Disasters and triage

When more than one thing goes wrong, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. It can be hard to keep calm, sort out what’s most important, and see what needs to be tackled first.  Sometimes you just can’t do everything. How do emergency responders learn to handle these situations? They practice using simulations - disaster exercises.

Back during my early teen years in Pittsburgh, I was in a Boy Scout troop that was part of one of the Prep Pitt exercises. At the Civic Arena I got made up with a realistic looking broken arm. They used modeling clay, chicken bones, and fake blood.  Apparently I had two broken bone ends poking through the skin. An ambulance took me over to Children’s Hospital, where I was bandaged and set aside so my “fracture” could be set later.

A decade later I was being trained as a medic by the Air Force. Everyone in the medical corp began tech school by taking a three week course called Medical Fundamentals that covered medical terminology, anatomy, physiology, first aid, etc.. It ended with a field program. Teams practiced carrying litters over an obstacle course. We learned about terminal ballistics (gunshot wounds). They taught us about triage -  a process for sorting patients into four categories:

The injured who can be helped by IMMEDIATE transport
The injured whose transport can be DELAYED
Those with MINOR injuries, who need help less urgently
The EXPECTANT who are beyond help 

Then they split us into medics and made-up patients for a realistic disaster exercise held at dusk. We ran through drizzle to find an airplane crash scene with a fuselage lit only by burning jet fuel in rows of split oil drums. Patients had been coached to scream and moan. Our only supplies were a jeep trailer with bandages, etc. We tried get the casualties sorted, treated, and away from the fuselage.  

I remember that one man with minimal injuries had been coached to wander around and realistically pester the medics. Three of the biggest medics were deputized to put him out of circulation. They grabbed some straps and a litter, and fastened him to the trunk of the largest tree in the vicinity. Problem solved.

After ten minutes or so our instructors declared that the fuel tanks on the plane had exploded, and everyone within a hundred feet was dead. By then we’d already sorted and removed almost all the patients from harm’s way.

Three years later I was working as a medic at an Air Force Reserve weekend at Greater Pittsburgh International Airport. On Sunday afternoon the crash phone rang. We loaded up our ambulance and joined the fire department and Air National Guard on the edge of the runway. Then we waited for an Air National Guard tanker aircraft to make an emergency landing on a wet runway with two of four engines shut down. They didn’t crash, but we were prepared for it.

Those four triage categories are still used in a common system known as Simple Triage and Rapid Treatment (START). The obscure military usage of the word Expectant was replaced with the word Deceased.

Last week I was listening to Nanci Griffith’s latest CD. The next to the last song is Davey’s Last Picture, which is about New York City firefighter David Halderman, Jr., who was killed at the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001.

The image of an ambulance came from Wikimedia Commons.

Top 50 most common embarrassments for Brits

On September 7th Ladbrokes plc, one of the world’s leading betting and gaming enterprises, released the results from a survey of 2,000 people. They claimed the average person in Great Britain embarrasses himself four times a day. Forgetting people’s names was first, followed by tripping. Other results included that:

“A fifth of respondents have a public speaking nightmare that they’d rather forget – the biggest speaking blunder was having your voice break or squeak high-pitched unexpectedly.
 
The biggest embarrassments were most likely to have been work related for the majority of people, while stories involving things going wrong in front of the in-laws were also very common.
 
One in seven Brits says a relationship ended largely because something embarrassing happened.”
 
Number 50 on the list was having your towel stolen or taken while showering, and this was the subject for a 30-second television commercial with former footballer Chris Kamara.

The Top Fifty most common embarrassments were:

1. Forgetting someone’s name when introducing them

2. Tripping over in public

3. Getting someone’s name wrong

4. Getting food stains/splashes on your top

5. Waving at someone and they don’t see you

6. Getting food stuck in your teeth

7. Thinking someone’s waving at you when they aren’t

8. Being late

9. Forgetting where you parked

10. Burping accidentally


11. Getting lost

12. Having sweat patches

13. Snorting while laughing

14. Flies/ trouser zip being undone

15. Swallowing food the wrong way

16. Talking about someone not knowing they’re in earshot

17. Accidentally texting the wrong person

18. Dropping things in shop/supermarket

19. Someone trying to get in bathroom when you’re using it

20. Stalling your car at traffic lights


21. Running for public transport and it pulling away

22. Being honked at by a car

23. Making an error on the self-checkout

24. Treading in dog muck

25. Wearing odd socks

26. Being ID’d

27. Having bits of food on your face

28. Locking yourself out of the house

29. Getting stuck in clothing while trying it on

30. Getting too drunk at a wedding


31. Forgetting important documents

32. Having lipstick on your teeth

33. Dropping a drink in a pub

34. Treading on someone else’s shoes

35. Accidentally ‘liking’ someone’s Facebook picture you fancy/shouldn’t have looked at

36. Snoring on train

37. Putting clothes on inside out/upside down

38. Walking into lamppost

39. Accidentally calling someone mum/dad

40. Falling off a bike


41. Dribbling while sleeping on train

42. Seeing ink marks on your face

43. Leaving blobs of shaving foam on your face

44. Mum kissing you goodbye in public

45. Getting stuck in revolving doors

46. Accidentally cc’ing someone in an email about them

47. Shared something on social media that was meant to be a private message

48. Socks being tucked into your trousers

49. Accidentally sent a revealing picture to the wrong person

50. Having your towel stolen or taken while showering
 
The image came from a 1914 movie poster.

A memorable quotation from a painting

The Latin inscription at the lower left reads AUT TACE  AUT LOQUERE MELIORA  SILENTIO, which translates to:

“Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.”

The painting is Philosophy (from the 1640s), a self portrait by Salvator Rosa, an Italian baroque painter who lived from 1615 to 1673. Those words originally came from Dionysius of Halicarnassus.

On February 18, 2010 in his  Manner of Speaking blog John Zimmer used it as No. 17 in his series of over 140 Quotes for Public Speakers. 

On March 1st I blogged something similar: Is your presentation more useful than a facial tissue?

The image came from Wikimedia Commons.

PowerPoint Flaws and Failures: Having Your Content Parroted

Late in August I saw the full text to a 22-page article titled PowerPoint® Presentation Flaws and Failures: A Psychological Analysis that had appeared in July in Frontiers in Educational Psychology. That article was written by Stephen M. Kosslyn, Rogier A. Kievet, Alexandra G. Russell, and Jennifer M. Shephard.

It’s very interesting because Stephen M. Kosslyn has previously written a pair of books titled Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations (2007), and Better PowerPoint: Quick Fixes Based on How Your Audience Thinks (2010). 

The article described three different studies. On September 1st in a post on Rules Commonly Broken I discussed the first one, which examined 140 presentations to see if they violated any of a set of 137 rules covering communication principles. On September 2nd in a post on a Survey of Common Flaws and Annoyances I discussed the second one. On September 3rd in a post on Do People Know and Understand What They’re Doing I discussed the third one. 

When I looked on Google I was surprised to find that all three of my posts has been parroted - the entire text had been copied and reposted on other TypePad blogs. My first post had appeared on Buckvvidella’s Blog, Dorsey Emerson’s Blog, and Nathaneal Foster 21’s Blog. My second post had shown up on Delrobles 86’s Blog, Hong Fernandez 19’s Blog, Peckalberto50’s Blog, and Stevens Kieth’s Blog. So far my third post only was on Riederuuin’s Blog. Those reposts did provide a link to my posts, but they did not contain links back to the original article that I had discussed.

I’m not amused by being copied wholesale, which is known as having your content scraped. You can get information either from the horse’s mouth, or out of the other end. Why would you choose the rear end? (The horse came from Wikimedia Commons).

UPDATE September 7, 2012

I was curious if this bait post also would be scraped. Today it showed up on a blog with the curious name of Platonic Best Friend Definition.  

PowerPoint Flaws and Failures: Do People Know and Understand What They’re Doing?

At PubMed Central I recently saw the full text to a 22-page article titled PowerPoint® Presentation Flaws and Failures: A Psychological Analysis that had appeared in July in Frontiers in Educational Psychology. That article was written by Stephen M. Kosslyn, Rogier A. Kievet, Alexandra G. Russell, and Jennifer M. Shephard.

It is of considerable interest because Stephen M. Kosslyn also has previously written a pair of books titled Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations (2007), and Better PowerPoint: Quick Fixes Based on How Your Audience Thinks (2010). The article discusses three different studies.

In this post I will discuss the third one, which had 48 people (27 females and 21 males) look at sixty pairs of “ Do/Don’t” slides to identify which was the correct choice. 41 slides came right from Kosslyn’s 2007 book, and the others were added. Principles (and number of slide pairs covering them) were:

Appropriate knowledge (6) 
Compatibility (8) 
Discriminability (8) 
Informative Changes (8) 
Limited Capacity (8) 
Perceptual Organization (7) 
Relevance (8) 
Salience (7) 

A bar chart shows the percent of incorrect choices made between the Do and Don’t slide pairs. (Click on the chart to see a larger, clearer version). The wrong choice was made on average 20.5% of the time (or one out of five times). Participants did best at identifying slides for the principle of Appropriate Knowledge (6.6% wrong), and worst for both Compatibility and Salience (28.9% wrong).

What is the chance that a presentation with ten slides will have all of them correct? It’s 0.795 raised to the tenth power, or 0.1008. So, there’s only a 10% chance of getting a completely correct one.

Another bar chart shows the percentage of correct choices where the explanation for that choice was wrong. The wrong explanation was made on average 16.8% of the time (or one out of six times). Participants did best at explaining slides for the principle of Appropriate Knowledge (10.8% wrong), and worst for Informative Changes (21.8% wrong).

This study showed that a significant minority of people do not really know (20.5%) or understand (16.8%) how to use PowerPoint effectively. Perhaps at work they just were handed a 10 Minute Guide, and turned loose to struggle with the software.

PowerPoint Flaws and Failures: Survey of Common Flaws and Annoyances

At PubMed Central I saw the full text to a 22-page article titled PowerPoint® Presentation Flaws and Failures: A Psychological Analysis that had appeared in July in Frontiers in Educational Psychology. That article was written by Stephen M. Kosslyn, Rogier A. Kievet, Alexandra G. Russell, and Jennifer M. Shephard.

It’s of considerable interest because Stephen M. Kosslyn also has previously written a pair of books titled Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations (2007), and Better PowerPoint: Quick Fixes Based on How Your Audience Thinks (2010).

The article describes three different studies. Yesterday I discussed the first one, about commonly broken rules. In this post I will discuss the second one, which was an online survey of 205 adults, (112 females, 83 males, and 10 who didn’t report their gender).

Participants were asked 42 questions divided among the following seven topics:

Appropriate Knowledge - 8 
Compatibility - 3 
Discriminability - 5 
Informative Change - 2 
Limited Capacity - 7 
Relevance - 12 
Salience - 4 

There also was one question about an unprepared speaker.

For each question the participants were asked to provide two rankings. The first was the proportion of presentations that had that flaw, as ranked on a zero to four scale where:

0 = None
1 =  Some 
2 = Half 
3 = Many 
4 = Virtually all 

The top ten most prevalent flaws (and their average ratings) were:

1. Presentation failed to convey a meaningful message because the main point was obscured by lots of irrelevant detail. (1.363) 

2. Slides contained too much material to absorb before the next slide was presented. (1.356)

3. Speaker read word-for-word from notes or from the slides themselves. (1.348)

4. Speaker did not inject any humor or illustrations to lighten complex material. (1.299) 

5. Speaker did not use a pointer or otherwise direct audience attention to important details on the slides. (1.279)  

6. Speaker went through the presentation too slowly. (1.265)

7. Speaker presented slides with a lot of text and then proceeded to talk while the audience was trying to read. (1.255)

8. Speaker used too much jargon. (1.249)

9. Speaker assumed the audience knew more than it did. (1.205)

10. Presentation failed to convey a meaningful message because not enough information was provided to support the main point. (1.201).

The second ranking, on a zero to three scale, was about the degree to which that problem bothered or annoyed them where:

0 = Not at all 
1 = Somewhat 
2 = A fair amount 
3 = Extremely annoying

The top ten most annoying flaws (and their average ratings) were:

1. Presentation failed to convey a meaningful message because the main point was obscured by lots of irrelevant detail. (1.340)

2. Speaker read word-for-word from notes or from the slides themselves. (1.315)

3. Presentation failed to convey a meaningful message because not enough information was provided to support the main point. (1.274)

4. Speaker went through the presentation too slowly. (1.262)

5. Slides contained too much material to absorb before the next slide was presented. (1.225)

6. Slides had text or graphics that were too small to see clearly. (1.195)

7. Presentation failed to convey a meaningful message because there was no main point. (1.170)

8. Speaker was talking about a topic that the audience did not care about. (1.162)

9. Speaker went over the allotted time (or rushed to finish in time). (1.117)

10. Speaker presented slides with a lot of text and then proceeded to talk while the audience was trying to read. (1.116)

Detailed results are shown in the Appendix to the magazine article. This survey provides a different perspective than Dave Paradi’s 2011 survey and 2009 survey, which had larger sample sizes but reported results from fewer questions.

PowerPoint Flaws and Failures: Rules Commonly Broken

Sometimes you can find an excellent recent magazine article that’s been completely ignored (so far) by all the bloggers posting at Alltop Speaking. A few days ago when I looked under PowerPoint at PubMed Central I saw the full text to a 22-page article titled PowerPoint® Presentation Flaws and Failures: A Psychological Analysis that had appeared in July in Frontiers in Educational Psychology. That article was written by Stephen M. Kosslyn, Rogier A. Kievet, Alexandra G. Russell, and Jennifer M. Shephard.

 It’s of considerable interest because Stephen M. Kosslyn also has previously written a pair of books titled Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations (2007), and Better PowerPoint: Quick Fixes Based on How Your Audience Thinks (2010).

 The article discusses three different studies. In this post I will discuss the first one, which examined 140 presentations to see if they violated any of a set of 137 rules covering the following communication principles:

Appropriate knowledge (7 rules) 
Compatibility (19) 
Discriminability (25) 
Informative Changes (8) 
Limited Capacity (15) 
Perceptual Organization (17) 
Relevance (19) 
Salience (12) 
“Over-Determined” (17) 

Table 1 of the article lists of all the rules, and the proportion (or percentage) of presentations that violated each one. Ten of these rules were broken by over 50% of the presentations. The top ten (and their percentages) were:

1. Bulleted items are not presented individually, growing the list from the top to the bottom. (95.7%)

2. More than two lines are used per bulleted sentence. (91.4%) 

3. More than four bulleted items appear in a single list. (91.4%) 

4. Hierarchical organization of lists is not used, with no more than four items at each level. (85.7%) 

5. All uppercase, all italics, or all bold typefaces are used. (80.7%) 

6. Visual or auditory characteristics change even when they do not signal a change in information. (72.1%) 

7. Words are not large enough (i.e., greater than 20 point) to be easily read. (66.4%) 

8. There is no crisp ending to signal that the presentation, or a given part, is over. (64.3%) 

9. Deep, heavily saturated blue is used for text or graphics. (55.0%) 

10. Entries in a table are too small to be read easily. (51.4%) 


Another ten rules were broken by about a third of the presentations. These are:

11. Bullets do not introduce topic sentences/phrases or specific cases. (47.1%) 

12. Underlining is used. (46.4%) 

13. Colors shimmer. (42.1%) 

14. Photos and clipart become too grainy when inserted into the slide. (41.4%) 

15. Either more or less detail than required for the point is presented. (37.9%) 

16. Serif and sans serif are mixed arbitrarily. (37.1%) 

17. Red and blue are used in adjacent regions. (35.7%) 

18. Non-standard or unfamiliar display formats are used. (34.3%) 

19. Different colors are not being used for emphasis or to specify. (32.9%) 

20. The most important content element is not the most salient. (32.1%) 

A pair of bar charts shown above list the 34 rules (by category) that were broken by 15% or more (roughly one-sixth) of the presentations. (Click on a chart to see a larger, clearer version). That’s 25 percent, the commonly broken rules, so you can apply the Pareto Principle to fix what you’ve been doing.

Table 2 of the article lists what proportion (or percentage) of those communication principles were broken by presentations in five categories: Business, Research, Government, Education, and Miscellaneous. For all categories, 100% of the presentations violated principles of both Disciminability and Limited Capacity.

Results from this study provide an excellent guide for improving your presentations. If you’d like to read even more how and why, then go to Amazon and buy the Kindle editions of both of Stephen Kosslyn’s books.

UPDATE September 30, 2012

It took a while, but Gavin McMahon, whose Make a Powerful Point blog is linked to at Alltop Speaking, also discussed the article in a series of three posts titled This is Your Brain on PowerPoint:

Part 1, September 24th

Part 2, September 25th

Part 3, September 26th