This guy — an assistant managing editor at the Birmingham News (shockingly ugly splash page here) — turned an old news rack, a Mac Mini and some clever scripting into a wholly cool beast: The digital newsstand.

Must. Get. One. Of. These. :::::a small “paff!” as my brain explodes:::::

For extra credit, go look at the comment thread about this item on Engadget — it’s mostly techies wondering why anyone would want one of these when you can get endless news from a Blackberry or PDA. Further proof (if we needed any) that you can’t merely rely on technical prowess for product development.

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Colin turned my tale of Kinko’s joy into a blog post.

I’d feel left out of my own party if I didn’t link to it.

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Beyond Bullets has a great article — to call it a mere post would be a disservice — about using PowerPoint to test ideas. Since I’m usually first in line to rant about poor use of that medium, it seems only fair to point out where it really shines. An excerpt:

Tip: The next time you have a new idea, try field-testing it first in a PowerPoint presentation. If it’s a brief idea, present the idea on a single slide, and then ask other people what they think about it. Or if you have a much larger idea or a sequence of thoughts, put a single idea on each slide and develop it out in a storyboard… When you challenge yourself to do the counter-intuitive, like writing your slides first, you open yourself to new possibilities you may not have seen from a previously limited view.

Thanks to Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion for pointing out the site.

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Came across an outstanding interview with Rich Mayer, a professor of psychology who’s got the chops to talk about PowerPoint as learning tool/learning hindrance.

And talk about it he does.

My favorite bit:

Bullets dont kill learning, but improper use of bullets kills learning. To create effective PowerPoint presentations, it is important to understand how people learn.

In particular, cognitive scientists have discovered three important features of the human information processing system that are particularly relevant for PowerPoint users: dual-channels, that is, people have separate information processing channels for visual material and verbal material; limited capacity, that is, people can pay attention to only a few pieces of information in each channel at a time; and active processing, that is, people understand the presented material when they pay attention to the relevant material, organize it into a coherent mental structure and integrate it with their prior knowledge.

The implications are that (1) PowerPoint presentations should use both visual and verbal forms of presentation; (2) filling the slides with information will easily overload people’s cognitive systems; and (3) the presentations should help learners to select, organize and integrate presented information.

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I work with a lot of consulting engineers and planners, and I’m consistently impressed with two things:

• How genuine they are in their desire to do good work in the face of project, client and internal challenges; and
• How perfectly awful most are at explaining the importance of their work.

As you might imagine, this hurts a lot of engineering firms when they’re out pitching new business.

The University of Newcastle Upon Tyne (don’t you just love British place names?) has this helpful collection of presentation tutorials for engineers. Some good (albeit largely tactical) stuff worth reading. Not an engineer? Give presentations? Read it anyway.

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As I’ve said in the past, I’m not a big fan of PowerPoint, and one of my biggest beefs is the fact that it’s a lousy data-transfer mechanism — try recreating a narrative from a PowerPoint that you didn’t author sometime, and you’ll see what I mean.

Now, the Los Angeles Times is reporting that investigators of Columbia crash are encountering the same thing. The story ends thusly:

When accident investigators sought out a report documenting details of the shuttle’s design or performance, they often found only PowerPoint presentations.

Without the knowledgeable voice of the engineers who had originally presented them, the slides were meaningless.

The board’s investigators soon coined a phrase for this new institutional amnesia.

“Death by PowerPoint.”

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