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PowerPoint is evil - and funny

I've been doing a lot of work on intercultural presentation skills, and making a lot of PowerPoint slides recently, despite my better judgement. I came across this, which I realise has been linked to extensively already, but it does show how the plain but still beautifully constructed 267 words of the Gettysburg address (which I was using in a training session to illustrate American directness in speech), can be made turgid with PowerPoint. Actually I think Norvig missed a trick with "of/by/for the people". The slashes are hideous, but it could also have been an opportunity for a meaningless graphic with a blob for "the people" and various arrows shooting around - preferably phased per mouse click.

Here's a better use of PowerPoint, sort of, with Clinton's autobiography reduced from 957 pages to five slides by Daniel Radosh at Slate magazine. Clinton seems to have skipped the plain and direct aspects of American communication skills - not even enough 'show and tell' to titillate judging by the reviews.

Unhelpful advice for visitors to London

I recently attributed the 'unhelpful advice for tourists in London - try the famous echo in the British Museum Reading Room' to a New Statesman (UK political magazine) competition. My husband disagreed (ever so nicely of course), saying it came from I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, the long-running BBC Radio 4 comedy programme. I've tried Googling it and it turns out it could even be from Gerard Hoffnung, artist, teacher, cartoonist, caricaturist, musician and tuba player, broadcaster and raconteur - born 1925 in Berlin, died 1959 in London.

1. Evidence for it being Gerard Hoffnung
According to Victor Lewis-Smith
and a site with other unhelpful advice
and Wikipedia

2. Evidence for it being from I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue
Transcript from July 30th 1979 - lots of other unhelpful advice from various editions of the show on this page such as:
It is customary when using the gents lavatory at York station, to greet visitors with a friendly pat on the bottom
If you're visiting Glastonbury, the last weekend in June is quite quiet
The fields around Longleat House are ideal for camping
If you're invited for a game of croquet, it's traditional to give your host a gift of a dozen moles
Millwall fans are known as 'Fairies'
Wales is nice

3. Evidence for it being from a New Statesman competition
Article in the The National Review
From the Tug Boat Potemkin blog who confirms that there was a 1976 New Statesman competition called "Helpful advice for tourists visiting the UK" which included 'London barbers are delighted to shave patrons' armpits' and 'bus conductors like to be paid in 5 and 10 pound notes as they hate carrying heavy coins up and down the stairs', but he does not mention 'try the echo in the Reading Room.'
And from someone who is obviously a fan of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, who says that these are from a New Statesman competion:
Never attempt to tip a taxi driver
Try the famous echo in the strangers' gallery at the House of Commons
Any passer-by is welcome to intervene in a game of cricket

I've found no back up on the web to say that it's the strangers' gallery not the Reading Room... I suppose I'll have to buy all the New Statesman competition compilation books to find out for sure.

The British Museum Reading Room

British surfers confused or nosy?

Netimperative is spinning this story about a survey done by comScore Networks to mean that as British people use search engines more often than other countries, they are confused or lazy about using the net. As a search engine addict, I think it is more about a large number of British people being knowledge workers, and also having a strong tradition of research, as well as being plain old nosy about other people. But then the French, who are also quite 'high context' and therefore like to know the background of people, use search engines significantly less often than the Brits.

They only surveyed five countries, but it was interesting too to note that Google was by far and away the most popular search engine for the UK, France, Germany and Canada, and it was only in the USA that Yahoo was anything like a close second.

Chinese vague censorship

Via BuzzMachine via Many to Many, an article on Chinese censorship,
both on the internet and offline, by Perry Link, of Princeton University.

What I find particularly interesting is his discussion of how Chinese governments have used vagueness, rather than giving specific details, when censoring people:

"Although repression under Jiang Zemin has applied to a narrower range of expression than it did under Deng, its essential methods have changed little from the Deng era. These methods have 'Chinese characteristics'; they have always differed, for example, from those of the Soviet Union. The Soviets published periodic handbooks that listed which specific phrases were out of bounds, and employed a large bureaucracy to enforce the rules. China has never had such a bureaucracy or published any such handbooks. The Chinese Communist Party rejected these more mechanical methods in favor of an essentially psychological control system that relies primarily on self-censorship. Questions of risk - how far to go, how explicit to be, with whom to ally and so on - are moved inside the cerebrums of every individual writer and editor. There are, of course, physical punishments that anchor a person's calculations. If you calculate incorrectly you can lose your job, be imprisoned or, in the worst case, get a bullet in the back of the head."

High context, non-verbal cultures which go 'wrong', (there's probably a more academic, systems analysis way of phrasing this), can lead to these kind of situations where all the burden is placed on the listener, to be 'clever' enough to get the hidden messages, and the listener becomes (rightly) paranoid and stressed.

Mobile tour guides

I expect New York isn't the only place to be introducing something like this - a service that gives you aural tours of the streets delivered to your handset once you key in your destination via a text message. The BBC has done something similar to accompany Peter Ackroyd's wonderful London series on TV.

I could have done with an Amsterdam version when I had a few hours to kill there last week before getting my plane. Not that sitting outside a bar by a canal drinking a beer was such a bad way to pass the time...