Shouldn't acronyms be pronounceable?

On April 3rd there was a press release titled NASA Awards Contract to Build Quieter Supersonic Aircraft which said:

“NASA has taken another step toward re-introducing supersonic flight with the award Tuesday of a contract for the design, building and testing of a supersonic aircraft that reduces a sonic boom to a gentle thump.

Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company of Palmdale, California, was selected for the Low-Boom Flight Demonstration contract, a cost-plus-incentive-fee contract valued at $247.5 million. Work under the contract began April 2 and runs through Dec. 31, 2021.

Under this contract, Lockheed Martin will complete the design and fabrication of an experimental aircraft, known as an X-plane, which will cruise at 55,000 feet at a speed of about 940 mph and create a sound about as loud as a car door closing, 75 Perceived Level decibel (PLdB), instead of a sonic boom.”

But, of course, Lockheed Martin referred to the aircraft by the unpronounceable acronym LBFD.

I think whoever at NASA came up with the name and acronym should have first run it past a person in their mythical Office Of Pronounceable Spellings (OOPS). The guy or gal in that office would have objected to that acronym, and told them to come up with something pronounceable – like QUAC (Quiet Unobtrusive Aerial Craft). If it’s a QUAC, then it sounds no louder than a duck quacking (rather than a car door closing).

Speech evaluation rubrics: how many levels should be on the scale, and which way should it point?

Back on May 8, 2010 I blogged about Rubrics and figuring out where you are. The fourth Merriam-Webster dictionary definition for a rubric is:

“a guide listing specific criteria for grading or scoring academic papers, projects or tests”

An evaluation rubric includes several questions about both content and delivery, which are scored on some sort of a scale. How many levels should be on the scale? At least two, but would either three, four, or five be better, as is shown above. What names should be given to those levels?

A week ago on LinkedIn at The Official Toastmasters International Members Group ChenKeat Fan posted on Evaluation sheet for evaluator in Pathways: what’s your opinion of its usefulness? So far there have been over twenty comments (including one from me). He complained that having to quantify on a 1 to 5 scale is cumbersome as compared to the previous scale with three levels. (But Toastmasters actually used a five-level scale before in their course on The Art of Effective Evaluation).

I got curious and looked up some history about speech evaluations. Back in 1981 there was a 47-page booklet by Douglas G. Bock and E. Hope-Bock on Evaluating Classroom Speaking. You can download it as Document ED 214 213 on the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) web site. That booklet ends with a section showing 13 sample evaluation forms. The preceding section on constructing an evaluation instrument discusses the topic of Controlling Rating Errors on page 22. It says that:

“The error of central tendency can be controlled by the number of scale values used on the continuum. For example, if only three numbers are use, most raters are going to use the middle category. It has been found that a five-step scale usually results in three steps being used. A seven-step scale uses about four. A ten-step scale usually produces five. One way to get raters to use more of the scale is to have more steps.”

A second question is which way the scale should run. As shown above, graphs displayed with Cartesian coordinates typically have an x-axis using the right-hand rule, but the left-hand rule also could be used. A scale with the right-hand rule would have the worst category at the left, and the best at the right. Since we read English from left to right, there might be a primacy effect where we would overuse that left category. Those using languages read from right to left (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, or Urdu) might have a different bias than English speakers.

A third question is where the scale should start, as shown above. Should there be a zero? Some might object that it should begin at 1, since we all are heroes - not zeroes. One way to organize a speech evaluation form with five levels is to alternately list a question and the scale (so the score for it can be circled). Other pages of the form can show details of what those five levels mean.

One well-known rubric is The NCA Competent Speaker Speech Evaluation Form (2nd edition, 2007) from the U. S. National Communication Association, as shown above. It is described in a 49-page Acrobat .pdf file you can download free from their web site. This rubric lists eight competencies – four for Content and four for Delivery (in four columns) rated on a right-hand rule axis with three levels: Unsatisfactory, Satisfactory, or Excellent. I have numbered them 0, 1, 2 – although the form omits that detail but nevertheless has a bottom row for General Comments and a Summative Score. The form also has a three-page explanation for those competencies. There is another NCA Competent Speaker Holistic Speech Evaluation Form that combines each set of four into just two categories labeled Preparation and Content, and Presentation and Delivery.  

In 2012 Communication Education magazine had an article by Lisa M. Schreiber, Gregory D. Paul, and Lisa R. Shibley titled The Development and Test of the Public Speaking Competence Rubric (PSCR) which you can download. As shown above, this rubric has eleven categories rated on a left-hand rule axis numbered from 4 to 0 and titled 4 = Advanced, 3 = Proficient, 2 =Basic, 1 = Minimal, or 0 = Deficient. You also can download a single-page Table with a detailed explanation for each item. I blogged about the PSCR in a July 9, 2012 post titled A new scale (rubric) for evaluating speeches.

   

In their Success Communication series, Toastmasters International has a two-hour course titled The Art of Effective Evaluation (Item 251). It has an Individual Speech Evaluation Form (Item 251D), which you can find at the end of a handout for it from the Park City club. As shown above, the form has 12 explicit categories (and room for two optional ones). The right-hand rule axis has five levels which from left to right are labeled 1 = Needs Considerable Improvement, 2 = Needs Some Improvement, 3 = Acceptable, 4 = Very Good, 5 = Excellent. The form is organized into three columns. Each row has a Category, followed by a Rating (1 to 5) and Recommendations for Improvement.   

In the new Pathways educational program from Toastmasters International, speeches are evaluated using a three-page form. The first page has a Purpose Statement, Notes for the Evaluator, and General Comments (with three categories – You excelled at, You may want to work on, and To challenge yourself). As shown above for the Icebreaker Speech, the second page in the form has seven categories on a left-hand rule axis with five levels labeled from left to right as 5 = Exemplary, 4 = Excels, 3 = Accomplished, 2 = Emerging, and 1 = Developing. Although those labels are  explained in detail on the third page of that form, I think they are way more obscure than those used in the PSCR.

As is shown above, perhaps a more honest revised set of labels would be 5 = Outstanding, 4 = Excellent, 3 = Good, 2 = Fair, and 1 = Poor (or Poop). Other evaluation guides from Pathways are discussed on a web page at UmErYouKnow with a link to a list of them.     

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Fearless public speaking is a reality, not a myth

In a recent blog post at Corporate Communication Experts titled The Myth of Fearless Public Speaking, Peter Dhu claimed:

“With fear so prevalent and so debilitating do people ever get to a position of fearless public speaking? I personally think not and I think the concept of public speaking with no fear is indeed a myth.  Mark Twain said ‘there were two types of speakers; those with nerves and those that were liars’.”

Are there really people who are not afraid at all of public speaking? How might we answer that question? We could ask a random national sample of over a thousand adults how much they feared it and give them a choice of several levels (like Very Afraid, Afraid, Somewhat Afraid, Not Afraid At All). Has something that ever been done? Heck yes!

On December 20, 2016 I blogged about Bursting the overblown claim that 95% of Americans fear public speaking at some level. In that post I included a horizontal bar chart showing results from the 2014, 2015, and 2016 Chapman Survey of American Fears, and 2014 YouGov surveys of both Britain and the U.S. The table shown above list those results for Not Afraid At All, and adds that from the 2017 Chapman Survey. Roughly one or two out of five adults is fearless. (The percentage from the 2017 Chapman survey is 5.5% higher than the average [36.4%] for the other three, and the raw data is no longer available online and therefore perhaps slightly suspect).

The green traffic light was adapted from Wikimedia Commons.

Update April 5, 2018

Similarly, in an article titled Get Over Public Speaking Anxiety posted on April 1, 2018 by Barbara Busey at her Presentation Dynamics web site she opened by claiming that:

“The fear of public speaking – whether little butterflies in the stomach or full out panic – is almost a universal experience.”

Perhaps that was an April Fool’s Day joke. Perhaps not.  

 

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Do you have any idea who you are talking to?

Many articles about public speaking mention that you should know your audience. It also is important to know if an audience member (or someone else you speak with) is an expert with a capital E – the guy who ‘wrote the book’ on a subject.  

While in graduate school in fall 1973, I took a course on Mechanical Behavior of Materials. There was a quiet, older student who the professor, Jack Low, had addressed just as Gil. One day Jack was lecturing on fracture toughness testing. He casually asked Gil about how one test method had been developed by a committee of the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM). Then we realized from Gil’s detailed reply that he really was J. G. (John Gilbert) Kaufman from the research lab of the Aluminum Company of America (aka Alcoa). Most of us knew of him as the author of many magazine articles and several ASTM books called Special Technical Publications (STPs) that were collections of presentations made at their conferences. Gil had worked at Alcoa for almost two decades. He had started there after getting a B.S. and M.S. in Civil Engineering. But he wanted to learn more about metallurgy, so he was working part time on a second M.S. degree.  

In the late 1970s I worked at the Climax Molybdenum Company research lab in Ann Arbor, Michigan. One afternoon I was surprised to see Rick Zordan, who I’d known in graduate school. Rick told me about his faux pas. He had arranged to visit the lab to use our Quantimet 720 image analyzing computer. Rick was working in Kokomo, Indiana – doing research on wear resistant weld-overlay materials similar to tool steels. When he’d mentioned tool steels, the guy who arranged use of the Quantimet said you have to meet Dick Johnson (our tool steel R & D guy), and took him over to Dick’s office. Rick repeatedly referred to a standard reference book he’d been reading by the last name of the first author, Roberts. Finally Dick couldn’t stand it anymore. He turned his desk chair around, to face his bookshelf, and pulled out a book. Dick said look, this is the third edition (1962) of Tool Steels by Roberts, Hamaker, and Johnson – and I’m Johnson. Oops! But then he and Rick wound up happily discussing how data from a Quantimet could be used to relate microstructure with properties. Dick had co-authored some articles on that topic, and also knew what else had been done by others.  

In the mid 1990s I heard about a deposition in a civil court case involving the crash of a sports car. After it had settled, a mechanical engineer told me the story. The defendant manufacturer had hired Donald J. Wulpi as their metallurgy expert. (Don had worked in the lab at International Harvester for three decades, and written a series of Metal Progress magazine articles about failure analysis which in 1966 were compiled into a 56-page booklet titled How Components Fail). The plaintiff sent an unprepared, inexperienced attorney to Ft. Wayne, Indiana and he deposed Don in a meeting room of a hotel at the airport. He asked Mr. Wulpi a standard question - if he’d referred to any reference materials while preparing his opinion. Then Don started citing page numbers, and said they were from a more detailed 262-page book he’d written in 1985 - Understanding How Components Fail. (That standard reference book currently is in its third edition). The perplexed attorney asked him where he could obtain that book. Don said he had a stack of them in the trunk of his car, and could sell him one for $55! (I took the five-day ASM Principles of Failure Analysis course from Don in the late 1980s).

On January 1, 2012 I blogged about how you should Resolve to anticipate “shoelace failures” and plan around them. In the first chapter of his book Donald J. Wulpi talked about failures that were just what you would expect to find. Last April in her blog on failure analysis at Industrial Heating Debbie Aliya wrote about how when she discussed that example in Pune, India the audience just gave her very perplexed looks. Then she looked at their feet, and saw all of them were wearing open sandals rather than lace-up shoes!  

Flogging a dead horse

Last week there was a post by David M. Thornton at LinkedIn on The Official Toastmasters International Members Group titled This Person Gives Three Reasons Why She Is Not A Toastmaster. So far it has generated almost 50 comments by upset and angry Toastmasters, including a half-dozen by David defending himself for posting about that slide show.

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry at that situation. Jeanne Trojan had posted Three reasons I’m not a Toastmaster at Slideshare way back on February 27, 2011. The next day she blogged about it at Outstanding Presentations, where I made the first comment. I linked to my April 25, 2011 blog post titled Taking potshots at Toastmasters International. Jeanne now has another web site that doesn’t even bother to link to that 2011 Slideshare, which already has a huge list of comments. Adding to them now is a senseless waste of time (the Wikipedia definition for Flogging a dead horse).

It would make more sense for defensive members to restrict their Bing or Google searches to recent articles or blog posts about Toastmasters. In Bing you just can click on Any time and click on Past month, or select a Custom range. In Google, click on Tools and change from Any time to Past year or Past month.

Making negative comments about Toastmasters International is an obvious way for a speech coach or writer to get noticed. I have posted about some of them. The most recent is Charles Crawford who I blogged about on January 22, 2018 in a post titled Toastmasters International misevaluated, and again on January 28, 2018 in another post titled Toastmasters International misevaluated again. On July 3, 2016 I blogged about Jane Genova in a post titled Making a mountain out of a molehill about getting a refund from Toastmasters.

A very subtle put down of Toastmasters I recently found skirted British defamation law by

not even mentioning us. In the Spring 2017 issue of The Speaker magazine (from the Association

of Speakers Clubs, the ASC) their National Vice President Eric Baker proclaimed on page 6:

“My understanding of other organisations that offer club membership is they do not all ask people to redo a speech even if it did not reach the required standard. So at the end of say ten speeches someone receives a certificate which is worthless because unlike our system there is no guarantee a member has improved!”  

If you are not familiar with the ASC you can read about their genesis from TCBI here.

The graphic of a dead horse was derived from images of a horse and cart wreck and a cat of nine tails at Openclipart.   

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Don’t trust superficial research

At the Rule The Room Public Speaking blog on March 20th Jason Teteak posted on the Top 10 Fears of Public Speaking which he claimed were the fears of failure, inadequacy, leadership, competition, embarrassment, selling, people, futility, self, and success.

He claimed that:

“Everyone has heard the statistics:

The fear of public speaking is worse than the fear of death.

.…A Gallup poll confirmed that the greatest fear of 40 percent of Americans is public speaking.”

But that poll he talked about without linking to NEVER asked about our greatest fears. It was reported in an article by Geoffrey Brewer on March 19, 2001 titled Snakes Top List of Americans’ Fears where the question was:

“Everybody has fears about different things. But some are more afraid of certain things than others. I'm going to read a list of some of these fears. For each one, please tell me whether you are afraid of it, or not. How about public speaking in front of an audience?”

and the top three answers (most common fears) were:

“A recent Gallup poll that asked adults what they were afraid of reveals that more people -- 51% -- fear snakes than any other suggested possibility, including speaking in public in front of an audience (40%) and heights (36%).”

How about the fear of public speaking being worse than death? Well, I blogged about how the 1973 Bruskin and 1993 Bruskin-Goldring surveys found the fear of public speaking was more common than the fear of death – not worse. What Jason should fear about public speaking is that his research about it was both inadequate and embarrassing.    

The low point for my first job interview trip

It’s spring, and the time when university students go out on job interview trips. I can’t forget a story about one trip with a very low point over four decades ago. That was back in 1977 when I was a Ph.D. student at Carnegie -Mellon University. I had flown to a large city in Oklahoma (perhaps Tulsa, or maybe Oklahoma City) and then was told to take the mid-afternoon 10-passenger company shuttle plane to a small northern city (like Bartlesville or Ponca City) for an interview at a medium-sized oil company. The Iranian-American manager of their materials and corrosion engineering group took me to dinner, and left me at a motel. Early the next morning he took me to headquarters, and I got to meet and talk with several of his engineers.

It seemed they were just going through the motions. One Egyptian engineer who’d graduated from a well-known US university clearly had been hired very recently. (Later I found out that he had filled the position which I interviewed for. Perhaps HR was just burning up their annual recruiting budget.) Right after an early, large lunch in their company cafeteria, someone drove me to the airport and I headed back on the company shuttle. The shuttle flight was relatively bumpy. After I landed I started walking across the asphalt back to the main terminal entrance in direct sunlight. But the combination of a hot day and a queasy stomach were too much for me. I wound up clutching a chain link fence while vomiting up my lunch, and still want to barf whenever I see that company’s logo. (On March 20, 2018 at Forbes there was an article titled The moment I realized my interview was fake – because they already hired someone).

Some advertised jobs aren’t real - they might be called phantoms; some real jobs never are advertised because they get filled via networking. My first job in Ann Arbor came via networking done by the Metallurgical Engineering and Materials Science department head. Robert Sekerka had been talking on the phone about an alumni matter with a manager of the Climax Molybdenum Company lab, William C. Hagel. Then he asked if they had any openings, and was told they were looking for someone to work on sulfide stress cracking (SSC) of alloy steels. Sekerka said, well Garber’s been stinking up the halls with his SSC tests, so you should talk with him. He did, I interviewed, and got the job.

But in between there were two other curious interviews. At Youngstown Sheet & Tube the HR guy was more hostile than a Marine Corps drill sergeant, since he’d been ordered to look for a research guy while they were laying off other operating personnel. Timken research in Canton, Ohio interviewed me too. I was impressed by the facilities, except that all but very senior engineers had their desks in an a huge open ‘bullpen.’ Later I found out that Timken almost never hired fresh PhDs – they preferred instead to send employees hired with less education to Case Western Reserve University part time for their PhDs.