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Here you go. Learn you some history.

Sure, they did some great things and the US wouldn't have been the great industrial power of the 20th century without them, but nothing is one sided: https://prezi.com/qleqtleyvtpi...

Interestingly, the influx of slaves into Rome produced a similar problem. Free labor made trade and low skill labor valueless.

https://prezi.com/0dczdwtwb3dn...

Yes, there really is a cobal programming language

There are a lot of lies spouted during the Overall Abortion Debate. For example, it is a lie to claim that "intrinsic value" exists. It is a lie to claim that an unborn human is not alive. It is a lie to claim that human life matters, in the Grand Scheme of Things. It is a lie to claim that an unborn human is equal to a "baby" or "child" (both of which normally don't have an attached placenta as a vital organ). It is a lie to claim that an unborn human is more than just a mere-animal organism. It is a lie to claim that "human" is always equal to "person" (see all the human life, cuticle cells, getting killed during manicures and pedicures; cuticle cells have the full set of human DNA and modern cloning/stem-cell research shows that any such cell has the potential to act like a zygote --also see "hydatidiform moles" and "brain-dead adults on full life-support" as other examples where "human" does not equal "person"). It is a lie to equate "potential" with "actual" (do you, a potential corpse, want to be buried 6 feet under today?). It is a lie to claim that the finite Earth has endless food-resources for an ever-growing population. It is a lie to claim that fossil fuels will last indefinitely. It is a lie to claim the Earth is not currently overpopulated, when we have such problems as Global Warming, Deforestation, Overfishing, Aquifer Depletion, Farmland Encroachment by Cities, Topsoil Losses, Algae Blooms, and vast amounts of Toxic Waste being dumped into the environment as a side-effect of Mass Production. It is a lie to claim that humanity is immune to a "Malthusian Catastrophe". It is a lie to claim that unborn human animal organisms are "innocent", when they actually act worse than parasites (without actually being parasites). It is even a lie to claim God opposes abortion (see Exodus 20:21, in which causing a miscarriage can be associated with the arbitrary penalty of ZERO). When all the lies are finally extirpated from the Overall Abortion Debate, there will be no valid rationale for illegalizing abortion in this day-and-age.

The problem isn't the software, but how people are using it. Banning Power Point won't fix bad end users. They will just find a different way to give crappy presentations.

Perhaps a better approach is bundle or create software that helps people create presentations from the script on up, and perhaps the software should have one presentation the audience sees and one the presenter sees full of more info or a complete script.

Yeah, PowerPoint can actually do that, what with the "Notes" section that shows up on the presenter screen while the projector output shows the slide.

Scanned TFA, lots of whining but not really much counterpoint on how to better organize and deliver information *properly* . There's a gratuitous link to http://prezi.com/ at the end, but just having a sexier, nonlinear presentation tool won't be of much help.

Good presentation delivery is indeed an art. But what properties make a presentation aid helpful?
The Daily Show is one example that comes to mind for someone who uses visual aids well... by placing an interesting image to associate with a story. When it does display any bulleted text, it is only used to deliver the punchline... so timing is crucial too.

TFA3 "Will Cheap Gas Undermine Climate-Change Efforts?" [...] "I don't think people will see the urgency of dealing with fossil fuels today," Perl said. Instead, he explained, people may choose to fill up their cars and burn fuel while the costs are low. [...] "This is like putting a Big Mac in front of people who need to diet or watch their cholesterol," Perl said. âoeSome people might have the willpower to stick with their program, and some people will wait until their first heart attack before committing to a diet --- but if we do that at a planetary scale it will be pretty traumatic."

This dialogue is straight from the United States' temperance movement that led up to a Constitutional amendment and a decade of peril, a black market economy comparable in size to the real one, and the Federally-subsidized ascension of organized crime. Some people think they are being proactive, easing their view of a world 'sin tax' as a way to stay global catastrophe. They are being hoodwinked into believing that unless they act soon by accepting some prepared package of countermeasures, some point of no return would be reached. This is being done in the traditional way, fronting claims that the (terrorists, evil corporations, fossil fuel interests) have "almost won".

But the real tripe, such as Perl spouts, misrepresents and marginalizes the personal motives among the poor and middle class folks who've managed to (just) stay afloat, and use their resources to acquire certain contested 'things'. Complicated and realistic motives, the whole spectrum of survival through pursuit of happiness (aka sanity) are reduced to some simple addict-reward-temperance model that suits the purpose. Then add a dash of global imperative and we have things like

I believe that the miseries consequent on the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors are so great as imperiously to command the attention of all dedicated lives; and that while the abolition of American slavery was numerically first, the abolition of the liquor traffic is not morally second.
~Elizabeth Stuart Phelps who helped to 'ferment' a revolution

Abolish slavery, then alcohol? This lady says this in 1897, a time when neither women nor former slaves in the US were permitted to vote. Priorities problem, much? Now cheap gas and pure-CO2 is the alcohol of the 21st century, and the same style of temperance movement is forming. It is hip and trendy. No one will confront you if you publicly picket for temperance in these matters.

Perhaps they should. Because where the rubber hits the road, such temperance movements are ultimately damaging to society. Phelps may have believed that the abolition of alcohol would magically 'elevate the human condition' to such a degree that other pressing issues of her day would be somehow solved, that it was drunkenness that was denying women the vote, or any other issue of the day to which she could have refocused her effort.

I'll say it flat out. Real people tend to have rational and understandable reasons for doing what they do. They will choose a vehicle that can hold a family and haul a load with a measure of real metal to stabilize it and protect them. They will choose a $30k truck or minivan over a $50k Tesla because... they have a choice.

Real innovation arises by pursuing real solutions to problems that result in the right choice being the cheapest one, not the one least encumbered by taxation. The future does not depend on the 'price of gas'. Temperance movements are ultimately about removing choice from the equation.

Hey, hey, hey, what about Prezi and it's GUI, er, I mean ZUI for Zooming User Interface? (jerk off gesture)

Won't *that* totally revolutionize online education because of its mystical non-linear interfacing systematicness?!?!

Agree; slashvertisments are showing up more and more on this site and its a real shame.

Looking at slideshare is not very encouraging- their site is covered with intrusive adverts and the comments indicate that the latest presentations don't seem to work on all browsers - with navigation buttons missing on the latest browsers.

I'm not sure that people will choose to use their service above http://prezi.com/ the clear leaders in this field.

I don't have too great of complaints with Google Docs' word processor and spread sheet, but the presentation software is absolutely horrible. I found Prezi recently and it shows promise.

A zooming presentation of the same material, showing the doses to scale:
http://prezi.com/ocl7xignbv5l/radiation-from-various-sources/

But can we cool the HTML 5 hype engine, seriously? This is a very minimal demo, just like every other "Look at the amazing power of HTML 5!" site I see. There are Flash-based music sites out there with dynamic scrolling, multi-track MIDI playback and lots of other features, and nobody calls them incredible. I look at the moving dot demo and then go back to Prezi, or listen to all the stuff about video in HTML 5 and then go work in Kaltura for a while

HTML 5 has a lot of potential. But it's hardly some amazing thing that brings new capabilities to the web. All of this is possible now. You may not like how it's done, but all HTML 5 is going to do is change the underlying tech, not give us lightning.

When the web was new and I had to make presentations like this, I would do HTML pages (with bullets) instead of powerpoint slides. The big difference was that I would also provide lots of links to additional information and details on each point. It took longer to write (both because of the additional information, but mostly because we didn't have great tools to assist), but was more engaging with the audience and did provide the additional details that a bullet-list-slide didn't.

Nowadays, I might think about using something like Prezi for some of my briefings. While it does allow a linear path through a presentation, the information is layed out spatially and allows zooms and pans both through the path and independent of the path. This makes it pretty easy to provide additional information and show the relationship between some of the points. It does allow bullet points, but mostly so it can mock their use.