Friday, September 09, 2005

PowerPoint Does Rocket Science

Robot Wisdom Weblog (www.robotwisdom.com) has an interesting link to an article by Edward Tufte titled "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science: Assessing the Quality and Credibility of Technical Reports." It's an analysis by Tufte of some of the presentation slides given to top management at NASA during the Columbia mission.

It's particularly fascinating that even an organization like NASA depends so heavily on PowerPoint to convey information at upper levels of management. Tufte, in essence, argues that PowerPoint, by its very nature, is essentially incapable of communicating information completely and accurately.

I don't necessarily agree with all his conclusions, but it's still an interesting read. To me, Tufte was a much more interesting and intellectually persuasive figure before he was giving seminars at $500 a head, but he's still provocative.

Here's the link:
https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1&topic=.

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