As academics we need to deal with numbers including project management spreadsheets and student marks. In addition, they are part of day-to-day life whether household budgeting or working out how many socks to pack for a journey. Perhaps most crucially, many national and global issues require an understanding of numeric information from climate change to tax rates, and of course the Covid-19 pandemic. If citizens are not able to make sense of this, democracy fails. Of course, many are not only uncertain when dealing with numbers, but suffer more or less extreme maths anxiety. Indeed a recent UK survey found that, “over a third of adults (35%) say that doing maths makes them feel anxious, while one in five are so fearful it even makes them feel physically sick”. Sometimes detailed calculations are necessary, but often the critical skill is qualitative–quantitative reasoning, that is a qualitative understanding of quantitative phenomena. This can after be aided by the ability to use back-of-the-envelope calculations and dealing with lightweight numeric information. This talk discusses these issues and presents some prototype tools to explore the design space for personal numeric information.
This talk is largely the same as the one of the same name given at Ulster University in February. However, the slides have been updated to correct web material misattributed to BBC which was actually Guardian. An eagle-eyed member of the audience spotted that the font in the screenshot was one found in the Guardian online web and not the BBC.
Slides
Demos
- Alan Labs
- Labs homepage
- calQ
- Documentation | Demo
- WS2 (workspace)
- Documentation | Demo
- The Size of Wales (TSoW)
- Just Counting (paper at AVI2024) | Demo
|
Ecology of numeric and small data tools
calQ
calQ export to speadsheet
TSoW (The Size of Wales) in action
TSoW markup in HTML
WS2 in action – editable field
WS2 in action – calculated field
WS2 – markup in WordPress
WS2 table – column formula
WS2 table – explanation of cell value
mydata simple case
mydata SQL query across data sources