How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid

How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid
Author: Franck Frommer
Publisher: New Press, The
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2012-02-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1595587535

With over 500 million users worldwide, Microsoft's PowerPoint software has become the ubiquitous tool for nearly all forms of public presentation—in schools, government agencies, the military, and, of course, offices everywhere. In this revealing and powerfully argued book, author Franck Frommer shows us that PowerPoint's celebrated ease and efficiency actually mask a profoundly disturbing but little-understood transformation in human communication. Using fascinating examples (including the most famous PowerPoint presentation of all: Colin Powell's indictment of Iraq before the United Nations), Frommer systematically deconstructs the slides, bulleted lists, and flashy graphics we all now take for granted. He shows how PowerPoint has promoted a new, slippery “grammar,” where faulty causality, sloppy logic, decontextualized data, and seductive showmanship have replaced the traditional tools of persuasion and argument. How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid includes a fascinating mini-history of PowerPoint's emergence, as well as a sobering and surprising account of its reach into the most unsuspecting nooks of work, life, and education. For anyone concerned with the corruption of language, the dumbing-down of society, or the unchecked expansion of “efficiency” in our culture, here is a book that will become a rallying cry for turning the tide.

How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid

How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid
Author: Franck Frommer
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2012
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1595587020

Reveals that PowerPoint's celebrated ease and efficiency can actually lead to a disturbing transformation in human communication, with implications not only for individuals but also for the culture at large.

Advanced Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007

Advanced Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
Author: Wayne Kao
Publisher: Pearson Education
Total Pages: 573
Release: 2007-12-27
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0132713527

This is the only book that will help an intermediate PowerPoint user improve their skills to an advanced level. In doing so, they can benefit both professionally and personally. This is not a comprehensive book that will bore you with every detail of PowerPoint, but a guide to specific actions you can take to create the ultimate presentation. The book covers the powerful formatting engine new to PowerPoint 2007, and how it can be used for applying soft shadows, reflection, and glows to make a presentation look attractive. It also covers PowerPoint's new 3D engine. The book goes into deep technical detail about the Office 2007 theme engine and how color schemes, effect schemes, and font schemes work; as well as the new PowerPoint XML file format, showing you how to edit PowerPoint files without using PowerPoint at all. The authors walk through programming a macro and explain how to format shapes, diagrams, charts, text, tables with gradient and picture fills and different kinds of lines (e.g. a beveled compound line with a diamond arrowhead). Also covered are those all important slide show shortcuts that few people know about like -- seeing your private notes while presenting on a projector, starting the slide show from the current slide without fumbling through the user interface, and how to black out the slide show screen with one key press.

Why Business People Speak Like Idiots

Why Business People Speak Like Idiots
Author: Brian Fugere
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2005-02-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780743269094

There is a fundamental disconnection between the way business people speak and real people communicate. From advertisers, big business and CEOs - the blather is coming at us in waves. The International Language of Business is no longer English - it's gobbledygook. The authors blindly discovered the enormity of the problem in June 2003 with the launch of Bullfighter, an anti-jargon software tool. But jargon is just one symptom in a larger problem afflicting corporate communications today: the wholesale inability to connect with an audience. In the form of admirably straight-talk, we discover how to avoid the 'obscurity trap', 'the anonymity trap', the 'hard-sell trap' and most importantly, 'the tedium trap'. In this witty and practical new book readers are given all the tools they need to fight the 'spin' and learn to speak like the rest of us.

Fluent Forever

Fluent Forever
Author: Gabriel Wyner
Publisher: Harmony
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2014-08-05
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 038534810X

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • For anyone who wants to learn a foreign language, this is the method that will finally make the words stick. “A brilliant and thoroughly modern guide to learning new languages.”—Gary Marcus, cognitive psychologist and author of the New York Times bestseller Guitar Zero At thirty years old, Gabriel Wyner speaks six languages fluently. He didn’t learn them in school—who does? Rather, he learned them in the past few years, working on his own and practicing on the subway, using simple techniques and free online resources—and here he wants to show others what he’s discovered. Starting with pronunciation, you’ll learn how to rewire your ears and turn foreign sounds into familiar sounds. You’ll retrain your tongue to produce those sounds accurately, using tricks from opera singers and actors. Next, you’ll begin to tackle words, and connect sounds and spellings to imagery rather than translations, which will enable you to think in a foreign language. And with the help of sophisticated spaced-repetition techniques, you’ll be able to memorize hundreds of words a month in minutes every day. This is brain hacking at its most exciting, taking what we know about neuroscience and linguistics and using it to create the most efficient and enjoyable way to learn a foreign language in the spare minutes of your day.

The Stupidity Paradox

The Stupidity Paradox
Author: Mats Alvesson
Publisher: Profile Books
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2016-06-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1782832025

Functional stupidity can be catastrophic. It can cause organisational collapse, financial meltdown and technical disaster. And there are countless, more everyday examples of organisations accepting the dubious, the absurd and the downright idiotic, from unsustainable management fads to the cult of leadership or an over-reliance on brand and image. And yet a dose of stupidity can be useful and produce good, short-term results: it can nurture harmony, encourage people to get on with the job and drive success. This is the stupidity paradox. The Stupidity Paradox tackles head-on the pros and cons of functional stupidity. You'll discover what makes a workplace mindless, why being stupid might be a good thing in the short term but a disaster in the longer term, and how to make your workplace a little less stupid by challenging thoughtless conformity. It shows how harmony and action in the workplace can be balanced with a culture of questioning and challenge. The book is a wake-up call for smart organisations and smarter people. It encourages us to use our intelligence fully for the sake of personal satisfaction, organisational success and the flourishing of society as a whole.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Thinking, Fast and Slow
Author: Daniel Kahneman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 511
Release: 2011-10-25
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1429969350

*Major New York Times Bestseller *More than 2.6 million copies sold *One of The New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year *Selected by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best nonfiction books of the year *Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient *Daniel Kahneman's work with Amos Tversky is the subject of Michael Lewis's best-selling The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Topping bestseller lists for almost ten years, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a contemporary classic, an essential book that has changed the lives of millions of readers.

Sweating Bullets

Sweating Bullets
Author: Robert Gaskins
Publisher: Vinland Books
Total Pages: 516
Release: 2012-04-20
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0985142405

PowerPoint was the first presentation software designed for Macintosh and Windows, received the first venture capital investment ever made by Apple, then became the first significant acquisition ever made by Microsoft, who set up a new Graphics Business Unit in Silicon Valley to develop it further. Now, twenty-five years later, PowerPoint is installed on more than one billion computers, worldwide. In this book, Robert Gaskins (who invented the idea, managed its design and development, and then headed the new Microsoft group) tells the story of its first years, recounting the perils and disasters narrowly evaded as a startup, dissecting the complexities of being the first distant development group in Microsoft, and explaining decisions and insights that enabled PowerPoint to become a lasting success well beyond its original business uses.

Earth System Law: Standing on the Precipice of the Anthropocene

Earth System Law: Standing on the Precipice of the Anthropocene
Author: Timothy Cadman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2021-12-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000482499

This book systematically explores the emerging legal discipline of Earth System Law (ESL), challenging the closed system of law and marking a new era in law and society scholarship. Law has historically provided stability, certainty, and predictability in the ordering of social relations (predominantly between humans). However, in recent decades the Earth’s relationship in law has changed with increasing recognition of the standing of Mother Earth, inherent rights of the environment (such as flora and fauna, rivers), and now recognition of the multiple relations of the Anthropocene. This book questions the fundamental assumption that ‘the law’ only applies to humans, and that the earth, as a system, has intrinsic rights and responsibilities. In the last ten years the planet has experienced its hottest period since human evolution, and by the year 2100, unless substantive action is taken, many species will be lost, and planetary conditions will be intolerable for human civilisation as it currently exists. Relationships between humans, the biosphere, and all planetary systems must change. The authors address these challenging topics, setting the groundwork of ESL to ensure sustainable development of the coupled socio-ecological system that the Earth has become. Earth System Law is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research project, and, as such, this book will be of great interest to researchers and stakeholders from a wide range of disciplines, including political science, anthropology, economics, law, ethics, sociology, and psychology.