COM 421: Technical Communication

Little is it known that the dropping of the atomic bombs, ”Little Boy” and “Fat Man” , on Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have been a miss communication. The United States asked the Japaneses near the end of WWII if they would surrender. The Japaneses respond with the word “mokusatsu”. In Japanese “mokusatsu” means “we withhold comment – pending discussion”.

The word was mistranslated when it was sent to the united states to the meaning “We are treating your message with contempt”. Many people in the United states were insulted with the answer and requested immediate action by President Truman. Truman agreed with the public out cry and decided to drop the bombs. If the response was more closely analyzed it could have been a possibility that the bombs were not dropped at all. It could have saved thousands of lives.

What could have been done so a miscommunication to this degree didn’t happen?

The Challenger and the Columbia were not the only places where complacency/miscommunication led to a disaster. One example of a miscommunication gone wrong is the Patriot Missile Failure. There was one main problem with the missile. The people writing the software did not let each other know whether or not they were accounting for floating point number error. Because only some of the programmers accounted for the error, the missile calculated it’s trajectory wrong and blew up a US Army Barracks killing 28 people. The sad part is, if the whole team had agreed on either, one, fixing the error or two, ignoring the problem (The rounding errors would have canceled themselves out), the missile would have been fine.

The takeaway from this example, is to standardize anything that might be risky in your project.

Can you think of any examples of a team that should have chosen a standard?

When Knowledge Conquered Fear is an episode of documentary series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014). Its goal is to introduce the history of discovering the comet and the nature’s law behind it. On the Chinese movie review site douban.com, it received many positive feedbacks (if the feedback is not readable, please try using Google Translate). Some feedbacks include that it’s easy to understand, that it has astonishing 3-D scenarios, and that it provokes audience’s emotion and deepens audience’s understanding of the characters in history.

Dialogic Model

The show used dialogic model whose ultimate goal is to engage the public in science problems. The show portrays this piece of history as a story, the ancient fear of comet was the “monster” to beat. The plans of Hooke, the budget crisis of Royal Society (the UK national academy of science) and Isaac Newton’s introvert personality were the barriers. And the hero “Halley”, with his passion, intelligence and dedication, went through a lot and final reached the accomplishment of the discovery of “Halley’s Comet”. The dramatic way of telling the history helps audience understand the characters’ relations, emotions, decisions and hence their ends. In this process, a piece history of science is introduced to the public along with the question that what difference has it brought. In addition to the interesting storyline, the show is enriched with spectacular photos and 3-D scenarios of the galaxy which catch audience’s curiosity and interests.

Talking Heads and Insider-outsider Model

The show has a appearing narrator as a insider-outsider communicator, which adds authority and audience’s trust to this show. He was in an astronomical observatory when he was talking about motion of stars, he looked like he was in Royal Society when he was talking about the difficult Halley had publishing Newton’s book, and he was next to a 3-D comet model in motion and used gestures when he was talking about the comet. In his talking, he barely used the word like “maybe”. He talked like he’s professional which also add seriousness to this documentary show. With this insider-outsider narrator, audience are likely to trust the show and hence likely to engage themselves in the show.

Downside

Even though the way the show is presented gets audience engaged, there’s one downside, which is that it afford to present more details of history. The material to form the storyline in the show is strictly selected, and hard to add, delete or modify. Audience might be interested other historical details.

Some Take-away

Dialogic model helps the public engage in science, it might also be a good idea for science education.

NOTE:

The reason that I chose the Chinese movie review website is because Chinese people are usually non-religious. They usually don’t have opinions for any God or opposed to atheists. Their reviews are usually based on the experience they got from the show, which are more accurate feedbacks about how well the show conveyed its goal.