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PowerPoint is a tool. Like all tools, it neither makes your craftsmanship good or bad. Rather, it affects the craftsman's efficiency. If what you produced before was crap, PowerPoint will allow you to produce crap in an efficient manner.
PowerPoint is to presenters what the WWW is to authors: it looks like there's more crap because it provides an avenue for people that were so far down the curve that previously they would have had no choice but to give up. That may have been becasue of quality, bu tnot in all cases.
My advisor always ranted about how chalkboards will always be better than slides. In all his years, however, he's never learned that he needs to move out of the way of what he's just written on the board so that the audience can see it.
PowerPoint corrupts. Great Edward Tufte rant about PowerPoint and other slideware, and why we should all avoid it. I did a talk a couple months ago and the conference organizers nearly insisted that I bring a PowerPoint presentation to accompany my speech. I told them that I didn't believe in slides for the kind of talk I was giving, and they responded, "But what will keep the audience from getting bored?" Urr, possibly the words coming out of my mouth?
Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
8:34:09 PM 
Categories: LiveJournal
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recent viruses and lost opportunities. Why, oh why, doesn’t Apple take advantage of all the current virus traffic to run ads that point out that Mac users don’t get these viruses ??? It seems so obvious. We were watching NBC news last night, and they were explaining the SOBIG virus and how it works. Not once did they mention that it only affects computers running Windows. (When I remarked about this, Gerald gently reminded me of the MS-NBC relationship. Duh.) Even on campus, none of the dire warnings about having your computer carefully checked by the tech folks before connecting it to the network mention... [mamamusings]
Without any proof that[system of choice] is not vulnerable to an equivalent exploit, trying to use viruses, worms, etc. as a marketing tactic will at best make you look foolish. At worst, it will motivate someone to put together a demonstration.
7:10:16 PM
Categories: Pushing rectangles... LiveJournal
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Edge.org -- The Moral Sense Test: Blackout. In the latest edition of John Brockman's EDGE newsletter, conversation about the blackout of August 14th. From the contribution by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, author of LINKED: THE NEW SCIENCE OF NETWORKS:
Once power is fully restored, it will take little time to find the culprit: most likely, it will be a malfunctioning switch or fuse, a snapped power line or some other local failure. Somebody will be fired, promotions and raises denied, and lawmakers will draw up legislation guaranteeing that this problem will not occur again.
Something will be inevitably missed, however, during all this finger-pointing: this week's blackout has little to do with faulty equipment, negligence or bad design. President Bush's call to upgrade the power grid will do little to eliminate power failures. The magnitude of the blackout is rooted in an often ignored aspect of our globalized world: vulnerability due to interconnectivity. Link, Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
You can't use this blackout to demonstrate the danger of interconnectivity, since that was not what caused it. Such blackouts come from a) sparse connectivity, and b) poorly planned connectivity. In general, almost any additional connectivity improves robustness (although there are always pathological cases).
7:05:35 PM
Categories: Pushing rectangles... LiveJournal
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