November 2007 Archives

Do you know Edward R. Tufte's little book, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2003)?

If you have ever given a PowerPoint presentation, or ever had to sit through a presentation at which a speaker recited a list of bullet points while you sat in a dark room gazing at the same bullet points, you'll find Tufte's book fascinating. In twenty-seven large-format pages of text and graphics, Tufte, professor emeritus, Yale University, eviscerates PowerPoint. Tufte argues that PowerPoint shapes not only what is on screen but the whole logic of reports and presentations, constraining discourse and communication with "PowerPoint Phluff," branding, sales-pitch simple-mindedness, low resolution typography, the dilution and obscuring of complex thinking, cluttering and distortion of statistical evidence, and simple-minded sequencing.

Today is the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, a masterpiece of eloquence that has made it a useful tool with which to parody rhetorical mediocrity, as in Oliver Jensen's famous "Gettysburg Address in Eisenhowerese" from 1957. Tufte's little book reproduces Peter Norvig's "The Gettysburg Address PowerPoint Presentation," produced with the PowerPoint AutoContent Wizard.

You may not always agree with Tufte's arguments, but his detailed and principled analyses of visual arguments are a delight to read and if you start with his PowerPoint tract you will want to move on to his longer works -- Visual Explanations, Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Evidence, and Beautiful Evidence.

At the Penn State Faculty Senate meeting of October 23, 2007, the Senate Committee on Computing and Information Systems presented a report on backing up electronic data. The committee worked on this report for a couple of years, designing it in the hope that it would prompt individual students, staff, and faculty to arrange for backup of their electronic data.

The full report is available in the Faculty Senate minutes for October 23, 2007.

The key issues:

* Develop a system that you use regularly for backup of your data.

* Don't rely on CD or DVD storage for backup -- these are not reliable in the long term.

* Consider whether you might use one or two external hard drives, one of which can be kept at another site for added safety. Portable external hard drives of 160GB, 250GB, 500GB, and even 1TB are small, efficient, reliable, and increasingly affordable.

* Develop a plan to migrate aging data to new media formats.

* Consider backing your data up to an online server. Your university may provide this service for you. There are also some commercial sites that provide the service.

The New York Times has published an article on how Penn State, Hamilton College, and other institutions teach speech skills to reticent, or shy, students.

The program was started at Penn State by Professor Gerald Phillips in 1965, and was well underway by the time I joined the faculty in 1971.

An organization called Ithaka has published a report on "University Publishing in a Digital Age" that calls on university administrators, faculty, librarians, and presses to leverage changes in technology to re-organize scholarly publication.

The report, published in August 2007, is worth a look. It summarizes and focuses much of the conversation of the past 15 years as higher education has changed its practices, usually in fragmented and incremental ways, in response to rapidly changing technologies of publication.

The local campaigns have produced an unprecedented level of advertising--signs, mailers, and even TV and radio--for what we call around here an "off -year election." The School Board elections are deliberately scheduled to occur in years when we are not having a presidential or congressional election, partly, in theory, to help diminish the effect of party on the process. Another aspect of this nonpartisan approach is that candidates in the primary may cross-file for the ballot as both Republicans and Democrats. This year, that process produced a single slate who won both sides of the ballot. The write-in challengers, James Leous and Robert Hendrickson, have themselves been collecting donations, and according to the Centre Daily Times have secured the endorsement of most of the State College Borough Council. Here is a mailing from Leous and Hendrickson from last week explaining how to execute a write-in ballot on the no-paper-trail-electronic-ballot machines now in use in the county.

This little fellow was our first caller last night for Trick or Treat. As the evening wore on, we greeted, as always happens, some Peter Pans who just didn't want to grow beyond the age of this ritual, but crowded up to our door, a little ashamed, but wanting to find the fun. Mostly we greeted very small children who came shyly to our door, their parents waiting at the end of the walk and reminding them to say "thank you."

Up the road a few miles, in Milesburg, Pennsylvania, according to a recent story in the Centre Daily Times, the town council refused to designate an official date and time for trick or treat. Council members apparently were suspicious that children from outside the town might be coming in from other towns to ask for candy.