[HN Gopher] Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven peo...
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Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)
Author : tk75x
Score : 321 points
Date : 2022-03-09 15:01 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mcdreeamiemusings.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mcdreeamiemusings.com)
| andi999 wrote:
| So what would have been a (realistic) alternative instead of
| trying to reenter the athmosphere with a broken tile?
| stuff4ben wrote:
| 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.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > It's not the tool, it's the presenter
|
| 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?
| phicoh wrote:
| Assuming we are talking about boring slides with just a few
| bullet points, then 99% of work is actually creating the
| (text of the) presentation. Creating boring slides can be
| done in a few minutes.
|
| Most time when I see a wrong and overful slide deck, people
| don't actually have any idea what they want to say. They just
| dumped some information in the slides that might be handy.
| brimble wrote:
| 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.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| @DefenseCharts has a great collection of these for anyone
| interested.
|
| https://nitter.net/DefenseCharts
| mkipper wrote:
| The defense industry really is the GOAT when it comes to
| slide decks.
|
| Nothing gets the creative juices flowing like sitting
| through an 8 hour presentation of a deck with 200 slides,
| which are really just 10 different slide decks from 10
| different departments stitched together, mostly containing
| quotes copied from actual design documents and pasted into
| bullet lists
| xoxxala wrote:
| I worked as a games producer for a major video game company
| 20 years ago and had bimonthly project green light meetings.
| Every 60 days, I had to produce a 80-120 slide powerpoint
| with info from development, marketing, PR, sales, finance,
| etc using their awful house layout. Then print these massive
| tomes for the executives. They would ignore everything else,
| and the presentation, jump straight to the finance info at
| the back of the deck and discuss the EBITDA for 10 minutes
| and then end the meeting.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| Been there, and unfortunately had to participate in that.
| Execs sometimes have a hard time conveying information, so
| PPT to the rescue! I want to blame management schools for
| their over-reliance on PPT, but in all honestly, it's hard to
| teach people to be good communicators.
| treesknees wrote:
| At a previous job, my favorite to see were the ones with 3
| slides. It was like nobody could communicate information
| without powerpoint. 1. Title slide with
| company logo 2. Content slide with 2 or 3 bullet points
| 3. Closing/thank you slide with contact info
| conductr wrote:
| It's not unusual for the management/BOD decks I work on to be
| 30 slides + 100 slides of appendix material. Everything in
| the 30 slides is heavily footnoted and supplemental/support
| information is in the appendix. It's kind of bonkers but
| pretty much standard practice at certain sized companies.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Unfortunately I direct experience and it's definitely present
| in some parts of NASA. We have increasingly been doing away
| with presentations when reporting updates up the chain. Just
| shoehorn your work into a single poorly designed slide and
| lob it over the fence. Your project manager rolls up your
| slide with everyone else's and lobs that deck over the fence
| to the program management. Hey, at least it's one fewer
| meeting.
| rhema wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| oconnor663 wrote:
| 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.
| manquer wrote:
| 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.
| magpi3 wrote:
| 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.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| >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.
|
| [1] https://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/030430save/#:
| ~....
|
| [2] https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-
| rescue...
| MattGaiser wrote:
| 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.
| brimble wrote:
| > 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_.
| wil421 wrote:
| 100% believable. I know someone who is a COO of a smaller
| company by employee count but very high revenue. They
| literally pay an offshore company to produce basic bullet
| points overnight based on notes.
| db48x wrote:
| It's not like that everywhere. Apparently at Amazon, the
| first 20-30 minutes of any meeting are dedicated to reading
| and taking notes on a memo, then the rest of the time can be
| spent discussing the contents of that memo. This ensures that
| nobody has to sit through any presentations, and also that
| everyone actually has time to read an in-depth document with
| the information that they actually need for every single
| meeting that they attend.
|
| I wouldn't want to give up engineering, but I think that
| sounds like something I could put up with if someone forced
| me to be an executive.
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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.
| carlmr wrote:
| 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.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I get this viewpoint pragmatically as nothing is going to
| change, but my point is that we can expect utterly nothing
| from the audience and excuse their refusal to do anything
| beyond accept Twitter feed like input.
|
| If someone wrote "I approved the landing as the title of the
| slide did not seem alarming", that person would be
| resoundingly rebuked. That would be an outrageous official
| rationale and the person would be regarded as lazy and
| negligent.
|
| But that is practically what happened and what we excuse.
| Graffur wrote:
| But it's not a high school presentation done for the sake of
| doing a presentation. It's not an audience who will review
| the performance. It's giving information to _professional_
| _experts_ who are _responsible_ for consuming that
| information.
| bambax wrote:
| > _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.
| gabrielsroka wrote:
| How about death by a tiny gray serif font?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| folkrav wrote:
| 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.
| gabrielsroka wrote:
| Chrome Lighthouse on both mobile and desktop said that TFA
| did not have a sufficient contrast ratio.
|
| It doesn't look too bad on my desktop, but on my Android
| which is set to 130% it's almost unreadable. I had to use
| reader mode.
|
| And it doesn't resize on mobile, probably because they're
| using px in their CSS instead of em or something scalable.
| folkrav wrote:
| You were specifically speaking about serif grey text on
| white, which is pretty much what I just told you - WCAG AA
| compliant. [1] You weren't talking about Lighthouse nor
| mobile specifically, so I just answered with whatever info
| you gave out.
|
| [1] https://i.imgur.com/SF5WTCa.png
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| The more this comment gets downvoted, the more it looks like
| death by tiny gray serif font, making the comment quite funny.
| vjust wrote:
| 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.
| rhacker wrote:
| 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.
| arrow7000 wrote:
| Yeah. So why not walk off a cliff? Who knows what will happen
| when you walk off a cliff? It's impossible to know. Chaos
| theory and all that.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Are you just saying that the powerpoint slide didn't literally
| kill the people, the explosion did?
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _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)
| elfrinjo wrote:
| If you are impressed by this, wait until you see Colin Powell's
| Iraq slides
| zomg wrote:
| 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.
| paulpauper wrote:
| 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.
|
| hindsight bias
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| 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.
| vmception wrote:
| 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.
| whartung wrote:
| Well, that's kind of the point.
|
| 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.
| thrwy_918 wrote:
| > Similarly for technical papers. Read the intro, the
| summary, skip to the end, read the conclusion.
|
| This isn't an appropriate comparison. The purpose of the
| conclusion _is_ to present the findings of the paper, whereas
| the purpose of presentation slides is not (or at least,
| should not be) to summarize the content of the presentation.
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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...
| vmception wrote:
| > It is never just one thing.
|
| Especially when Boeing is involved
| 300bps wrote:
| The audio of the presenter would add additional context but the
| PowerPoint presentation is objectively bad.
|
| 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_
| athenot wrote:
| The original article by Edward Tufte which is referenced by this
| blog post can be found here:
|
| https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
| nickdothutton wrote:
| PPT as it is used, or any similar software performing the same
| function, as used in the same way, is a cancer.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| zardo wrote:
| 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.
| anonu wrote:
| I would be peeved at the typos in the slide. That seems sloppy if
| youre dealing with this kind of work.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > These managers were REALLY that braindead? These are NASA
| managers in charge of life-or-death decisions
|
| 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.
| Graffur wrote:
| It's still their fault and not the person who created the
| slide.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| This doesn't sound like a normal decision, but a rather big
| one. Also, after 9,999 decisions, I'd expect you to be pretty
| good at picking out what's important.
| throwthere wrote:
| I think it's getting at cognitive bias more than intellect
| Veedrac wrote:
| 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.
| ModernMech wrote:
| 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.
| tgflynn wrote:
| > 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.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| There was a possibility to rescue Columbia, but it would have
| been very difficult:
|
| 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?)
| giantg2 wrote:
| I agree. I think there is a disconnect on what was known at the
| time vs what this retrospective article is assuming was known
| at the time.
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| hbn wrote:
| If this is true then it's increasingly bold of this article's
| author to blame the deaths of 7 astronauts on a single
| engineer for not getting the information hierarchy correct on
| a powerpoint
| patagurbon wrote:
| 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.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| I know. Right?
|
| 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
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| https://spaceflightnow.com/columbia/report/rescue.html
|
| 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.
| wizzard wrote:
| And could have had the same problem as Columbia. There was no
| quick fix to ensure Atlantis didn't meet the same fate.
| ciphol wrote:
| Judging by previous flights, the chance of a Columbia
| problem occurring on any given flight (like that of
| Atlantis) was around 1/200. Would you take a 1/200 chance
| of losing your life to save someone else's? Many people
| would.
| tgflynn wrote:
| That's from a study that was done after the accident. As far
| as I'm aware NASA never even considered a rescue mission
| while Columbia was in orbit. They simply assumed that if the
| tiles were damaged there was nothing that could be done. It
| also seems that that assumption was what lead to the decision
| not to make efforts to assess the damage such as a space walk
| or the use of DoD spy satellites.
| sumanthvepa wrote:
| 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.
| codeflo wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]
| http://mamamusings.net/archives/2005/11/19/the_culture_of_th...
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| 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.
| zeruch wrote:
| "resist the urge to do a hybrid slide, and if at all possible
| make presentation slides at front, reference/supplementary
| slides at back."
|
| This has been my SOP for years, but its amazing how resistant
| some folks are to it (like $NUMBER_OF_SLIDES is the sole
| measure of quality...with "more slides are bad, mmmkay" being
| the default). I fought with my last boss on this endlessly,
| as I would rather have many slides with small digestible
| chunks of info that I could scaffold my presentations through
| at a brisk clip, and they preferred as few slides as
| possible, with dense text and charts, that they would
| elaborate on in long exposition.
|
| I always got better positive feedback, to no avail. My decks
| would be 'edited' into a compacted slop-fest. Drove me batty.
| potatolicious wrote:
| One effective way of juggling the two types of slides I've
| found is to stick the reference slides into an appendix that
| isn't part of the actual presentation - but can be quickly
| pulled up during ensuing discussions, and for the benefit of
| people reviewing the slides later.
|
| High-level stats during the actual presentation, meaty
| details available upon request.
| greggman3 wrote:
| What's are "screen-shaped pages"? My screens are all kinds of
| ratios and orientations.
|
| 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
| gcthomas wrote:
| Pdfs are terrible for letter style docs on phones (reflowable
| text is better, say in emails), but they are great as slides.
| Certainly easier to distribute or display than proprietary
| PPT editors.
| cryptonector wrote:
| 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.)
| the_snooze wrote:
| >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.
|
| I use presenter notes precisely for what you're describing.
| My actual slides are sparse, but I distribute slides with
| full presenter notes so all the main points get across in a
| written form after the fact, without distracting from the
| talk.
|
| In Powerpoint, I use the "print to PDF" function and tell it
| to generate pages containing slides with notes.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Presenter notes though are intended to help the presenter,
| and their form is not great for users who missed the
| presentation. As well, the presenter often does need
| presenter notes that are terse and not suitable for the
| public. We need slides that are shown at the presentation,
| slides not shown at the presentation but which are public,
| and presenter notes.
| the_snooze wrote:
| I think that's the presenter's responsibility. I use the
| presenter notes to organize my thoughts. By the time I
| give a talk, I already have most things memorized and
| only need to grab a few phrases here and there from my
| (rather detailed full-sentence) notes. The notes easily
| stand on their own.
|
| It's certainly an improvement over the usual ineffective
| way people make slides and give talks: by reading bullet
| points off the slides themselves. I keep over 90% of the
| text for my talks in the presenter notes. It's equally
| useful for prepration and for future reference.
| gregmac wrote:
| Yeah, this is a good idea.
|
| I'd add a tip: start writing your notes in the speaker
| notes and leave the slides blank, instead of the other way
| around (which is kind of what PowerPoint's UI pushes you
| towards). Only create the actual slide content after
| refining your speaker notes once or twice.
|
| For me, at least, I find it's much easier to add content to
| the blank slide than it is to refine (aka: erase words
| from) the sentences I initially type out. I tend to like
| slide content that is graphics (photos, screenshots,
| graphs, diagrams), titles, or lists of short headline-style
| text (1~3 words).
| cryptonector wrote:
| Nice, I like that!
| cxr wrote:
| The conclusion of Tufte (linked late in the article) and the
| investigation board is that, yes, you _should_ be using the
| Bezos approach.
|
| I recommend everyone check out Tufte's original "PowerPoint
| Does Rocket Science" piece. The piece linked here instead
| seems to be superficially middling-quality reblog spam. I say
| "superficially middling" here because it's actually low-
| quality reblog spam masquerading as middling-quality insight.
| For example, some of the conclusions presented here run
| _counter_ to the conclusions that this piece 's author is
| attempting to summarize from Tufte et al.
|
| That's a problem, but that's before even mentioning that it
| appears that the slides pictured here _aren 't even the
| slides that were in "play" during the relevant incident_.
| Boeing's 2003 slides are 4:3 ratio (and of course they would
| be), with the Boeing watermark in the corner and without the
| errors that can be seen in the "screenshots" in the linked
| blog post.
|
| If this were the product of a serious academic endeavor
| instead of a grey area, slightly scummy, content-marketing
| afterthought, it probably wouldn't be out of line to treat
| this as academic fraud.
| crdrost wrote:
| Video is of course not necessary, just sufficient.
|
| What you want are the talk notes, something you can read to
| understand what the shape of the talk was, what context each
| image came out in. The video of the actual talk substitutes
| quite nicely for these notes.
|
| It would be preferable if more presentation media had a
| "front of card/back of card" approach where the card itself
| specifies how long it thinks it should be on the screen
| (evaluable over "timing runs"), bullet points for the speaker
| and readers of the printed form, as well as the image that
| will be shown.
| cryptonector wrote:
| > Video is of course not necessary, just sufficient.
|
| It should be so, but that means writing different
| materials, one for the actual presentation, and one for
| everyone who couldn't be there. It would be better to have
| the video.
|
| Mind you, for accessibility and general user-friendliness,
| you want both. But audio/video is a great help because
| there will be things that the off-line materials miss.
|
| > It would be preferable if more presentation media had a
| "front of card/back of card"
|
| Yes. PowerPoint and the like generally have a public /
| presenter distinction, but we want three distinctions:
| online / off-line / presenter.
| endymi0n wrote:
| This. I remember the day when I casually asked my cofounder, an
| amazing storyteller, how his day was.
|
| 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."
| pklausler wrote:
| It was Blaise Pascal in his _Lettres Provinciales_.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| "a nice PDF with screen-shaped pages"
|
| 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.
| sosborn wrote:
| More importantly (to me anyway), copying large swaths of text
| is so much more reliable in a word doc. Copying text in a pdf
| (derived from PowerPoint no less) is a special hell.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Unbelievable, I've never copied text from a PDF without
| some error. It's baffling how broken that system is
| compared to say, text selection in web browsers.
|
| If you start doing fancy CSS tricks you can break that too,
| of course.
| db48x wrote:
| In a PDF, every single glyph could be independently
| positioned. Most aren't quite that pathological, but
| frequently every text run is independent.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| A PDF can contain metadata that correctly sequences the
| characters which is great for cut-n-paste, accessibility
| and reflowing the text. That metadata is frequently
| absent and the mechanism for incorporating it is by no
| means simple.
| captainmuon wrote:
| 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.)
| the_snooze wrote:
| >My experience outside of academia is that people use
| PowerPoint exactly for persuasion.
|
| It happens in my corner of academia too, and I'm all for it.
| When I give a talk, I'm trying to persuade people to read my
| paper and ask me interesting questions about the work. The
| paper has all the gory details. The point of my talk isn't to
| duplcate the written text, but to make it accessible enough
| that people want to learn more.
| toyg wrote:
| Your boss must have been traumatized by some salesman.
|
| PPTs are great, when they have been written by someone who
| knows _what_ to communicate and _how_ to do it, which
| involves knowing your audience. For boffins, slides that are
| denser than average but lighter than what they would
| otherwise have to read, are just fine. For the layman, one
| better err on the side of simplicity and direct impact.
|
| _> PowerPoint is something you do to a customer or to the
| board, not to your colleagues_
|
| That is bullshit borne of insecurity. If one can be persuaded
| so radically by a presentation, one's convictions are pretty
| weak to begin with.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I've been taught that if you are selling high tech products
| to C-levels at the biggest companies you want to have
| highly information dense slides (e.g. condense 2 slides
| into 1, then condense 2 of those slides in 1) but also have
| them well organized so you can make a presentation that
| drives home a few key points.
|
| Personally I am a big fan of powerpoint for making "boxes
| and lines" diagrams about how a product works, what process
| we're using, things like that. I love making stuff like
|
| https://www.slideshare.net/paulahoule/making-the-semantic-
| we...
| toyg wrote:
| _> at the biggest companies you want to have highly
| information dense slides_
|
| One of my bosses got that memo - the whole thing is one
| single giant slide with 12 indicators or so. Their
| sessions are hell, they make people roll eyes and
| disengage out of boredom. The message I get is that they
| either don't really care to interact with us hoi polloi,
| or are just bypassing their own inadequacy at managing a
| deck at speed - which is understandable, but at that
| point why are you even there?
|
| IMHO, if one has 6-9 segregated boxes on the same slide
| and is going to describe each one, they could have been
| 6-9 slides with exactly the same content but bigger and
| more impactful. But people have grown to fear the
| whitespace (can't help themselves overfilling each slide)
| and transitions (the dreaded pause and meaningless "let's
| read the title" which is horribly endemic in the States),
| so they go for this compromise. The impatient reads the
| whole slide and tunes out, but is not annoyed at you for
| keeping him from doing that, so it's considered a win.
| Still, he's not listening to anything you're saying - you
| could have as well just sent an email.
|
| (It might well be just a fad. C-levels love fads like
| your next person. In fact, they often love _creating_
| fads, just to watch the monkey dance.)
|
| IMHO, a slide should have the elements you're linking
| together to make a single point. If the point is "sales
| are good but margin is bad", you'll need a few graphs in
| the same slide, for sure. But you need transitions at
| some point to keep people awake and focused on the train
| of thought you want them to ride. Even in a TED talk,
| where you really just want people to look at you and only
| you, the occasional flash of light from transitions is
| necessary to keep the senses engaged.
| jccooper wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| 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".
|
| [0] https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v1ch5.htm
| yummybear wrote:
| 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".
| subhro wrote:
| Three kickass books I found very helpful in improving my slide-
| foo and hold the attention of my audience:
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sklargh wrote:
| 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.
| jquery wrote:
| Losing DFW is such a tragedy for mankind. Are there any living
| thinkers on his level?
| sklargh wrote:
| Not in the literary space.
| csours wrote:
| 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.
|
| One slide and bad culture killed seven people.
| D13Fd wrote:
| 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?
| arrow7000 wrote:
| Yes that was the point. Nobody is blaming PowerPoint the
| program.
| shashurup wrote:
| I still cannot get why was it a big deal to go outside and check
| the tile?
| areoform wrote:
| 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
|
| 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."
| junon wrote:
| Fascinating, I'm familiar with the incident but never heard this
| aspect of it.
| beeforpork wrote:
| Very interesting! I will start my future presentations with 'The
| Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint...' :-)
|
| But this '...has grown exponentially...' is just such BS. _sigh_
| I just cannot get used to this expression entering lay language.
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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.
| mdekkers wrote:
| > 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
|
| Have you ever worked for a business with "management"?
| NotAWorkNick wrote:
| 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
|
| (not the one that downvoted your comment btw)
| bumby wrote:
| > _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.
| dekhn wrote:
| You're being downvoted because the entire process that lead to
| this decision has been massively analyzed and the root causes
| were determined.
| giantg2 wrote:
| And was it determined that this slide killed 7 people, as
| claimed in the title? That seems overly dramatic and ignores
| the other root causes.
| dekhn wrote:
| No, it wasn't this slide.
| ubercore wrote:
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The title of this post is claiming this slide killed 7
| people. That's a pretty bold and accusatory claim that seems
| to leave out the other failures, right?
| TobTobXX wrote:
| From the article (emphasis mine):
|
| > This, however, is the story of a PowerPoint slide that
| actually _helped_ kill seven people.
| amenod wrote:
| Pretty bad title for a blog post that talks about
| misleading powerpoint presentations. Some readers might
| make conclusions from the title alone, instead of reading
| the whole text below.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Yep; this slide was worse than useless in that to the
| given audience it could instead read as an endorsement
| that launching is fine.
| giantg2 wrote:
| This wasn't about a launch decision. An audience of
| engineers would _not_ view this slide as an endorsement.
| mypalmike wrote:
| Please read the article so you don't come across as ill
| informed. This was not a launch/no launch decision.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Any evidence to support that claim? NASA employees raised
| concerns about the severity of the damage, which shows
| the contents of the slide were effectively communicated
| to NASA engineers, but that leaders ignored them. Thus
| the slide was not a contributor.
|
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2271525/It-
| better-d...
| [deleted]
| zelos wrote:
| 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.
| bumby wrote:
| I agree with you, but to be charitable, this was a real-time
| and evolving situation where I'm willing to bet the slide was
| expected to be finished "yesterday"
| phicoh wrote:
| This seems to be the kind of slide made by someone without
| a lot of experience presenting work.
|
| The other issue is, some people really, really, don't want
| to speculate.
|
| In this case it seems that the person who made the slide
| probably assumed that the tile could be broken with a high
| enough probility. But because it was outside all available
| data, the slide says that we don't really know.
|
| Of course, anybody in a position to make such a go-no-go
| decision should have enough experience talking to
| engineers, and seeing this effect in action to recognize
| the slide for what it is. It is really weird to conclude
| that based on absence of data, it is probably safe.
| bumby wrote:
| > _It is really weird to conclude that based on absence
| of data, it is probably safe._
|
| Considering that's exactly what happened nearly 20 years
| earlier with _Challenger_ , it seems to be more common
| and likely the result of a number of cognitive biases. We
| read these with some hindsight and are disconnected from
| all the other pressures (schedule, budget, peer, etc.)
| they are dealing with at the time.
| mirker wrote:
| One factor for why is that bringing bad news may poorly
| reflect on the organization, and therefore the person's
| career.
| bumby wrote:
| It takes some intestinal fortitude to be in a role that
| is tasked with communicating information people don't
| want to hear. It's part of the reason NASA created it's
| "Safety and Mission Assurance" organization after this
| incident and gave them a completely different chain of
| command. In theory, that mitigates some of the career
| threat, but in practice it may be different.
| phicoh wrote:
| That points to a far more fundamental problem. Related to
| information processing higher up in the organisation.
| Just making better slides is unlikely to solve that
| problem.
| bumby wrote:
| Probably correct, and I have doubts that those types of
| problems are easily fixed because they're rooted in human
| psychology. It's interesting to me that the "big"
| incidents seem to occur every 15-20 years, almost as if
| there is a new professional cohort who has to learn the
| hard way. I do think clear communication is a necessary,
| but insufficient, element of fixing that problem.
| phicoh wrote:
| One thing I wonder about with these kinds of accidents:
| to what extend does operational experience work its way
| back to requirements of components.
|
| For example, if regularly pieces of foam are hitting the
| tiles after launch, was that part of the specs for the
| tiles to handle that? Did anybody go back, take a worst
| case scenario of a piece foam hitting a tile (size,
| speed, etc.) and verify that the tiles could handle such
| an impact?
| bumby wrote:
| They'll generally use a Failure Mode Effects Analysis
| (FMEA). So in this example, designers would identify all
| the ways a tile could fail and the consequence and
| probability of that failure. They then go through the
| process of mitigating it. The order of precedence for
| mitigations is 1) remove the hazard, 2) engineer around
| the hazard, 3) administrative controls (like standard
| procedures), 4) personal protective equipment. The
| iterate around this until the risk is within an
| acceptable range. All those mitigations become
| requirements.
|
| So let's say they identify a tile failure mode as "tile
| struck by object". They assign a worst-case severity to
| that. Let's say they knew how bad it could be and they
| assign a severity as "loss of crew." Then they have to
| identify all the ways the tile could be struck and assign
| probabilities to that even happening. They use a matrix
| that maps the severity and probability to arrive at a
| risk classification. If the classification is higher than
| their threshold, they add mitigations that either reduce
| the severity or the probability (or both) until it's
| within an acceptable risk range.
|
| There's lots that can go wrong with this process, though.
| You obviously have to be able to identify the failure
| modes. Is there some off-the-wall failure that nobody
| could foresee? Maybe. Then you have to have good enough
| data to objectively determine the risk. In this case, I
| wonder if all the previous foam strikes led them to
| discredit the risk as being improbable/negligible to
| cause that failure mode. Add to that, the PowerPoint
| seemed to imply the model they used is too conservative
| (it was believed to overestimate the actual penetration).
| I know people involved on some hypervelocity testing of
| the foam and they were legitimately surprised at the way
| the foam acted when it was fired at higher speeds. So in
| this case, the risk was probably unknown beforehand,
| although they assumed they understood the risk
| sufficiently. To quote Mark Twain, "What gets us into
| trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for
| sure that just ain't so."
|
| That's just one system on an immensely complex machine.
| It's easy to sit back with hindsight and say "Well, they
| shouldn't have made a decision until they did additional
| testing to get the data." But if they did that to every
| system on the Shuttle, it likely wouldn't have left the
| ground. In practice, engineers deal with all kinds of
| other cost and schedule constraints.
| phicoh wrote:
| This issue is not that they had to ground the Shuttle
| until they had the data. The issue seems to be that foam
| was hitting the tiles with parameters outside their test
| database.
|
| Why didn't they go back and test with 'real world' foam
| sizes?
| bumby wrote:
| I can only speculate.
|
| I would push back on the idea that they would not have to
| ground the Shuttle. If they thought the foam could cause
| a loss of crew, they would ground the Shuttle until they
| fully understood the problem. That's exactly what
| happened in the aftermath of _Columbia_.
|
| > _Why didn 't they go back and test with 'real world'
| foam sizes?_
|
| That's exactly what they did after the incident (while
| the Shuttles were grounded). If you're asking why didn't
| they do that beforehand, my assumption is they already
| had a model that they felt they could use. According to
| the subject PPT slides, they even thought that model was
| overly conservative. In addition, while foam-shedding was
| out of spec, it was considered "in family" meaning that
| they knew of the issue and felt like it was not a flight
| safety issue. Both their physical and mental models of
| the phenomena were, at best, incomplete but they didn't
| know that at the time.
| phicoh wrote:
| So in your opinion, the slide said that with the impact
| of the foam it would have been very unlikely that the
| tile would have failed? In that case the inpretation by
| NASA of the slide was correct.
|
| Which is weird because slide also mentions that a small
| increase in energy can have a disproportional effect.
|
| I find it weird that they would rely on their model (for
| extrapolation) when they know that the behavior of the
| tiles is non-linear. If they knew that the real world was
| outside their testing parameters and they decided not to
| test, then that sounds to me like a very serious
| ommision.
|
| I.e., it is weird to extrapolate tests to something 600
| times bigger. Certainly if it is about impact on
| ceramics.
| mjevans wrote:
| This could also be related to a broader tendency to
| promote 'performers' who are more likely to take risks or
| shortcuts that they might not realize involve risks as
| well as people that use less resources (lower safety
| margins, less overlapping checks etc).
|
| It's sadly difficult to be recognized for excellence in
| preventing surprises, as hard as it is to quantify that.
| raverbashing wrote:
| 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.
| lostcolony wrote:
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I understand that he's not a NASA employee. Do you think it's
| fair to claim that the slide killed 7 people? I don't. Could
| it be worded better or have a better layout - sure. But
| there's no problem with that slide that would support the
| claim that 7 people died because of it. The information was
| there.
|
| As you said, it is a 2 way street. Slides are accessories. Do
| you have the conversation that unfolded during this slide and
| presentation? Did the audience ask questions about things
| they didn't understand?
|
| _Is there even any evidence that NASA didn 't know about the
| damage or had a rescue plan?_
|
| You claim they wouldn't have taken the risk, yet if I
| remember correctly they had no rescue plan and gave a
| relatively low (70%ish maybe) survival rate. Low level
| employees did raise concerns about severity of the damage.
| This seems to support the idea rather the communication
| between the vendor and NASA was sufficient since some NASA
| employees shared the same view.
|
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2271525/It-
| better-d...
| bumby wrote:
| There was serious consideration to sending _Atlantis_ as a
| rescue mission as _Columbia_ was not in a position capable
| of rendezvousing with the ISS to use the later as a
| lifeboat. To your point, subsequent missions were required
| to have a formal rescue mission outlined.
| andi999 wrote:
| Agree. Also where is the executive summary for that slide on
| that slide?
| logifail wrote:
| > Also where is the executive summary for that slide on
| that slide?
|
| Q: Shouldn't every PowerPoint slide _be_ an executive
| summary? PowerPoint can be a terrible way to [attempt to]
| present detail.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I believe they were using that question to point out the
| absurdity of making a slide that long by suggesting that
| it is made even longer with a summary of itself.
| krisoft wrote:
| > 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.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| I read the title as saying "be careful when predicting tile
| penetration" based on one of the first point they make being
| that the method used to predict penetration "overpredicted
| penetration of tile coating significantly".
|
| Though in fairness they then have sub points that _kind of_
| contradict this conclusion rather than support it.
|
| But honestly this slide would make more sense if several of
| the sub points where top level independent statements
| instead.
| josefx wrote:
| > based on one of the first point they make being that the
| method used to predict penetration "overpredicted
| penetration of tile coating significantly".
|
| That point read to me as if they completely overestimated
| the damage.
| Iolaum wrote:
| 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
|
| _______________
|
| Now that should get a reader's attention.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Hell, it's even probably fair to make an editorial conclusion
| at the end -
|
| "Given this, we strongly recommend against launch"
| giantg2 wrote:
| The damage happened during launch. Unless you're talking
| about how the insulation was old and NASA knew that
| insulation can, and had in the past, struck shuttles.
| giantg2 wrote:
| True, there are better ways to word it. That does leave out
| some detail that the original one had, like test velocity and
| not showing the thought process as well (like a formula on a
| math slide or deductive argument in philosophy).
|
| My main point is that the title claims thus slide is what
| killed 7 people and basically blames the creator, but leaves
| out all the other failures. Slide formatting and wording
| (which ignores the actual discussion that should have gone
| with it) is really inconsequential compared to the rest of
| the process in a briefing.
| Iolaum wrote:
| The slide being such a mess, makes me think that the
| speaker's arguments may not point to the danger so clearly
| either. This makes me look favorably on the title even
| though it is hyperbole.
|
| Granted this is pure speculation on my part and should be
| treated accordingly.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> 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:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10989358
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19034783
| giantg2 wrote:
| Wow, I didn't know that. What a poor track record.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| Yeah, its very hard to say that Challenger was because of a
| miscommuncation from the vendor engineers. They wrote out
| directly [0] "Recommendations: O-ring temperature must be >
| 53F at launch", and the temperature of the air at launch was
| 36F and measurements on the solid rocket boosters (where the
| o-rings are located) got down to 25F and 8F [1].
|
| But their recommendation was challenged by the NASA SRB
| managers. And after an offline discussion the SRB vendor came
| back and had changed their opinion that it was safe. And the
| NASA SRB manager never brought up the o-ring temperature
| concern to the rest of the management team.
|
| [0] https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v1p90.jpg
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_di
| sas...
| silvestrov wrote:
| 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.
| techsupporter wrote:
| > When engineers are not allowed to use "alarmist language"
|
| This has been a recurring theme throughout my career, the
| struggle between being seen as "alarmist" and accurately
| conveying urgency.
|
| We get this in the medical field all of the time. "Outcomes
| delivered via mechanism seen as potentially contraindicated"
| or some other spaghetti. I've been in these meetings many
| times, where we (the individual contributors) have to tell
| the bosses or peers or partner group about something that
| _might_ be bad. As in Y2K-style of bad, where it will be bad
| if we don 't address it but if we do address it with the
| urgency needed, no one will be able to recognize the success
| for what it is.
|
| As you said, no one's manager wants to be seen as crying wolf
| all of the time, but post-hoc there's the expectation that a
| couple of engineers way out at the end of the limb of the
| tree didn't just wait for the limb to be sawed off behind
| them, they took out the saw and did it themselves. That they
| stood up in the presentation and yelled "you're all idiots!
| This is going to kill the entire crew! Everyone will die,
| don't you see?! And I'm not standing for it!" just before
| they rip the badge off of their lanyard or belt hook and then
| righteously storm out.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yep, a lot of organizations have a cultural taboo against
| telling the bosses bad news. The way one manager taught me:
| If it's good news, use plain language and big text. If it's
| bad news, soften it, shrink it, slather it with jargon,
| obfuscate it. Don't hide it but _don 't_ raise an alarm.
| Couch any unpleasant language with possible-this and
| unknown-that. Terrible advice but that's the way a lot of
| exec readouts work.
| brimble wrote:
| Maybe it's survivorship bias and I'm only seeing in-fact-
| rare good examples, but organizational communication seemed
| _so much better_ back in the 1940s-~1960s.
|
| And other communication, for that matter. Instructional
| videos from that era make "pro" YouTube look like amateur
| hour, let alone modern material produced by industry and
| government, which is even worse.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I don't buy the title.
|
| 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 wrote:
| > I don't buy the title.
|
| 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.
| dqpb wrote:
| 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)
| dmix wrote:
| > this foam, falling nine times faster than a fired bullet
|
| 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.
| wdurden wrote:
| 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.
| wdurden wrote:
| Oh, but yes, that PP slide was bad. Symantic's More on a Mac
| Plus would have allowed a better job 15 years earlier.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yep, that's why the test speed estimates 200 fps. There's no
| mention of if the incident velocity is similar to the test
| velocity though.
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| That's correct. The CAIB report says it was traveling at a
| relative speed of "625 to 840 feet per second" at the time of
| impact.
|
| 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 wrote:
| The foam accelerated down and the spacecraft accelerated up.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > 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.
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