[rayiner]

Clearly the mission controllers bear some responsibility, but I disagree with diverting blame from the creators of the PowerPoint.

The PowerPoint displays extremely clouded thinking. The title is: "Review of Test Data Indicates Conservatism for Tile Penetration." What the heck does that even mean? An unclear title is a very strong indicator of unclear thinking about the point being made. Further, there is a relatively precise estimate of the size of the foam, and its orders of magnitude larger than the size used for the tests. The slide clearly states that the penetration velocity depends on "volume/mass of the projectile"--i.e. one would expect a much larger projectile to penetrate at a lower speed. So why is the lead message not "we have to try the tests with bigger foam, because we don't have the data we need to reach a proper conclusion?"

Remember, while this is happening, a million other things are going on. The officials have other risks and trade-offs to deal with. In that scenario, one of your jobs as an engineer is to clearly convey your point, and perhaps more importantly, the limitations of your analysis. It's not the job of the decisionmakers to tease that information out of you. Ideally, of course, a decisionmaker faced with unclear messaging will try and get to the bottom. But in a high-pressure scenario, that doesn't always happen. For one thing, how does the official even know which issues need to be run to the ground and which do not? Who was the person who best knew how significant this slide was? The official reading it (who probably saw a hundred other slides in the same meeting), or the person who wrote it?

[paultopia]

Yeah, I agree. This is one of the worst slides I've ever seen. A few things I'd add to the above.

- The title is extremely unclear: are they supposed to be conservative in their beliefs about the risks (i.e., to not believe that the tile got penetrated), or are they supposed to be conservative in their behavior about the consequences (i.e., reduce risks by not re-entering the damn shuttle)?

- wtf does "overpredicted" mean? That's the second largest font, and it has no visible meaning?

- They don't even attempt to estimate the speed that the foam was traveling. They just said that it depends on speed and mass, but they make no suggestion of the speed.

- Nor do they attempt to draw boundaries on the possible speeds. Could they have fit a line on the test data and at least given a range of speeds that were clearly dangerous?

I don't think this is merely bad presentation design, however. This feels like someone was afraid to stick their necks out in a bureaucracy, and hence didn't give the managers enough information because there were some error bars around it.

[Izkata]

> wtf does "overpredicted" mean? That's the second largest font, and it has no visible meaning?

Honestly, it reads to me as being along the lines of "overestimated" - and in this sentence would mean "reality wasn't as bad as our predictions, so we have a lot more leeway than we thought".

[TeMPOraL]

A mathematical model (here, the crater equations) predicts something. If the prediction turned to be larger than reality, you could say that the model overpredicted.

[stormking]

What you should say is that the model is wrong.

[TeMPOraL]

That too. "Overpredicted" is a particular way in which this model turned out to be wrong for the problem it was applied to.

[vezycash]

> "Review of Test Data Indicates Conservatism for Tile Penetration."

The title has nothing to do with power point. This is no different from how academics title papers. The use of unnecessarily big words & passive tenses (rather than active) increases with level of schooling.

"Don't bury the lede" - Journalists and writers are taught this. It means, save readers some mental clock cycles. Pore through your own news and figure out the most important fact. Then put it in the title and/or on top.

Highly schooled, intelligent and "honest" people don't do this. When journalists over simplify or make logic leaps in their writing, we call it clickbait. We also prefer the use of the words MAY, and COULD (probability isn't intuitive to most people) - which allows people to ignore the information.

Successful salesy types are intentional about their use of words. They'll use active phrases, avoid ambiguous words, use words that denote certainty to force action in choice areas, and vagueries to hide or down play others.

The officials were surely served papers before or after the meeting and made their decision despite the slideshow.

Summary: Engineers need copyrighting and sales training as well.

[TeMPOraL]

> Summary: Engineers need copyrighting and sales training as well.

Waaait. Your comment essentially established two things: that journalists receive training on how to write properly, and that successful salesy type know how to bullshit their audience to get what their want. I think the conclusion doesn't follow.

Observe that journalists universally don't apply their writing training - in fact, modern news reporting is one of the worst kind of writing out there, with the lede buried under 30 meters of gravel, and spread on a hectare of land (we call it clickbait only when headline is manipulative). So this shows your training matters little if incentives on the job are in total opposition to it.

As for the sales angle, commercial copywriting isn't exactly a paragon of clarity either. Effectiveness in sales isn't measured in how clearly you communicated costs and benefits, but how excitingly you communicated the benefits, and how effectively you've hidden the drawbacks. Engineering communication shouldn't be manipulative like this.

The way I see it, many engineers could use some communication training, but it should be focused at presenting things clearly and truthfully, and on effectively ELI5-ing things to managers. But beyond that, incentives within organization needs to be adjusted, because it's hard to get an engineer to explain things clearly when their job depends on them not doing it.

[speedplane]

> The way I see it, many engineers could use some communication training, but it should be focused at presenting things clearly and truthfully

There are technical communications courses, in fact, it's a required course at Cornell Engineering. Agreed, it's not at all the same as copyrighting or journalism, but the general level of technical communication is so poor, that even courses in those would be an improvement.

[kiwijamo]

Did you mean copywriting?

[peteradio]

Just because you don't understand the jargon does not make it incorrect/unclear, have you ever worked at NASA?

[bumby]

Use of jargon is a huge impediment to communication in organizations like NASA and DoD. There's even a glib saying that you won't get your project funded unless you give it a cutesy/cool acronym. This ends up stifling communication because each group has its own pet vernacular that obfuscates meaning unless you are inside the circle.

They could benefit from clear, concise communication that gets to the point

[peteradio]

Read the full deck and tell me what is hard to understand:

https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/2203main_COL_debris_boeing_030123.p...

[zipperhead]

Indeed. The conclusion is:

```` Contingent on multiple tile loss thermal analysis showing no violation of M/OD criteria, safe return indicated even with significant tile damage ````

That's going to be difficult for management to push back against.

[zaroth]

Thank you for posting the full deck. The conclusion is pretty clearly stated that the engineers thought the shuttle would return safely, even with missing tiles. The focus on this one slide out of context seems totally wrong.

[TeMPOraL]

"Contingent on multiple tile loss thermal analysis", i.e. "we're running that model now and until we're done we're not sure, but the tests we did so far suggest that a tile loss should not prevent safe return".

It isn't really that unclear. There are formal words, but - unlike typical managerial presentations - there's also content behind them.

[pjtr]

So the real slide was actually quite different from the one presented in the article. The article shows various errors not present in the real slide (vaires, e.?g., Ln, hanrd). The real slide also use different font weights and bullet symbols. Was that intentional to give a bad impression, or just really sloppy? Or were those slides cleaned up?

[bumby]

I have mixed opinions. I agree that they conclusion is much more clear than the single slide implies. However, the slides do a poor job communicating in many other respects. For example, on the first non-title slide four separate acronyms are used, an only one is defined. (Incidentally, it's one that also has another, different, acronym within industry - M/OD => MMOD). Maybe everyone in the audience already familiar with these terms, but maybe they're not. I think in this case clarity should trump brevity. I think the original site has a particular, biased point of view but also that NASA can often do a poor job communicating.

The part I'm grappling with is how they came to that conclusion despite the "flight condition is significantly outside the test database" acknowledgement as alluded to in the original post. To me, this sounds very much like Challenger in terms of drawing conclusions without hard data to back it up. Easy arm-chair quarterbacking in hindsight, I know, but it seems the through-lines are psychological in nature, not engineering or technical problems.

[caconym_]

If NASA is encoding safety-critical messages in "jargon" that can pass for misleadingly ambiguous plain English, that's a huge safety problem itself. What if it's somebody's first day on the job?

Especially given the sorry state of the presentation in general, I really doubt this is the case, though.

[peteradio]

Have you ever presented inside a collaboration?

[caconym_]

Yes, and my experience doing so only cements the opinion(s) expressed in my previous comment—to which I'm inclined to say your reply is not terribly relevant.

Ambiguous, poorly presented, and technically dense are three different things, though they can all be present in the same place. Only two of them are necessarily bad.

[peteradio]

So what exactly is technically dense/ambiguous in this summary presentation (remember this isn't the only information provided). Perhaps you'd like to review the full deck of slides rather than the single one picked by the asshole author, I'm particularly interested in the one titled "Damage Results From “Crater” Equations Show Significant Tile Damage" . https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/2203main_COL_debris_boeing_030123.p...

[caconym_]

The title, "Review of Test Data Indicates Conservatism for Tile Penetration" is completely ambiguous to the point of being nonsensical. It is impossible to know in which direction the author of the slides thinks we should be conservative.

Ironically the slide you point out ("Damage Results From 'Crater' Equations Show Significant Tile Damage") seems to skew our interpretation of the next slide's title and content in the wrong direction. The former slide states that "'Crater' indicates that multiple tiles would be taken down to densified layer". That sounds bad. However, it also tells us that the "program" (assuming this means the Crater model) that generated this alarming prediction was "designed to be conservative". This would seem to downplay any concern generated by this result. Furthermore we are told that "Crater reports damage for test conditions that show no damage", further casting into doubt the predictions of the model.

And then, on the next slide: "Review of Test Data Indicates Conservatism for Tile Penetration". On the previous slide the word "conservatism" was used to tell us that the results from the "Crater" model may be on the high side, i.e. showing a problem where there is none, and that the test data show a much smaller degree of damage. This slide is about test data ("Review of Test Data"). On both slides we are told that compared to test data, the Crater results are inflated: "Crater reports damage for test conditions that show no damage", and "Crater overpredicted penetration [...] significantly".

Where does this leave us? The context of this additional slide makes the presentation even more misleading than the "asshole author", to use your delightful term, thinks it is. The title is not merely ambiguous; we are explicitly nudged toward the wrong interpretation of it. I have to thank you for bringing this additional context to my attention.

The author may in fact be an asshole (though I think your language is inappropriate in context), and his analysis may lack depth (I think it does to some degree), but in the simple matter of this slide being egregiously awful he's totally right. I don't know why you'd choose this hill to die on.

[TeMPOraL]

Seconding your comment. The presentation isn't ambiguous, it's just written in a detached, conservative style typical to scientific papers.

[hodgesrm]

I wonder if they would really would have been any clearer without PowerPoint. The person who wrote that slide seemed fully capable of obscuring the message in any medium.