a w ww w w W w w w Weneda, epeme 1, 006 -Th@ Mc iga al Postcard from New York: A Midwesterner on the subways y suburban Chicago childhood did -not involve much mass transporta- tion. Most of my travel experience involves the back seat of a caravan. I'm not sure I ever took a bus, except to junior high school, and that hardly counts. I rode the El exactly two times, both 20-minute trips to Wrigley Field, and I sometimes caught a com- muter train downtown, but it was a smooth ride populated by men with briefcases. The only sound was the rustling of Chicago Tri- bunes. It smelled like soap. These experiences did not at all prepare me for the New York City subways, which I had always imagined as grimy tunnels full of blight. This summer, I found out that I was mostly right. For three months, as areportingintern for one of the city's dailies, I rode the uptown 1 to Washington Heights, the Queens bound 7, the D to the Bronx, the shuttle train between Grand Central and Times Square, the downtown 5 to catch the Staten Island Ferry as well as dozens and dozens of other routes. The most surprising thing about the sub- ways is how safe they are. At the beginning of the summer, I was baffled by the number of small children I spotted. Any parent who brings their infant into this subterranean horror film set should be forced to put the child up for adoption, I reasoned. It turns out I was wrong. New York Police Depart- ment records show that you only have a 1-in-714,000 chance of being a victim of a crime on the subways. There were only a few murders on the subways last year. That may seem like a lot to a Midwesterner, but it's not when you consider that 4.9 million Exploring the peculiar subterranean world of straphangers. people ride them each weekday. The New York subway system may also be one of the most diverse places on earth.A trip on the D train from Coney Island through Manhattan all the way to 205th Street in the Bronx reveals more nationalities, creeds and colors than pro-affirmative action Univer- sity of Michigan administrators could ever dream of. The system has its fair share of problems. More often than you might imagine, I spot- ted pools of blood on the tracks, fresh from the suicides of people who likely could not bear the thick humidity of the underground platforms for another moment. The stations are filthy and routinely smell of urine, feces and spoiled meat. There's a lot of inappropri- ate oogling and brushingup against and even indecent exposure. By the end of the summer, I felt like a bona fide straphanger, though I knew the 87-year- old woman standing next to me drinking a cup of coffee and reading the New York Post without losing balance as the cars lurched around a dark turn would not consider me one. I once rode anA train fromPenn Stationto the end of the line, Far Rockaway, Brooklyn, which is only on the standard subway map by virtue of an inset. The trip took me almost two hours. I sat and read the paper and watched peo- ple come and go, lugging paintings and FAO Schwartz bags and beach chairs and stuffed suitcases. I watched the beggars and sales- men filter in and out of the car. Two teenagers announced that they were selling M&M's for their baseball team, which made me wonder for the 20th time that summer whether any of them were raising money for Little League or actually avoiding a summer job flipping burgers. A middle-aged man with bright eyes got on and sang a song he had written about Jesus. Afterward, he asked for donations. "A scrap of food or something to drink would be much appreciated," he said as the sun lin- gered over the Empire State Building behind him. No one gave him anything. "God bless you anyway," he said. We had been blessed. We traveled on. When I arrived, my editor told me we were abandoning the story, and I got on the next train back to Manhattan. Underneath Brooklyn, a man hawked ille- gal DVDs. "Your favorite boy wizard in the most compelling installment yet," his deep voice boomed. "That wacky donkey, prin- cess and ogre are back at it again in Shrek the Third. And you can own it for only $5. Or how about something for your husband? That renegade cop John McClane saving the world from criminals. Three for $10!" No one bought anything from him either. Then a pair of men set up a boom box in the aisle. "Own this collection of Bob Mar- ley's greatest hits," one said. "Only $3 for 17 songs." The woman to my left frowned and buried her head ina Spanish-language news- paper as the man to my right reached for his wallet. One of the salesmen switched on the boom box. I still had an hour left on the train, and I was out of reading material. The only thing to do was to sit back and listen. The opening chords of "Redemption Song" filled the car. -Karl Stampfl is the editor in chief of The Michigan Daily. Cont'd: Why your English presentation sounds like a sales pitch POWERPOINT From page 5B wouldn't have fit on one line. More important, Tufte argues that the hierarchical setup of bullet points hid important details from view. Larger bullets gave overviews of problems, while only the smaller, indented ones expressed dangers and doubts. And people viewing slideshows generally assume that smaller, lower-level bullet points are less important. "Information was lost as it traveled up the hierarchy," said a 2005 NASA report about the Columbia disaster. "It is easy to under- stand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation." THE SLIDESHOW CRUTCH When Al Gore made the rounds with his PowerPoint presentation he called "An Inconvenient Truth," was eventually made into a blockbusterPowerPoint movie, he con- verted a lot of people to his cause. Somehow even watching the famously dour Al Gore clicking through slides is a lot more interest- ing than watching a professor use the same technology. A big risk associated with PowerPoint use is it becomes a replacement for thinking and explaining ideas to others. Instead of being the shining result of years of reflection and stewing, as Gore's presentation was, profes- sors' presentations can be droll and confus- ing. That's most obvious when presenters load up slides with paragraph upon paragraph of information and then read them to the audi- ence. "That's a no-no," Fishman said. "Use it as a complement to what you're saying." Fishman says it's not so much that Power- Point creates boring lectures but that boring lecturers use it. In September 2003 in Wired magazine, Tufte arguing that presentations given with PowerPoint are more sales pitch- es than information sessions. He complained that slideshows often have more visual con- tent than informational content. "If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant," he wrote. "Audience bore- dom is usually a content failure, not a deco- ration failure." As much as PowerPoint is a crutch for lazy instructors, it can also be a crutch for lazy students. Though somesay PowerPoint is an invaluable tool for jogging memories of the lecture, with lecture slides often available online, some students rely on PowerPoint presentations more than the actual class. Can great oration and PowerPoint go hand-in-hand? Sleep through lecture? Download the slides, and the entire lesson is before you in PDF form. And with some professors using the new technology to make lecture slides avail- able before classes, paying attention during class has become outdated. DELETE POWERPOINT? This is hardly a new dilemma. Microsoft first released PowerPoint in 1987, albeit only in black and white, and this summer marked two decades of people making electronic slideshows. During that time, scores of other similar programs have popped up, including Apple's popular Keynote. Making slick-look- ing presentations has never been easier Even before personal computers, slide- shows existed in boardrooms in a low-tech version. Graphic designers sketched graphs, data and sentences onto 35mm slides that were displayed using mechanical slide viewers that went "cuh-click" as they advanced the images. There are limits to technology, though. O'Donnell said he wishes the old-fashioned chalkboards were more prevalent around campus. In many classrooms, they've been covered or removed to make space for pro- jector screens. Sometimes, O'Donnell takes a portable chalkboard to lectures with him, alongside his PowerPoint slides. The question remains, is PowerPoint a bad thing? "That's an unanswerable question," Fish- man said. "Technology isn't good or bad - it depends on how people use it." One thing's for certain. Slideshows aren't going away. Dull lecturers will continue to read paragraphs off slides, students will use PowerPoint files in lieu of listening to lec- tures, and important details might just get lost to indented bullets, but at least it will be fun to watch.