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213 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 2006
If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than that Y did something to X…If we think of Y rather than X as the agent, the vocabulary is much richer and more attractively diversified: drawn on, resort to, adapt, pick up, absorb, assimilate, address, paraphrase, elaborate on…(quoted from Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures).
Making a presentation is a moral act as well as an intellectual activity. [...] Thus consuming a presentation is also an intellectual and a moral activity. p. 141
This evidence-free fancy [Aristotle's claim that all celestial bodies are perfect, smooth, and without blemish] had become religious doctrine before being demolished by 10 pages of visual observations [of the Moon] reported in [Gallileo's] Sidereus Nuncius. p. 98
And that is the grand, forever consequence of Sidereus Nuncius: from then on, all science, to be credible, had to be based on publicly displayed evidence of seeing and reasoning, and not merely on wordy arguments. p. 101
Sentences are smarter than the grunts of bullet points. p.182
PowerPoint's convenience for some presenters is costly to the content and the audience. These costs arise from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, an intensely hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narratives and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous chartjunk and PP Phluff, branding of slides with logotypes, a preoccupation with format not content, incompetent designs for data graphics and tables, and a smirky commercialism that turns information into a sales pitch and presenters in marketeers. This cognitive style harms the quality of thought for the producers and the consumers of presentations.
The vigorous, vaguely quantitative words, "significant" and "significantly" are used 5 times on this slide, with meanings ranging from "detectable in a perhaps irrelevant calibration case study" to "an amount of damage so that everyone dies" to "a difference of 640-fold." None of the 5 "significants" refer to statistical significance.
The pushy PP style tends to set up a dominance relationship between speaker and audience, as the speaker makes power points with hierarchical bullets to passive followers. Such aggressive, stereotyped, over-managed presentations--the Great Leader up on the pedestal...