babbling blue

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.

Transfer Jet

Interesting new wireless technology, with a stupid name. It’s a very high speed wireless protocol (375 megabits per second) with very limited range (one inch or less). Link is to a video demo from CES. From David Pogue.

At work we have these giant Xerox Workcenter Pro scanner/copier/printer/etc beasts that do pretty much everything short of making you lunch (unless you’re on the Japanese porn star diet, in which case they do that too). The problem is, they never work worth a damn. They’re always jamming and getting stuck. The one on this part of the floor has had to be “reset” by the Xerox guy at least twice already this week. I know this because I sit about 12 feet away from it and I’ve heard him telling people that it was “. . . resetting, it’ll be about 5 minutes” twice. I can often hear the thing cranking away–”attempting to recover”, according to the display. It’s not clear what it’s attempting to recover from. My guess is a hangover. If these machines are secretly alcoholics, that could go a long way to explaining why they’re so dysfunctional. And loud.
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