babbling blue

More funny from Savage Chickens.

It’s good because it appeals to multiple kinds of geeks.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fractured her right elbow Wednesday during a fall, State Department officials said.

Clinton fell Wednesday afternoon on her way to the White House and was taken to George Washington University Hospital. She was treated and released, and will have surgery to repair her elbow in coming weeks.

From CNN.

Study: PowerPoint animations are comprehension killers – Ars Technica.

So, for example, on a slide dedicated to discussing four aspects of a given topic, the relevant text and images can be made to appear gradually, so that each aspect is discussed thoroughly before the next even appears. The alternative, dumping all the information to the screen at once, and then working through it verbally, would seem to have the potential to distract and overwhelm the audience. So, this seems to be a situation where animation should clearly help.

Not so, as it turns out. At least in this study. Students watched identical lectures. The only difference was one had PowerPoint animations and the other didn’t. Both sets increased their scores from the baseline (around 40%) but the non-animated group went up to 82% while the animated group only went up to 71%.

Of course this is just one study, so take it with a grain of salt. But it’s something to keep in mind next time you’re putting a presentation together and have the itch to make it fancy. I know I’ve given in to that temptation myself in the past.

Dueling technology bloggers! I don’t know if one of these was written in response to the other, or if this was coincidental, but it’s kind of amusing either way.

David Coursey from PCWorld.com weighs in with “Five Reasons the Palm Pre Won’t Prevail” (see what he did there? clever, eh?). Unfortunately he doesn’t really have simple one-sentence summaries for each of the 5, so I’ll let you go to the site and read them yourself.

Then we have Jason Hiner over at ZDNet.com giving us “Palm Pre: Five reasons to expect a homerun“. He was considerate enough to give us short versions for each of his points, so I’ll include them here.

5. Palm knows how to build an ecosystem
4. The carriers want an iPhone competitor
3. The webOS will be a strong development platform
2. Touchscreen + Qwerty
1. It is the first true multi-tasking smartphone

Who’s right, who’s wrong? Who can say? Not I. The naysayer has a bit of an odor of iPhanboy about him. An “If it ain’t iPhone, it ain’t worth it” sort of mentality. One commenter had an excellent response, but to keep this brief I’ll quote it in a separate post. Either way, the fact that the Palm Pre is stirring some debate is a good thing for Palm and Sprint, because it means people are talking about it.