#HowardWainer

2025-04-09

> How much is enough? While many consider this the most central existential question of our acquisitive age, it also underlies many real-world practical decisions that we must make...
> It also illustrates the omnipresent, existential issue “how much is #enough?” ..We could have gone further. When are you done? Doing exercises like this one helps to teach us the impor-tant lesson that, in any serious investigation, you are never done, youjust run out of time—obesa cantavit.*
#HowardWainer in _ #PicturingAnUncertainWorld _ sounds like 老子 LaoZi #知足 #足るを知る

2025-03-26

Rereading a print out of Howard Wainer's _Understanding Graphs and Tables_, it's what had me searching murder rates and El Salvador. Wainer writes key phrases I should remember: an "orienting attitude", a "redesign task must first try to develop and understanding of purpose..."
csis.pace.edu/~marchese/CS397Z
#HowardWainer #TableDesign #DataPresentation #GraphsAndTables

2025-03-25

#HowardWainer's "The Most Dangerous Equation"^1s got me to Kelly's Equation. One page^2 linked to Wikipedia's "#HedonicTreadmill"^3. Researchers see Primo Levi's insight too!?
> The process of hedonic adaptation is often conceptualized as a treadmill, since no matter how hard one tries to gain an increase in happiness, one will remain in the same place. [Once their bellies are full]
^1 americanscientist.org/article/
^2 theory.stanford.edu/~blynn/pr/
^3 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_
@bsmall2@tiksi.net
#KellysEquation

2025-03-24

> In the late 1990s the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation began supporting small schools on a broad-ranging, intensive, national basis. By 2001, the Foundation had given grants to education projects totaling approximately $1.7 billion... There are many claims made about the advantages of smaller schools, but I will focus here on just one...
americanscientist.org/article/
#HowardWainer #TheMostDangerousEquation #BillGates #GatesFail #deMoivresEquation #uspol
🧵

An image made with racket's latex-pict^1 in order to approximate the equation shown in Howard Wainer's article linked in the post. This is "de Moivre's equation" which is "the equation that provides us with the standard deviation of the sampling distribution of the mean.... (Note the square root symbol, which will be a key to at least one of the misunderstandings of variation.)".

^1 test-1.rkt in the repo directory:  https://codeberg.org/bsmall2/statistics-class-notes/src/branch/main/racket/latex-pict
2024-10-25

> The first rule of table construction is to:
> Order the rows and columns in a way that makes sense. We are almost never interested in “Austria First.”
...
> Round-a lot! This is so for three reasons:
> a. Humans cannot understand more than two digits very easily.
> b. We can almost never justify more than two digits of accuracy statistically.
> c. We almost never care about accuracy of more than two digits.

diasp.org/posts/12734726
jstor.org/stable/1176346
#HowardWainer #DataOrder

2023-06-20

> "Getting information from a table is like extracting sunlight from a cucumber."
jstor.org/stable/1165236
files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED3
#HowardWainer quoting #FarquharAndFarquhar #Farquhar from 1891 #SunlightFromACucumber #DataTables

2022-04-17

> This table of fisheries data made it easy to appreciate functional programming with sort. You are free to create a function that will.. order.. the data. It's simple to adhere to Howard Wainer's rules for “table construction.”..
> The first rule of table construction is to:
1. Order the rows and columns in a way that makes sense. We are almost never interested in “Austria First.” #HowardWainer
write.as/bs2lr/minamata-fish-m
#crab #crabs #racket #RacketPlot #DataVisualization #Minamata

2019-07-04

More commentary on DrRacket Visualization work and Data Tables (with input from Howard Wainer)
ruhrspora.de/posts/2986945
#HowardWainer #Farquhar #DataTable

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