Slide to the flight gate at the airport.

If you spend S$10 a few bucks at the restaurants or businesses at Singapore’s Changi Airport, getting to your flight’s departure gate is fast and easy.  Just take the four-storey-high slide.

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Brevity is the Soul of PowerPoint

At last, a study that proves what you already knew about PowerPoint:

“Slide presentations as speech suppressors: When and why learners miss oral information,”  Christof Wecker, Computers & Education (2012) [abstract]

There’s a nice summary by Eric Horow, but here it is in bullet points:

• If your slides aren’t brief, you should
• A)  Speak without them, or
• B) Put the entire presentation on slides and don’t say a word.

We’ve always liked Guy Kawasaki’s rule of thumb: 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30-point font.

What happens when your slides aren’t concise?

Bullet Points

— “‘PowerPoint makes us stupid,’ Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

‘It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,’ General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. ‘Some problems in the world are not bullet[point]-izable.'”

“We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint,” Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times.