Technology: July 2010 Archives
"Every year, the services spend millions of dollars teaching our people how to think. We invest in everything from war colleges to noncommissioned officer schools. Our senior schools in particular expose our leaders to broad issues and historical insights in an attempt to expose the complex and interactive nature of many of the decisions they will make.
"Unfortunately, as soon as they graduate, our people return to a world driven by a tool that is the antithesis of thinking: PowerPoint. Make no mistake, PowerPoint is not a neutral tool -- it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them....
"Rather than the intellectually demanding work of condensing a complex issue to two pages of clear text, the staff instead works to create 20 to 60 slides."
PDFUnlock! - Unlock PDF files online for free.
I used this handy tool to unlock a City of Tulsa document (a Tulsa Public Facilities Authority annual report) so I could OCR it. (By the way, there's no excuse for posting scanned, un-OCRed PDFs of Word or Excel documents when the original document is in the city's possession. Convert the file directly to PDF so it's easily searchable, and post the document in its original format, too.)
