I did a lousy presentation with Keynote the other day, but consoled myself by inventing a new game: Powerpointwacking. Choose a subject at random, insert it in Google along with "ppt" and 9 out of 10 Powerpoint shows you locate will be utter crap.

Home > Presentation Skills/Keynote > I did a lousy presentation with Keynote the other day, but consoled myself by inventing a new game: Powerpointwacking. Choose a subject at random, insert it in Google along with "ppt" and 9 out of 10 Powerpoint shows you locate will be utter crap.

Date Created: 18 Feb, 2006, 06:34 PM

I gave a presentation the other day using Keynote 3.

It was to a group of mental health practitioners who I am guessing are not particularly used to a Keynote-type show - more the overhead transparency, sloppy Powerpoint presentation kind of crowd.

So I was confident my subject knowledge would exceed their's and my presentation utilising many of the things I think best makes for a solid presentation would be in place. Things like using high quality pictures, fun movies, minimal but extremely clear text, and appropriate and "tasteful" transitions and slide builds with which to get me over the line with a group I expected to be highly demanding.

I used a Keynote stack from a previous talk as my foundation then introduced new slides and hid old ones so as to localise the talk. In the end, there were some 50 slides for a 45 minute talk. And some of those slides had multiple builds.

I kept to the previous talk's delivery method of dividing the subject into a story with a beginning, middle and end. Actually, more like a 3-act play with a preface, the preface being how mental health practitioners are slow on the uptake when it comes to using new technologies, whereupon I showed them the slide top left which is about all a practitioner needs to get started. Other health practitioners like dentists, optometrists, physiotherapists and other specialist medical practitioners must spend large sums of money or simply join an existing practice as an associate to access expensive tools of the trade.

From there, I discussed the trickle down effect of technology: how early adopters pay through the nose to use new technologies while others continue using old but familiar, until the new stuff reaches sufficient development and critical mass to make it widely acceptable and affordable to the masses. Witness the iPod and how it was seen as overpriced for a 5GB hard drive, before most saw it as a digital music device.

Expensive anti-skid brakes started out on commercial aircraft, before they filtered down to Mercedes and BMW, thence to GM, Ford and the Japanese car makers.

I spoke of expensive digital cameras for the passionate hobbyist or professional newspaper/magazine photostoryteller showing the early way forward, so that now at the American Toy Fair in Manhattan, we are seeing special kiddies digital cameras (with viewfinders and hand controls specially sized for the mitts and eyes of 3-6 year old), and costing US$75. Such is progress (right).

This preface set the stage for my discussing new technologies filtering down from aviation, military, and industrial training into the clinician's office to the point where they were affordable and could show similar results to standard well-tested procedures. But these technologies had advantages for clinicians who were willing to go the expense and ramp up their technology prowess.

I had high quality images, videos, and really current materials to back my claims, as well as provide a stimulating and alternative lunchtime presentation.

It was not to be, as you will likely have gathered by now.

For days before, I had debated with myself if the 3-act storyline was in the right order. Should I take people through a sequence of how current clinical problems are addressed (something with which I felt they would be familiar) and remind them of their shortcomings, and then set up the reasoning for exploring the use of technologies? Or should I leap in and discuss the technologies first, with definitions, some non-clinical examples then make the case for clinical useage?

I was guessing, as well as using the experience of the last time I had offered a similar presentation to guide me. In the end, I chose unwisely.

The talk did not get off to a good start. I arrived on time with 15 minutes to spare to do an equipment check and make sure lighting and sound were appropriate. But there were a few problems. People knew me and knew of me and insisted on coming uo and saying hullo while I was fiddling with equipment. Very hard to do justice to both simultaneously.

Secondly, the video projector was ancient, and I could not get the Powerbook's DVI-VGA connection to work. Just as well I also had the S-video cable as a backup as that did the job.

Unfortunately, the projector's quality was poor such that one of the visual illusions I had selected to demonstrate a key point - the study of visual illusions in psychology remains central, if not more important than ever - was badly rendered.

Why the need to study illusions?

Well, its study certainly forms the bedrock of making psychology a science unto itself, rather than as most people think of it, as a health subject, an art and craft more than a science.

I used a number of trompe l'oeil pictures, including the original painting by van Hoostraten (1664).

...and then selected some environmental illusions

This is a parking lot in Christchurch, New Zealand. Kiwis seem to like to fool and be fooled it seems.

And then I showed a more classical illusion, the sort of thing you see in psychologist textbooks.

The inner circle is meant to be seen revolving one way, the outer the other way.

(I got this example from a great blog by a couple of cognitive psychologists over on Cognitive Daily, who seemed surprised to learn that about 20% of their readers use Macs, far removed from the 3% market share so commonly used in Apple-based discussions.)

I used the new Keynote "Fall" transition to move to the next slide which was a picture of the remains of an Air New Zealand DC-10 which crashed in Antarctica in 1979. The "Fall" transition was chosen to add impetus to the discussion, moving from something light and fluffy (the optical illusion) to the piece of aircraft within which over 230 people had perished.

What's the connection? Well, I wanted to dramatically display the relevance of understanding how our senses can be deceived even when we know they are! So even though you know the two circles in the visual illusion above are not moving, you can't help but see this to be the case - for most people.

But what happens if you don't know you're looking at an illusion?

Huh?

In the DC-10 situation, where the-then state-of-the-art Inertial Navigation System (INS)had been programmed with co-ordinates or waypoints for the trip, it turned out that wrong co-ordinates had been entered - twice. The second one was an attempt to fix the first once the error, which had been in the Air New Zealand computers for many months, was discovered during a random check. The first error was small enough not to have caused much concern during the many flights to Antarctica for sight-seeing purposes. But its correction did introduce a much larger error, a typographical one rather than one of miscalculation, such that it plotted a direct line to Mt. Erebus, a volcanic mountain, 12,000 feet high. How the error was not picked up in an airline that used a "Check, Cross-check and re-check" safety system was closely focussed upon during the ensuing the Royal Commission (think Katrina Congressional Hearings).

Amongst the litany of errors, the flight crew were not informed of the changes and so used old waypoints to plot their own charts, expecting they would follow previous flights' trip co-ordinates. On their own charts, they plotted the route they expected to take, and there was evidence given to the court that the Captain was seen doing this the night before by one of his two daughters who watched him do the plotting and studying.

During the course of the flight, weather conditions altered and visual acknowledgment of the terrain became difficult, even with a very experienced Antarctic explorer, a good mate of Sir Edmund Hillary, on the flight deck. Checking the waypoints against maps and the view outside (as heard on the recovered Cockpit Voice Recorder or CVR - one type of so-called "black-box") proved troublesome.

The situation was not helped because the pilots had not been told of the waypoint corrections which the plane followed and which placed them on a direct course to Mt. Erebus. The view outside seemed to confirm what they expected to see if they had been on the uncorrected course, which was many miles to one side - or so they thought - of the mountain.

The astute reader, who knows nothing of this incident, will have two obvious questions in his or her head.

- How do you miss seeing a 12,000 foot mountain?

- Even if the crew were having a jolly good time, and had their eyes off the sky surely the radar would pick up the mountain and issue a warning in time to pull up or away?

The latter is easily dealt with, although it presented an initial degree of perplexity to the Royal Commission. The radar had two mapping modes, weather and terrain. You can set the terrain-mapping option by aiming the radar dish, in the aircraft's nose, downwards, so that it sweeps the ground terrain. Any reflections will give a return on the radar something like a contour map you see on weather forecasts. A second radar system is installed on the aircraft's belly and is used for accurate height readouts during the final landing phase, not during cruise.

The radar had been set to weather-mapping mode, where it detects reflections from water droplets in the air, useful for avoiding thunderstorms. So heading to snowy Mt. Erebus should have returned its outline, and thus triggered avoidance actions. Right?

But the ice on the mountain is very dry, and so no radar returns were noticed. They would have had to know Erebus was dead ahead to put the radar into terrain mode to see it to avoid it - but they thought they were miles away.

(Stay with me - we're getting close...)

But the plane kept flying towards Erebus with the crew becoming concerned about the deteriorating weather and visibility. They were calm, thinking there were no impediments to their journey, and poor visibility would be like night flying - just utilise the INS co-ordinates to make the return journey.

But the visibility became worse and a visual illusion well-known to polar expeditions was experienced without them knowing it was occurring. This is the phenomenon known as White-Out.

Here's the Wikipedia definition:

"In clear air conditions, when there is no snow falling, diffuse lighting from overcast cloud may cause all surface definition to disappear. It becomes impossible to tell how far away the snowy surface is. In polar regions (and in eg the Scottish Hills in winter) this optical illusion can make whole snow-covered mountains invisible against the background white cloud, and the horizon cannot be identified, slopes cannot be judged for steepness, and snow surfaces cannot be seen. It is only when a dark or coloured object is placed on a snowy surface that the surface can be seen at all."

Without any radar return, and thinking they were miles from the mountain, with the view outside seeming to match what they expected to see given the course co-ordinates they thought they were following, they flew straight at the mountain.

At almost collision point, the low altitude radar kicked in, causing a well-practised and reflexive "Go Around" manoeuvre to be called for by the Captain with the on-board computer system enunciating "Pull up! Pull up!"

Power was applied to the engines, but to no avail and at very high speed, the DC-10 hit Mt. Erebus about 1,500 foot up its slopes.

This is why we still need to study illusions, and was the point of these slides, and my writing about it here.

Indeed, we need to study illusions more than ever, because the Erebus disaster informed the aviation community (who saw the Royal Commission almost as a model of investigative procedures - initially, it had been put down solely to Pilot Error by New Zealand's Chief Investigator of Air Accidents) of the dense matrix of causative factors, and how visual illusions are ever-present traps for the unwary.

In this case, we see what we expect to see and new information is accepted through this filter of expectancy.

(I'll soon be doing a podcast with a former Professor of mine who gave expert witness testimony to the Royal Commission on Whiteout and who's story hasn't yet been told. There is still controversy surrounding the case, as a number of individuals protested to the Privy Council over what they saw as unsupported conclusions reached by the Royal Commissioner).

Psychologists have studied this phenomenon of expectation for more than 50 years, and in some ways, is the underlying theory behind the so-called iPod halo effect. With the expectation that the iPod is a great product from Apple, so will other Apple products be great, so let's visit an Apple store and check it out, rather than accept the Windows status quo.

Who knows if the halo aspects of the iPod phenomenon was ever part of an original Steve Jobs' plan, but I think once it started to happen, Apple recognised the possibilities, and really pushed it along with its marketing expertise. Introducing the Shuffle on the back of the hard drive iPod's success only served to careen the halo effect down further to another mass market who wanted to play in the iTunes candy store (the music store cards soon followed, negating the need for a credit card and parental supervision).

Governments have been known to use the same kind of illusory behaviour, seeing things which aren't there but basing actions on evidence that ordinarily wouldn't make the grade. But once your mind is made up - perhaps misled by those you trust or whose affections you crave - further evidence piles up in favour of what you expect to see. It's a form of Emperor's Clothes, where only the simple child not party to the community-based illusory phenomenon is willing to point at and laugh at the nude Emperor.

By the way, some of the environmental trompe l'eoil pictures above achieve their effect if seen from one viewpoint only, a process known as anamorphosis. Approach the picture from another angle reveals the painter's talents to deceive!

So it's important to walk around the subject matter and explore it from different angles before you make up your mind. If you only ever see things from one viewpoint, you can easily be fooled into seeing things not as they truly are.

Back to my Keynote presentation...

These were some of the thoughts that went through my mind as I prepared my talk. Setting limits on the knowledge to be conveyed within a short amount of time is harder sometimes than having too little information, and on this occasion I was too inclusive and not centred enough on the central topic which was part of the presentation's title.

Things were not helped by the failure of my second Sony-Ericsson bluetooth phone within a year (they just die), and I had hoped to use its Salling Clicker software to advance the slides, rather than being stuck at the podium.

So I dug up my old Keyspan infrared remote during the week and located its most recent software and lo and behold it worked. Just three more pieces of equipment I usually don't carry to pack away: the remote unit, the receiver, and its USB cable.

It worked OK, but what I didn't realise I was doing during the course of my talk was tightly holding the remote while I was waving my arms about emphasising the current slide's point.

Or what I thought was the current slide.

Like the Erebus pilots thinking they knew where they were at all times, I thought I was on slide 15. But I was unknowingly pressing the remote's advance button, and behind me and out of my sight the slides were advancing on their own and increasingly perplexing fashion to a mildly amused audience.

I had been using Keynote in Presenter mode, where the current and next slide are simultaneously displayed, but because I'd moved in front of the Powerbook, its screen was out of view. Only when I turned to point at the projected display, did I realise i was 10 minutes ahead of myself!

In my excitement, I committed a form of Presentation suicide - I pushed the reverse button on the remote and manually stepped back through the slides to where I thought I had been speaking.

This is a Presentation no-no, just like dropping out of the show and skipping slides if time is running short. It destroys any sense of audience immersion.

What I should have done (lessons learnt for you and me both) is move to the keyboard, typed in a number of an earlier slide (a guesstimate) and Keynote would have shown me it and the slide either side of it so I could select it and start over, without ever leaving the show (See screen shot below for example). You can also enter the slide number you want to go to if you know it, or want to take a guess.

Thus, in a really critical presentation, where even if something goes wrong, you want to minimize futzing around in your recovery, best to print out a copy of the slides as a PDF, in colour, and with each slide numbered so you can easily leap to a chosen slide without much effort or delay. Keep it by the Powerbook but out of audience sight. Otherwise, know your slides backwards and forwards to best guess what number it is.

In this way, Keynote is quite forgiving, but I must say in Keynote 3 the transition from one slide to the next seems out of synch with my key pressing, as if some delay is present. Naturally, I shut down all other applications while in show mode, unless I need to use them during the show, in which case the H and Expose (F11) keys are very handy.

But those apps which poll the network in the background and chew up CPU cycles are a drain and will cause lag it seems. So Mail, which is a real culprit, is left unopened, as well as any chat and Bit Torrent apps. Airport is switched off too.

And I always make sure now to check the Energy Saver preference to make sure it's set to Highest Performance.

What did I do after my session, with its lukewarm applause which told me I didn't hit my marks? I went back and went through the slides, reconstructing the show to better reflect what I thought would have been a better presentation and saved it. Lots of culling and tweaking and re-ordering.

Then I checked my email to find a university counselling service, who, of all the suggested topics for a continuing education program, had asked for a 2 hour Presentation Skills workshop, with a special emphasis on avoiding Death by Powerpoint.

What I did wasn't Death by Keynote, and the software served me well. But the episode did serve me well to remind me to do more research about the intended audience, be particularly fierce with eliminating "oh you're so clever slides and builds" and think again about story telling and narratives.

Which is to say, do more research and thinking about how best to tell a story. The tools exist with Keynote, Safari and Camino (where you can just drag and drop jpgs into Keynote) as well as Google Image to locate high quality pictures of whatever you want.

Then I cheered myself up and started preparation for the University presentation by randomly selecting a subject (I chose Door handles), typed it into Google along with the letters ppt to denote Powerpoint, then watched as Google returned scores of results. I picked one or two at random to prove a point I'm going to make at the upcoming talk: That 9 times out of 10, when you choose a Powerpoint slideshow from Google almost at random, it will be crap.

And you know what, having done this a few times since, I have every confidence that when I do this in my presentation (I'll let the paying customers suggest the topics so it doesn't look like a setup) I will find some awful Powerpoints to illustrate the salient points I'll be making.

Try it - you've heard of Googlewacking; this is Powerpointwacking.

It was a great form of solo debriefing. I felt a lot better afterwards.