Talk at EPIC CDT Away Day, St Davids Hotel, Cardiff, 11th April 2024. https://alandix.com/academic/talks/CDT-away-day-April-2024-QQ/ 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.

1. Alan Dix
https://alandix.com/qqr/
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/AVI2024-justcounting/
@alanjohndix
Qualitative–Quantitative reasoning
and lightweight numbers

2. today I am not talking about …
• deep digitality and digital thinking
• next generation UX tools
• long tail of small data
• intelligent interfaces
• physicality
• now
• digital light
• walking round Wales
• virtual crackers and slow time
• digital humanities and community heritage
• modeling dreams, regret and the emergence of self

3. plugs

4. climate change
numbers matter …
in short ….
being a C21 citizen
covid
Brexit growing
inequality

6. Guardian – fact check
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/15/leave-campaigns-350m-claim-was-too-low-says-boris-john

7. Guardian – fact (double) check
raw = £350m
after rebate = £276m
minus half of that = (£138m)
net figure = £138m

12. arithmetic mathematics
?

13. the qualitative understanding
of quantitative phenomena

15. HCI?

16. HCI for
qualitative quantitative reasoning
in HCI
visualisation
tools for
quick and dirty
calculation

17. Fitts Law
in practice
HCI for
qualitative quantitative reasoning
in HCI
visualisation
tools for
quick and dirty
calculation
CSCW
critical mass

18. scientific QQ
Fitts Law
as cybernetics

19. Electrostatically-charged crop sprays

20. Above canopy model
ground at
0 V
open boundary
condition complex
sprayer at
high voltage
+ 1000s V
charged
spray drops
model path,
speed and
space voltage
due to drop
cloud
?

21. Within Canopy Model
crop modelled as
straight sides
ground at
bottom
+V – charged spray enters crop
canopy from above;
speed and charge determined
by above canopy model.

22. Within Canopy Model
crop modelled as
straight sides
ground at
bottom
+V – charged spray enters crop
canopy from above;
speed and charge determined
by above canopy model.

23. Misses crop (Class I)

24. Good spread (Class II)

25. All at the top (Class III)

26. Connect and re-parameterise
+ 1000s V
above crop model
within
crop model
dimesionless
parameters

27. Design/engineering interventions
X

29. BBC – fact (mis)check

30. data and provenance
quotes and context
Snip!t
make it easy!
1970s file systems, Word and PPT

32. data and provenance
quotes and context
Snip!t
make it easy!
1970s file systems, Word and PPT

34. Monotonic reasoning
Shops to politics

35. ↑ more
automation
↓ less
labour needed
↑ higher
productivity
↑ higher
prosperity
↓ less
employment
↓ lower
wages
? people
better off
↑ ↓

36. ↑ more
automation
↓ decline of
other companies
↑ more
competative
↑ growth
of company
↓ less
jobs elsewhere
↑ more
jobs there
? overall
employment
↑
↓

39. numerical data
numeric data and innumeracy
–more BBC – 35,000 m3 vs 35 km3
qualitative–quantitative reasoning
–iVolver
–worksheets

40. the size of Wales (TSoW)
478 square kilometers
184.5 square miles
about 1¼ times the size
of the Isle of Wight
184.5
sq miles
146.8
sq miles

41. numerical data
numeric data and innumeracy
–more BBC – 35,000 m3 vs 35 km3
qualitative–quantitative reasoning
–iVolver
–calQ
–worksheets

42. iVolver
(Méndez, Nacenta & Vandenheste, 2016)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnJ80cEKKxo
https://sachi.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/research/visualisation/ivolver/

43. calQ
export

44. WS2 (worksheets)

45. WS2 (worksheets)

46. WS2 (worksheets)

47. a tool ecology

48. in summary
numbers matter
qualitative–quantitative reasoning
lightweight numeric tools

49. Qualitative–Quantitative reasoning
and lightweight numbers
Alan Dix
https://alandix.com/