made to feel like their presentation software is responsible for seven people dying tragically. This was an engineering failure and a communication failure, but cannot and should not be laid at the feet of PowerPoint.
Alternative title: death by ears, how failing to listen and communicate killed seven people.
A question I often ask myself (though I don't work with anything with actual human risk) - when are my concerns valid and when am I coming off as just having a bleak outlook.
My own personal experience is that it's easier to be concerned with the small things (we have to have naming conventions), than with big things (are we building the right thing). I think there is a tendency to think "it'll probably work out".
Wow, 7 lifes at stake and still managers can decide to "skip smaller text" because if it is smaller it is definitely less important...
I agree: it's an awful slide. But the information was there. And I can imagine that the engineers were asked to assemble that presentation in a couple days, so I'd be surprised if they could do anything better.
I agree: an outsider would not understand a word of that slide. So what? What was the audience of that presentation? Why did the audience not read the slide / documentation beforehand? Why was it not understandable by them?
Again: the point here is the stakes. Would I read such a presentation for my day-to-day work? Probably not.
Would I read it until I understand every single word if there were 7 lifes at stake? OF COURSE!
Would I try to understand the engineers that had to assemble a comprehensive and credible document in a matter of days, and do my part of the work? If it was my day-to-day job, probably not. If there were 7 lifes at stake? OF COURSE.
So yeah, terrible slide. Don't try to justify people not reading it, though.
Could it be that Boeing engineers made this presentation vague and confusing on purpose? I mean the article presumes that the engineers had poor PowerPoint skills, but it seems to me that this could have been cover-your-ass type of situation (also perhaps similar to Challenger disaster story).
I mean obviously Boeing engineers need to communicate to NASA their assessment of the situation, but they don't want to be blamed for any technical difficulties (e.g. if second shuttle would have to be launched to save the crew). So they think Columbia will probably be fine, but let's communicate our worries to NASA, but let's do that in deliberately vague and conspicuous language, in hope that NASA managers won't see the fine print.
Tufte isn't exactly wrong, but the way he writes has so much certainty in it. In reality, the design choices people make in the media they use has as much to do with social norms and culture as what really works.
As cool as it might look, does Prezi actually solve any real problem/need in information presentation? The spatial & hierarchical organization of the presentation feels very gimmicky for 99% of the presentations where it is absolutely irrelevant.
That powerpoint is truly opaque. The culture of work that resulted in that powerpoint being used hopefully is no more. I wonder if one can connect that to the Boeing Max disaster.
We don't need Tufte and his subtle points to see this was an abominable piece of communication. More important, would be the question "is it safe to call out a bull shit slide in a corporate meeting". We hear of how Bezos or Jobs would be rude and obnoxious to their employees when something was not laid out clearly. This, on the other hand is where politeness takes us.
I just realized that more time has passed since the Columbia Shuttle disaster (19 years), then passed between the Columbia and Challenger disasters (17 years). That seems impossible to me.
I remember reading each of the astronaut's bios after the Columbia disaster, and the same thought kept echoing in my head: what a tragedy, what a waste. Seven remarkably talented people. I had no idea until I read this article how easily their deaths could have been avoided.
>Seven remarkably talented people. I had no idea until I read this article how easily their deaths could have been avoided.
In reality, there was likely nothing that could have been done once the damage occurred. Example source (form the 3 months after the disaster) here [1].
At the time no space shuttle was kept ready to launch for rescue (though this changed after this disaster) and their options here were limited. A common thought is 'just dock at the ISS' but the shuttle didn't have the fuel to reach it (future flights would ensure they were in the same plane to be able to dock there).
A more in depth review years later(with a summary here [2]) did find that it may have actually been possible to launch another shuttle in time, but it would have had to have skipped safety checks, and importantly, launch with a known issue on board (the foam strike possibility). And even then, the rescue mission would have had to gone off without a hitch, because even in the absolutely bare minimum amount of time required, the Columbia crew would have been dangerously low on oxygen.
I’ve seen a lot of management consulting decks, and they tend to be very information dense. But a lot of effort is put into making sure that the each slide conveys exactly the message that the consultant wants to convey. Also the slides are designed to be read and used outside of the actual presentation, often as reference material.
> Imagine if the engineers had put up a slide with just: “foam strike more than 600 times bigger than test data.” Maybe NASA would have listened. Maybe they wouldn’t have attempted re-entry.
Yes. This proves PowerPoint isn't to blame per se, but how it was used.
PowerPoint is not the problem, it's poor presentation of information.
Yes, you can de-emphasize information in a powerpoint presentation, just like you could with a chalkboard, overhead slides, or any other way of presenting information to a group. So what?
Has nothing to do with PowerPoint or the language:
The shuttle is inherently dangerous. An endless # of things can go wrong. The Shuttle program should have been grounded anyway on the basis of cost and danger. Too bad it took a tragedy for that to happen.
Is the implication that the slide was presented without discussion? You can't judge a presentation based on the accompanying visual aids without considering the verbal content.
> This allowed NASA managers to imply a hierarchy of importance in their head: the writing lower down and in smaller font was ignored
These managers were REALLY that braindead? These are NASA managers in charge of life-or-death decisions, and their dull eyes glaze over as spittle puddles underneath them because they're too stupid to read one whole entire paragraph worth of text without ignoring subheadings because they "don't look important"? I hope they're happy with the result of their childish intellectual laziness.
this is why whenever i write slides, each slide gets a title and a subheading. the subheading provides the implication of the slide and its contents.
done properly, one could read the heading and subtitle of each slide and never need to look at the contents, unless some specific detail is desired/needed.
The article doesn't do the slides nor the evidence justice. It might be more illustrative to study the original article by Edward Tufte, which the writer (and I) learned about the issue from, https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0001yB-2238.gif
I think it's why I think teaching engineers how to draw and do good design is important. How big is a cubic inch? How big is the crater in the heat shield that we're talking about?
It would have been better to draw comparisons and explore things. Here's a simple sentence that could have done better;
"Sir, our test database was for objects the size of an average icecube. The thing that hit the wing was the size of seven and a half footballs. It's 640x larger!
[chart that shows just how much kinetic energy we're talking about]
We're looking at somewhere between 640x to 1000x more energy than we've ever seen. We have a problem."
I'd like to go a bit further. If you see something, design and explain something. Challenger is a great example of this; Dr Tufte covers it extremely well, just laying out the boosters and the blowthrough they experienced from left to right on a chart that has temperature as the X axis, you can see clearly that it gets worse as the temperature drops. But no one at NASA or Thiokol thought about doing that.
No one thought about humanizing the data. They knew how important it was. They tried to say something. But they couldn't express it.
It's not enough to just show people the data. We need to get people to understand it. And that's often social suicide.
It's easy for people to want to remain stuck in their status quo, no one likes the "negative person", but that's what ends up getting people killed in safety critical environments. And that's how we get messes like the ones we're in today.
One particular one that comes to mind is climate change, I am unsure if most people are aware of this, but it's very similar to the failure expressed here. Most of the scientists whose work is consumed by the IPCC and the models that are published by the IPCC know that the "consensus" is wrong. Except, it's wrong in the opposite direction to what certain people want it to be.
The reality is far worse than what the models suggest. The models still don't include the loss of permafrost - what's worse is that they don't model the non-linearity of permafrost loss, methane emission, that then sparks more warming and more permafrost loss etc, https://www.woodwellclimate.org/review-of-permafrost-science... nor do they include effects of how the climate would change of ocean conveyor currents shut down (AMOC in particular is of significant interest, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/12/concern-grows-over... ). They also don't model the melting and release of clathrates from the ocean, or the effects of ocean acidification, and several other non-linear processes.
I had a very polite, but heated argument with one of the scientists involved and he told me that they aren't going to include that, because if they do, the numbers will look much worse and they'll be dismissed as apocalyptic loons.
Which brings us, elegantly, back to the point that Dr Feynman made in his remarks about the Challenger disaster,
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
> The article doesn't do the slides nor the evidence justice.
That's an understatement. A close reading reveals that it misrepresents the position of Tufte's writing, the conclusions of the investigation board, and the report of the subsequent return-to-flight group.
The size looks the exact same as this very site to me. It's #5e5e5e (effective, as it's actually a slightly transparent RGBa value) against #fff, so a contrast ratio of 6.48:1, well within WCAG AA standards, and a tiny, slight shift to #595959 would be enough to meet AAA.
codeflo|4 years ago
> Attempting to have slides serve both as projected visuals and as stand-alone handouts makes for bad visuals and bad documentation. Yet, this is a typical, acceptable approach. PowerPoint (or Keynote) is a tool for displaying visual information, information that helps you tell your story, make your case, or prove your point. PowerPoint is a terrible tool for making written documents, that's what word processors are for.
I think that’s on point for many companies. A lot of the terrible slides you see in meetings are actually intended as documentation after the fact, and few people recognize (or care) that this makes for a terrible presentation.
Ironically, I think Powerpoint isn’t such a bad tool for creating handouts. If the intended reader reads the document on their screen instead of printing it, a nice PDF with screen-shaped pages might actually be close to optimal.
You just have to be 100% clear whether you’re creating a document or a presentation.
[1] http://mamamusings.net/archives/2005/11/19/the_culture_of_th...
captainmuon|4 years ago
My experience outside of academia is that people use PowerPoint exactly for persuasion. Even to the degree that when I wanted to prepare a presentation internally, one of my bosses got angry because he thought I was going to bullshit him. (PowerPoint is something you do to a customer or to the board, not to your colleagues.)
NikolaNovak|4 years ago
1. presentation - should be sparse, key, anchoring data that enables people to ground themselves while they listen and pay attention to YOU
or
2. Reference - dashboard and background and details and density
If a deck may be used for both purposes, intentionally or not (e.g. we expect it to be shared and referred to by people not attending), resist the urge to do a hybrid slide, and if at all possible make presentation slides at front, reference/supplementary slides at back.
Worst situation is when somebody uses what are effectively reference slides for a live presentation. People's attention is split between reading and making sense of dense information on screen, and the key important points you are trying to verbalize.
cryptonector|4 years ago
As a presenter I have to worry about whether my slides will be seen w/ or without video of my presentation. Therefore I try to make my slide decks able to stand alone, though I admit this is not great.
The common pattern now instead is to make colorful and near-content-free slide decks where the presenter simply speaks with colorful backgrounds. I am terrible at crafting such slide decks -- well, I've not tried. This pattern works while presenting though, and I should probably adopt it. Or perhaps I should adopt the Jeff Bezos approach.
What presenters and audiences need is a commitment to publish video of presentations, including Q&A segments. And video has to be playable at 2x speed.
(Yes, almost every video I watch I watch at 2x speed. Where platforms allow faster playback speeds I've even gone faster. Speech is extremely low-bandwidth. This does mean I've to backtrack more often than I'd like, but it's still better this way. I pay attention more when speech is faster -- up to the point where I can't follow, of course, and which I shy away from.)
Cosmin_C|4 years ago
I've seen Powerpoint since medical school evolve from trying to squeeze as much information as possible on slides to utter nonsense and hundreds of words per displayed page. Heck, just stay home and automate your presentation to display the slides and mail them to your students instead, don't do this.
I've also been guilty when having to turbo half ass wing a teaching session of stuffing a lot of text in my slides. But I was aware this was not appropriate and I always tried to not be "that person". However, when you have 30 million presentations per day around the world, this is almost impossible to do.
endymi0n|4 years ago
He answered: „Awesome. I had 8 slides this morning. Now I have three.“
That day, something fundamentally clicked in me.
I learned that day that condensing and sharpening information towards a punchline is real, hard and meaningful work.
Or, as Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”
jccooper|4 years ago
greggman3|4 years ago
I wish pdf would die. It's a left over vestage of a paper world. It's also left over from a non-connected, non-international world A4 vs US Letter.
PDF really has no place in this smartphone first world
rahimnathwani|4 years ago
Right, but you can create such a thing with a word processor. Just change the page size or orientation.
Sure, the page breaks might not default to where you want them, but you can add page breaks wherever you want, and don't need to create a text box for each paragraph.
giantg2|4 years ago
The title is not reassuring. Conservatism in engineering is essentially about creating safety margins through conservative estimation. The title is saying we need to be careful because a tile was likely penetrated. Hell, if I remember correctly they were reporting that there was known tile damage on the news before reentry, but that they didn't know the extent.
"NASA felt the engineers didn’t know what would happen but that all data pointed to there not being enough damage to put the lives of the crew in danger."
If you thought they didn't know, then ask them what they do know! It's right on the slide that flight conditions are outside of test parameters and that the mass of the projectile was much higher. How the F do you work at NASA and not understand the basic principles of mass, velocity, and energy well enough for that to stand out enough to ask questions or run your own calculations...
The reason the slide is laid out the way it is, is because it's describing the thought process and creates a deductive argument for how they got to their concern. This is a presentation for a briefing for other engineers, not a conference or sales pitch. It's supposed to be formal and contain the synopsis of technical points. Using projectors for technical briefings predates the use of PowerPoint. I see nothing wrong with the layout in that context.
Edit: why downvote without a reply? NASA has a history of blaming vendors when they screw up. This looks like another example to me. The presentation format does not have any issues given the setting and target audience.
lostcolony|4 years ago
To say that "the slide doesn't have any issues" is laughable on the face of it. But it's immaterial; your claim is that "NASA just ignored the engineers from Boeing" rather than "NASA didn't understand the engineers from Boeing". Communication is a two party process, and believe it or not, NASA isn't actually incentivized to take risks that lead to loss of life and damages public perception of them; it's far more likely they didn't understand the stakes, and looking at the slide from that perspective, it's very easy to see why they would not have understood the stakes even if the Boeing engineers did.
krisoft|4 years ago
It is a godawfull title. I believe that is how it reads to you but it totally reads the opposite to me. I read the title and it translates in my head as “we reviewed the test results and they suggest that the tiles are built sturdy enough to not get penetrated”. Exactly because what you say the word “conservatism” means to me that a system is designed to meet the loads plus reasonable safety margin. So if the review of test data indicates conservatism that means to me that the test found the test object roboust even with a reasonable safety margin. Otherwise i wouldn’t say that it “indicates conservatism” but that it “indicates lack of safety margin”.
> The reason the slide is laid out the way it is, is because it's describing the thought process
I agree, but that is not a good thing. People think in all kind of haphazard ways, before you communicate to others it is on you to look at your ramblings and make it orderly. The penultimate sentence is the most important one that should go first “flight conditions is significantly outside of test database”. That doesn’t mean that the tile is broken, nor does it mean that it is not broken. It means that we can’t tell from our tests.
pdonis|4 years ago
And, for context, Edward Tufte, whose review of the slides is being referenced in this article, is the same one who misunderstood and misrepresented what the actual issue was during the briefing the night before the Challenger launch, in his paper reviewing the presentation the engineers made then.
Edit: previous HN discussions of Tufte's Challenger review here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10989358
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19034783
zelos|4 years ago
It looks like the bad "before" example in a presentation skills workshop. This was created by engineers working on life and death issues involving billions of dollars of hardware.
Iolaum|4 years ago
A quick and dirty re-writing of the title (and slide):
_______________
Review of Test data indicates incident is well outside of safety margins.
- Volume of ramp is 1920 cu in vs 3 cu in for test
- Once tile is penetrated SOFI can cause significant damage.
- Flight condition significantly outside of test database
_______________
Now that should get a reader's attention.
bumby|4 years ago
To the point of the article, I think this is the wrong takeaway, meaning the slides were not communicating effectively.
The second point illustrates this. It says the models were overpredicting the penetration. Meaning the models were conservative and the the actual penetration was likely less than what models show. They were setting the table for an optimistic outlook.
The real issue, IMO, is highlighted later in the article where there isn't sufficient fidelity in the tests to back up those claims. Tests after the incident showed the foam acted very differently at the delta-v that actually occurred.
And regarding your point about blaming contractors, the vast majority of work done by NASA is done by contractors. NASA is, to some extent, a pass-through organization that funds other organizations like Boeing, Lockheed, Honeywell, Jacobs, etc.
>If you thought they didn't know, then ask them what they do know!
This gets to the same cognitive biases that led to Challenger, EVA 23 and a host of smaller incidents nobody hears about. Data is not objectively weighed in these situations because of schedule pressure, optimism bias, etc. In this case, most launches were showing foam shedding with no issue, so it lead to a false belief that it wasn't dangerous even though it was out-of-spec. Add to that a slide that says the models are too conservative and you can see where cognitive biases may influence the decision. Lastly, most people like to think they're self-aware enough to identify these biases in real-time, but they aren't. It's also why the incident lead to a separate organization within NASA focused on safety, quality, and risk that has a segregated chain of command.
ubercore|4 years ago
raverbashing|4 years ago
I'm not so sure how many people are familiar with the term "conservatism" as used here. I'm not. Some might be aware, those who are not aware will just skip over
I read this slide a couple of times. There's no thought order, no connection between the topics (even if we assume people are familiar with the subject) and several typos.
It is not a Powerpoint fault it is a fault of whoever wrote this.
This is an issue with information hierarchy. If this is a risk (and I can't imagine what might have been a bigger risk at that mission) it needs to be brought into attention. Not added to line 4 of slide 7 and be done with it.
silvestrov|4 years ago
I don't expect "foam strike more than 600 times bigger than test data" would go over well politically. You'd be telling the audience that these people will die while everybody watches. No manager want to be the messenger for that kind of messages.
mdekkers|4 years ago
Have you ever worked for a business with “management”?
dekhn|4 years ago
NotAWorkNick|4 years ago
(not the one that downvoted your comment btw)
PaulHoule|4 years ago
When the shuttle design was finalized in the late 1970s they knew it had a 2-3% chance of a hull loss per launch. They were still planning to launch it 50 times a year so that would have meant losing a shuttle and crew every year!
The shuttle had hundreds of critical flaws and that 'normalization of deviance' meeting at which slides like this were shown at was a routine part of each shuttle launch. For each of these unacceptable situations they had to convince themselves that, with some mitigation (or not), they could accept it. It was inevitable that something like this was going to happen and then there would be recriminations about the details of that meeting.
Every other crewed space vehicle had an escape system to get the crew away from a failed rocket. The Challenger crew survived the explosion but were killed when the reinforced crew section hit the ocean. Similarly the Colombia astronauts were killed by a thermal protection system that was "unsafe at any speed". When the first few shuttles were launched there was a huge amount of concern about tiles breaking and coming off. Once they'd dodged the bullet a few times they assumed it was alright but it wasn't...
In the literature "normalization of deviance" has turned from a formal process used in managing dangerous technology to incidents such as: surgeon takes a crap and goes to work without washing his hands, forklift operator smokes pot and operates, etc.
dr_orpheus|4 years ago
At the Flight Readiness Review for the solid rocket boosters before launch the engineers of Morton Thiokol (the solid rocket booster manufacturer) objected to launch because of the detrimental effect of the cold temperatures on the o-rings in the solid rocket boosters. They had never launched in that cold of temperatures before and previous test data had shown erosion of the seals on previous flights. These concerns were not communicated by the Morton Thiokol management or NASA present at that flight readiness review to any of the higher level managers that got final approval on launch.
For Challenger it was a known issue and people specifically said "don't do this".
[0] https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v1ch5.htm
oconnor663|4 years ago
One huge issue, beyond whether a rescue mission would've been possible, is whether it would've be ethical. If NASA knew that Columbia was stranded in orbit, then it would be knowingly sending a second crew up on a vehicle with the exact same potential problem, with no time to mitigate it. I'm sure a rescue crew would've volunteered despite the risks, but anyway the point is that "the slide that killed seven people" is erasing all of these questions.
manquer|4 years ago
This article is not attempting to answer that question, there is volume of literature on that.
The primary thrust of the article is to highlight a common tool we use and how using it ineffectively can be dangerous, it does a good job of communicating that point effectively albeit with click baity title.
I and most people here wouldn't understand tile design or shuttle engineering or ethics of space risks and not something we can learn from, it is rocket science after all,
However crappy PowerPoint presentations we all use and consume and we could potentially improve communicating in our day to day professional lives even if though we don't do cool NASA kind of projects.
andi999|4 years ago
https://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts125/090508sts400/
tgflynn|4 years ago
That's not how I remember it being presented to the public. The official word at the time was that there were no feasible rescue options. Yes, they could have done a spacewalk to inspect the damage but if it had been bad there still wasn't anything that could have been done. I think the main problem with launching a rescue mission was the time it took NASA to get a shuttle ready for launch.
WillPostForFood|4 years ago
Atlantis was already scheduled for launch 41 days after Columbia. Columbia had ~30 days of air. NASA believed that Atlantis prep could have been accelerated and launched in time to attempt a rescue.
gambiting|4 years ago
marcellus23|4 years ago
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue...
That there was "no other feasible plan" than re-entry was presumably because the risk of re-entry was assumed to be low. If the risk was correctly estimated to be higher, then it seems likely the rescue plan would become feasible (since, what other choice would NASA have?)
patagurbon|4 years ago
geoduck14|4 years ago
Everyone here is dogging the Slide. Sure it sucks - but I DISTINCTLY remember analysis of resuce. Do a space walk and repair it; send a second shuttle (they existing crew would run out); something else.
Also, the crew had a chance to call their loved ones and "sat good bye", and the pilot was anticipating the wing melting off.
NASA knew the risk, they tried to prevent it - but the shuttle still crashed
giantg2|4 years ago
gmiller123456|4 years ago
mannykannot|4 years ago
This led to a certain realistic fatalism:
"Then [Linda Ham] delivered the sentence that would define the rest of the tragedy; a sentence that was repeated as common wisdom by almost every senior manager that I talked to over the next two weeks: ‘You know, if there was any real damage done to the wing, there is nothing we can do about it.’ As unsettling as that was, I had to agree; going back to the first shuttle flight it had been well known that there was no way to repair the heat shield in flight. Nobody, not even me, thought about a rescue mission. Why would we?" - Wayne Hale, https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/after-ten-years-d...
Once it became clear, during the investigation, that the foam impact had created a hole in the reinforced carbon-carbon leading edge of the wing, the board's chairman, Admiral Hal Gehman, insisted that a test should be performed to demonstrate that this was likely. As this meant destroying one of the few spare parts, and it had not been decided at this point to retire the shuttles, he was unsure whether this was worth doing, but what convinced him to go ahead was the number of engineers and managers who still doubted this could have happened, despite all the evidence.
It is never just one thing.
The whole of Wayne Hale's retrospective starts here: https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2012/08/14/after-ten-years-w...
whartung|4 years ago
The people making the decisions, whether they listened to the presentation or not, perhaps gave too much credence to what was on the slide. The audio portion is temporal, even if recorded. You're there in the moment listening, but it doesn't necessarily last.
But the slide is "eternal". Always there to be referenced, or passed along. The slide was going to be viewed repeatedly over a longer time frame. Biasing the memory of those who may have been at the presentation, and serving as a "single" source of truth for those who did not.
As much as PP is meant to be a visual AID, most folks are actually pretty lousy at using it that way, and PP has morphed, even if unintentionally, as an artifact of record.
I'm as guilty as the next guy wanting to skim the PP deck rather than listening to the presentation. I can skim a deck in 5m, vs sitting for 60m listening.
Similarly for technical papers. Read the intro, the summary, skip to the end, read the conclusion. Only if any of what I read is actually interesting will I dig deeper in to the paper.
300bps|4 years ago
It’s a wall of text. It should have had a single sentence in bold giant font:
WE HAVE NEVER TESTED AN INSULATION COLLISION AT ANYTHING CLOSE TO THIS LEVEL
vmception|4 years ago
"SOFI and ramp mean the same thing, whats the reader to dooooo"
"Significant is used 5 times... without explanation!"
"There are 100 words!"
Yes, we need to know how the presentation went, and we also. need to know what NASA would have alternatively done and if it was honestly considered at all or even feasible
On a side note, its crazy that a couple tiles compromise the entire vessel, but I understand that the heat would travel across the inner metal. Its still crazy to think there isn't some other kind of dissipation measure possible.
grenbys|4 years ago
stuff4ben|4 years ago
Reading word for word off a text-heavy deck in a monotone with no images or diagrams is a recipe for disaster. I tend to have my decks (back when I was doing presentations) be relatively text-lite and involve images/diagrams that back up my talking points. And I've seen image-heavy decks that really don't convey anything either.
brimble|4 years ago
[EDIT] There's also a kind of horrendous, illegible house style some places, that's expected to be how these documents look. The US military and any big businesses that work heavily with them are infamous for this. They routinely produce some comically terrible decks and graphics. I wouldn't be surprised if that weird, seemingly-intentionally-hard-to-read style is also present in at least some parts of NASA, especially up at the administration level.
commandlinefan|4 years ago
That's true, but it's also how much time the presenter had to put the presentation together. Was he already 6 weeks behind on a dozen (meaningless) deadlines when he found out he had to give a presentation tomorrow morning at 8 AM?
commandlinefan|4 years ago
Then they would have been fired unceremoniously and replaced with engineers that knew better than to make their bosses look bad. (who themselves would then, of course, been held responsible for apparently preventable deaths).
Stop blaming the engineers for this stuff. This is the fault of the timeline chasers.
einpoklum|4 years ago
More engineers need to risk this and raise red flags, publicly, about potential lethal faults. Yes, you will suffer if you get fired; but our education as engineers (if I may include myself among those ranks despite being a software guy...) must be such that we would find _not_ raising the red flag shameful and despicable. So much so that it would seem far worse than losing one's job.
RcouF1uZ4gsC|4 years ago
This is not just a normal, routine presentation. This is an all hands on deck emergency and discussion. And NASA isn't just a bunch of MBA's, but rather people who have spent their entire careers immersed in this kind of stuff.
No matter what is one the slide, I expect that the audience asks detailed questions. Even if the slide has just a big thumbs up emoji, I suspect you would still get a lot of really hard questions.
Think about presentations on programming, where someone in the audience points out that the example code on the slide is incorrect/won't compile/undefined behavior
I would expect a bunch of geeks (which I think would be there at NASA) to scrutinize the slide and try to find any flaw in the logic. Especially when the lives of people they deeply care about are on the line.
If they are so cavalier about human life that they just skip the details of the slide while making literal life and death decisions, it speaks of a very deep culture rot that goes far beyond PowerPoint.
conductr|4 years ago
IDK. I too like to think the discourse and Q&A would have signaled differently than the slide. But, this is also 2003 and people generally had not gotten great at communicating via powerpoint yet. It's still bad now, it was horrible then. A unformatted list of bullet points was obviously still an acceptable slide format which tells me a good deal of how much slide skillz these folks utilized.
So, I do believe the slide title. I feel like it could have just as easily been discussed prior to the slide, it was agreed the test was acceptable or risk was low, and so the title was just trying to indicate that "it's been pre-agreed there is no problem here" then outlines some of the concerns which were considered.
Veedrac|4 years ago
Slides make sense as a way to introduce the outline of concept to a broad audience in a way that requires much less effort than 1-on-1 discussions. They are not a means for coming to decisions. If you need to make a critical, life- and business-shaping decision off the back of a side deck, you should instead delegate the decision to someone who knows more than you.
MattGaiser|4 years ago
That is part of the reason Powerpoint is everywhere. You cannot assume that people have read anything before the meeting, you cannot assume they will read during the meeting, so you need to read it out loud to have a decent chance of it being received.
I am also not thrilled accepting the use of titles and formatting as a excuse to skim 100 words. It is just the refusal to read/comprehend on a smaller scale.
brimble|4 years ago
I've been told—very seriously—by multiple management consultants that public and private sector executives alike won't read a damn thing unless it shows up in powerpoint format, and even then you have to walk them through point by point or they'll miss most of it. This, when the documents are coming from people they're paying tons of money specifically to tell them stuff.
The company in question (you've heard of them, if you've heard of any management consulting companies at all) quite literally had an off-shored office dedicated to producing PowerPoints decks from notes overnight, while everyone on an actual engagement was sleeping. The primary tangible output of an engagement, as I understand it, is, overwhelmingly, PowerPoint decks. It's the Final Draft of the upper-end management world—apparently, you'll be dismissed and lose face if you show up with anything else, or even send something else in an email.
carlmr|4 years ago
If this was a presentation done in high school they would have gotten a failing grade. And I think we can expect more from university educated people.
giantg2|4 years ago
I mean, NASA is the one who called in the vendor engineers to answer questions they had. If you didn't get answers to those questions, or if the answers weren't clear enough for you, then NASA needs communicate that. You can't get the information you want if you don't ask the questions. Everyone here is blaming a slide deck (that had the information on it!) instead of asking how NASA could have ignored that information. Slide formatting is a pitiful excuse for lack of due diligence by the recipients of that briefing - the people responsible for the safety of the at-risk personnel.
sklargh|4 years ago
jquery|4 years ago
athenot|4 years ago
https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
rhacker|4 years ago
karaterobot|4 years ago
arrow7000|4 years ago
csours|4 years ago
One slide and bad culture killed seven people.
dmix|4 years ago
Wouldn’t the foam initially be travelling as fast as the spacecraft? So it’s just the time between it’s release and hitting the wing to accelerate.
CommieBobDole|4 years ago
Which technically is the speed of a bullet, but just barely. Nowhere near nine times.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/akamai.netstorage/anon.nasa-global/C...
csours|4 years ago
giantg2|4 years ago
wdurden|4 years ago
dqpb|4 years ago
There is a simple low-effort high-information solution to this problem - have everyone vote (or bet) on the decision. This, more than anything else, will reveal whether or not you've reached understanding/consensus/alignment.
(This is not to say that the final decision should be made by voting, rather it's to gauge the level of consensus)
ModernMech|4 years ago
Alternative title: death by ears, how failing to listen and communicate killed seven people.
yummybear|4 years ago
My own personal experience is that it's easier to be concerned with the small things (we have to have naming conventions), than with big things (are we building the right thing). I think there is a tendency to think "it'll probably work out".
etamponi|4 years ago
I agree: it's an awful slide. But the information was there. And I can imagine that the engineers were asked to assemble that presentation in a couple days, so I'd be surprised if they could do anything better.
I agree: an outsider would not understand a word of that slide. So what? What was the audience of that presentation? Why did the audience not read the slide / documentation beforehand? Why was it not understandable by them?
Again: the point here is the stakes. Would I read such a presentation for my day-to-day work? Probably not. Would I read it until I understand every single word if there were 7 lifes at stake? OF COURSE! Would I try to understand the engineers that had to assemble a comprehensive and credible document in a matter of days, and do my part of the work? If it was my day-to-day job, probably not. If there were 7 lifes at stake? OF COURSE.
So yeah, terrible slide. Don't try to justify people not reading it, though.
subhro|4 years ago
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596522347/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470632011/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1101980168/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
If you only have time to go through 1 book, I would recommend Slide:ology.
mltony|4 years ago
I mean obviously Boeing engineers need to communicate to NASA their assessment of the situation, but they don't want to be blamed for any technical difficulties (e.g. if second shuttle would have to be launched to save the crew). So they think Columbia will probably be fine, but let's communicate our worries to NASA, but let's do that in deliberately vague and conspicuous language, in hope that NASA managers won't see the fine print.
beeforpork|4 years ago
But this '...has grown exponentially...' is just such BS. sigh I just cannot get used to this expression entering lay language.
rhema|4 years ago
Alternatives like Prezi exist, but are not really going to be accepted in formal presentations https://infovisu.com/assets/pubs/linder2015beyond.pdf .
If you really bring me a physical piece of paper today, I doubt I would be able to keep track of it.
ssivark|4 years ago
vjust|4 years ago
We don't need Tufte and his subtle points to see this was an abominable piece of communication. More important, would be the question "is it safe to call out a bull shit slide in a corporate meeting". We hear of how Bezos or Jobs would be rude and obnoxious to their employees when something was not laid out clearly. This, on the other hand is where politeness takes us.
dang|4 years ago
Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19668161 - April 2019 (127 comments)
Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24115837 - Aug 2020 (1 comment)
magpi3|4 years ago
I remember reading each of the astronaut's bios after the Columbia disaster, and the same thought kept echoing in my head: what a tragedy, what a waste. Seven remarkably talented people. I had no idea until I read this article how easily their deaths could have been avoided.
ApolloFortyNine|4 years ago
In reality, there was likely nothing that could have been done once the damage occurred. Example source (form the 3 months after the disaster) here [1].
At the time no space shuttle was kept ready to launch for rescue (though this changed after this disaster) and their options here were limited. A common thought is 'just dock at the ISS' but the shuttle didn't have the fuel to reach it (future flights would ensure they were in the same plane to be able to dock there).
A more in depth review years later(with a summary here [2]) did find that it may have actually been possible to launch another shuttle in time, but it would have had to have skipped safety checks, and importantly, launch with a known issue on board (the foam strike possibility). And even then, the rescue mission would have had to gone off without a hitch, because even in the absolutely bare minimum amount of time required, the Columbia crew would have been dangerously low on oxygen.
[1] https://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/030430save/#:~....
[2] https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue...
sumanthvepa|4 years ago
andi999|4 years ago
bambax|4 years ago
Yes. This proves PowerPoint isn't to blame per se, but how it was used.
D13Fd|4 years ago
Yes, you can de-emphasize information in a powerpoint presentation, just like you could with a chalkboard, overhead slides, or any other way of presenting information to a group. So what?
arrow7000|4 years ago
paulpauper|4 years ago
The shuttle is inherently dangerous. An endless # of things can go wrong. The Shuttle program should have been grounded anyway on the basis of cost and danger. Too bad it took a tragedy for that to happen.
hindsight bias
zardo|4 years ago
jimmaswell|4 years ago
These managers were REALLY that braindead? These are NASA managers in charge of life-or-death decisions, and their dull eyes glaze over as spittle puddles underneath them because they're too stupid to read one whole entire paragraph worth of text without ignoring subheadings because they "don't look important"? I hope they're happy with the result of their childish intellectual laziness.
einpoklum|4 years ago
If you're in charge of 10000 life-or-death decisions, and are on a tight schedule, you are unlikely to give each of them its proper attention.
throwthere|4 years ago
nickdothutton|4 years ago
zomg|4 years ago
done properly, one could read the heading and subtitle of each slide and never need to look at the contents, unless some specific detail is desired/needed.
anonu|4 years ago
junon|4 years ago
shashurup|4 years ago
areoform|4 years ago
https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0001yB-2239.gif
I think it's why I think teaching engineers how to draw and do good design is important. How big is a cubic inch? How big is the crater in the heat shield that we're talking about?
It would have been better to draw comparisons and explore things. Here's a simple sentence that could have done better;
"Sir, our test database was for objects the size of an average icecube. The thing that hit the wing was the size of seven and a half footballs. It's 640x larger!
[chart that shows just how much kinetic energy we're talking about]
We're looking at somewhere between 640x to 1000x more energy than we've ever seen. We have a problem."
A friend and I did an interview with Don Eyles a while ago and he said something that haunts me, "if you see something, say something" https://twitter.com/_areoform/status/1501589762599112704
I'd like to go a bit further. If you see something, design and explain something. Challenger is a great example of this; Dr Tufte covers it extremely well, just laying out the boosters and the blowthrough they experienced from left to right on a chart that has temperature as the X axis, you can see clearly that it gets worse as the temperature drops. But no one at NASA or Thiokol thought about doing that.
No one thought about humanizing the data. They knew how important it was. They tried to say something. But they couldn't express it.
It's not enough to just show people the data. We need to get people to understand it. And that's often social suicide.
It's easy for people to want to remain stuck in their status quo, no one likes the "negative person", but that's what ends up getting people killed in safety critical environments. And that's how we get messes like the ones we're in today.
One particular one that comes to mind is climate change, I am unsure if most people are aware of this, but it's very similar to the failure expressed here. Most of the scientists whose work is consumed by the IPCC and the models that are published by the IPCC know that the "consensus" is wrong. Except, it's wrong in the opposite direction to what certain people want it to be.
The reality is far worse than what the models suggest. The models still don't include the loss of permafrost - what's worse is that they don't model the non-linearity of permafrost loss, methane emission, that then sparks more warming and more permafrost loss etc, https://www.woodwellclimate.org/review-of-permafrost-science... nor do they include effects of how the climate would change of ocean conveyor currents shut down (AMOC in particular is of significant interest, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/12/concern-grows-over... ). They also don't model the melting and release of clathrates from the ocean, or the effects of ocean acidification, and several other non-linear processes.
I had a very polite, but heated argument with one of the scientists involved and he told me that they aren't going to include that, because if they do, the numbers will look much worse and they'll be dismissed as apocalyptic loons.
Which brings us, elegantly, back to the point that Dr Feynman made in his remarks about the Challenger disaster,
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
cxr|4 years ago
That's an understatement. A close reading reveals that it misrepresents the position of Tufte's writing, the conclusions of the investigation board, and the report of the subsequent return-to-flight group.
And it uses "sweetened" (fabricated) figures, to boot. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30622688>
Dove|4 years ago
elfrinjo|4 years ago
CountDrewku|4 years ago
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gabrielsroka|4 years ago
ARandomerDude|4 years ago
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unknown|4 years ago
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