Space Shuttle Model

Columbia, around the earth for two weeks with an unknown hole in the wing due to a strike by the foam (the latter which NASA did know). The craft burned on re-entry, killing all the crew. He also killed PowerPoint at NASA. These are the six cognitive traps that PowerPoint is so good at - and all six appear in a slide key that is used in a presentation by Boeing while Columbia was damaged but still flying. It was the slide:

These are the cognitive traps:

1. Festival bureaucracy
There are 5 different levels to this slide (counting the title). The first three sentences are all in large print and tell you not to worry. Read below, and you should worry - a lot of time. By the way, SOFI means foam (or tech-heads: Spray foam insulation). The word "crater" refers to the model they use to assess the gravity of the foam strike was.

2. Conclusion title
We often want to get to the bottom line. PowerPoint is the opposite - it allows us to make a conclusion one way, reducing the motivation to follow the details of the story. The title says everything is OK. The content says otherwise.

3. Choice of words
The important word "/ ly appears 5 times. But read the slide, and "significant" changes to describe a conservative to a disastrous outcome. But whoever comes first sets the tone in this troubled world of ours.

4. Relevance
If you read the last line, it tells you that all data presented is irrelevant - it does not fall within the scope of the model crater.

5. Inconsistency
The same unit volume (cubic centimeters) is represented in a slightly different way each time. Things can get out of hand in aerospace engineering when things are not compatible - as the crash of a spacecraft 250 million in March because of a mix-up between metric and old books and to system ounces. Oops.

6. Withdrawal distance
We tend to shorten the sentences in "bullet points" for PowerPoint. Sometimes this translates into a sentence that his mother could love. What the hell does "initial entry at normal speed described as" mean and why is he there?

When you blow on the side of the head, is the fact that the kinetic energy is velocity squared that hurts so much. Similarly, we can increase the energy of what we want to convey by using cognitive traps in presentations. However, lies are like the shipping costs - it gives you every time.

Reference: Edward Tufte. PowerPoint Does Rocket Science: Assessing the quality and credibility of technical reports. http://www.edwardtufte.com