Brooders

Australia’s SMH is reporting PowerPoint presentations a ‘disaster’

Some points from the research:

Pioneered at the University of NSW, the research shows the human brain processes and retains more information if it is digested in either its verbal or written form, but not both at the same time.

Interesting, considering most powerpoint presentations I’ve seen read their slides.

“It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented.”

I have noticed some corporates, including my own, claiming powerpoint is documentation. I.e. Do you have any documentation?, yes here’s the sales/marketing slidedeck.

I don’t think marketing people get what technical documentation actually is, and vice versa.

For some interesting presentation skills and techniques there is always Presentation Zen , and the way out Dick Hardt presentation at OSCON 2005.

It will be interesting to see how this research is accepted or not. Will it be debunked, confirmed, discredited?

So now even presentation skills to convey information are coming under the spotlight, much like communication skills.

This has many ramifications for Education, which is now all powerpoint (at least in my Masters of Business it was). Come to think of it my undergraduate degree usually had code or maths on overhead projectors, which the lecturer talked about but never read …

The “what is cyberpunk theme?” has arisen again in 2007.

Livejournal Cyberpunk Community had two articles

• What is Cyberpunk?
• What is to BE Cyberpunk?

And cyberpunkreview.com is asking for Help writing the new cyberpunk Manifesto.

I dropped my bit over on the “what is it to BE cyberpunk?”

I always wonder about this “what it is to be cyberpunk?”.

I am not sure you can actually call yourself cyberpunk, but would use it to describe someone or something else. Maybe because Cyberpunk is more used to describe the state of society rather than a person. A person can be transhumanist because they can believe in something – enhancement of humanity through technology .. believing in dystopia, technology and massive corporate dominance. I don’t think anyone would say they were postmodern, just that something is postmodern ?

Natmun hit it

Cyberpunk is the dichotomy of knowing the technology is our greatest achievement and our greatest down fall,

However I think complexity is our ally . More information that’s generated means more information must be assimilated and correlated, and that gets harder and harder the more that’s produced.
I also associate with Morbid_curious .. I too am a software developer and deal with encryption, so I’m more on the cyber side.

Cyberpunk is an observation of society, and what’s going wrong with it due to technology.

Gibson et al got it right but the world doesn’t look they way they envisaged .. we have the negative impact, but dressed up in consumerist benefits and the denial that technology has caused problems. In some ways this delusion is worse than than visual proof, just lurking below the surface.

In Australia at least, we live in a post-scarcity country (at least from survival necesity). No one should be struggling to survive, basic necessities are judged to include a television. Government support means that asic existence is always possible, food, shelter is supported by the government, without having to work for it. The rest move up the ladder, but more wealth just means more lifestyle.

Post scarcity in this sense isn’t utoptian, but functional.

However, humanity craves connectivity, mobile phones, internet and wireless all embrace the ubiquitous connectivity. Mass production and economies of scale produce massive corporations. These large interactions come at a cost, humans lose their identity in the masses .. by becoming a larger society we become smaller in comparison. Less purpose. The increasing use of technology is communication .. email, SMS, IM, mobile phones to keep people connected. Perhaps this connectivity becomes purpose in itself.

Cyberpunk is seeing flaws in society .. it just doesn’t look like the art that was produced in the 80s !

This is interesting, but I’m not sure if it’s useful.

The virtual desktop by BumpTop

This is a much different approach than the Jeff Han Multitouch Interface, but people challenging metaphors can only make things better .. some will get discarded (or maginalised) along the way.

Most interface changes always come at a huge cost initially, until mass production kicks in and everyone enjoys economies of scale. So what would people use more the BumpTop with a tablet and a pen or a multitouch screen? I’m not sure.

I’ve been using a qwerty keyboard since 1984 .. I think it’s times something else was invented. Maybe Bumptop is the missing link between now and the multitouch interfaces?