[everdev]

It is a little far fetched to think the audience didn't listen or ask questions about any potential risks.

It's easy to go back after an accident and find multiple points of failure and find things that could have been done better.

My guess is that most people thought it was a minor or acceptable risk. Unfortunately, they were very wrong.

But that doesn't mean the PPT slide is at fault.

[rayiner]

> But that doesn't mean the PPT slide is at fault.

I think it's a bit of poetic license to say that the PPT is at fault. But didn't help. Many mistakes lead to an outcome like this one. But this PPT is one of those mistakes. The basic information is there for a very significant point--we know penetration can happen with a sufficiently large or sufficiently fast-moving piece of foam, and this piece of foam is 600 times bigger than anything we tested before. Had this PPT clearly conveyed that point, the chances would have been higher that some decisionmaker would have realized its significance.

[TeMPOraL]

> I think it's a bit of poetic license to say that the PPT is at fault. But didn't help.

Poetic license in journalism doesn't help either. What we got here is pure clickbait, literally accusing something of killing people, when it was just one among many things that were suboptimal and just "didn't help".

[rossdavidh]

I think the PPT slide is at fault for the fact that the most relevant piece of information (this is 600x bigger than we have tested) got lost. The decision, and even the way in which the meeting to make the decision was held, is not on PPT. But, it was the one and only purpose of a PPT slide to communicate information in a way that makes it easier to understand, otherwise we would just use plain txt files.

A plain txt file here, would have been better.

[sailingparrot]

How would a plain txt file have helped? As the person writing the txt/ppt/whatever it's your job to put the emphasis on the important part: the 600x difference.

In text this means puting that at the beginning, in the title and in bold. The same is true in PPT, you have to outline the important stuff. It has to be visible at a glance.

File formats don't solve lack of communication and listening skills.

[rossdavidh]

Certainly not. The fact that plain txt would have been better than this, was meant to convey how poorly the format worked for the intended purpose (highlighting the most important information).

I wasn't saying a plain txt file was a solution; I was saying that even plain txt, a very low-power format, would have been better than this, and since the ONLY PURPOSE of a PPT is to help you format things, this was a failure. Certainly no format will solve lack of communication, but I see better communication in Hacker News comments than I see in PowerPoints, and I think that says something about the value of PowerPoint.

[sailingparrot]

But it wouldn't have been better.... At best it would have been equally bad.