All about risk
Link: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/geeking-out-over-terminology
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In which I promote Dominic Lee’s new site Maverick Actuary, but also look at how we geeks can be more effective in communicating with the non-geeks.
Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell
Publication Date: 19 Sept 2022
Publication Site: STUMP on substack
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BLUF is a military communications acronym—it stands for “bottom line up front”—that’s designed to enforce speed and clarity in reports and emails.
The basic idea is simple: put the most important details first. Don’t tease or delay your main point because people are busy and their time is valuable. And make it clear—life-or-death decisions could be made using your information.
Author(s): Jan-Erik Asplund
Publication Date: 9 Sept 2019
Publication Site: Animalz
Link: https://policyviz.com/2021/03/02/three-things-you-can-do-to-make-your-data-tables-more-visual/
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One last option is to add sparklines. Sparklines are small line charts that are typically used in data-rich tables, often at the end of a row or column. The purpose of sparklines is not necessarily to help the reader find specific values but instead to show general patterns and trends. Here, the sparklines show all five years of data, which allows us to omit three columns of numbers, lightening and simplifying the table. This approach lets us show the full time series in the sparklines while just showing the two endpoints in the table cells.
Author(s): Jon Schwabish
Publication Date: 2 March 2021
Publication Site: PolicyViz
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Five key fallacies and pitfalls have affected public-health messaging, as well as media coverage, and have played an outsize role in derailing an effective pandemic response. These problems were deepened by the ways that we—the public—developed to cope with a dreadful situation under great uncertainty. And now, even as vaccines offer brilliant hope, and even though, at least in the United States, we no longer have to deal with the problem of a misinformer in chief, some officials and media outlets are repeating many of the same mistakes in handling the vaccine rollout.
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Amidst all the mistrust and the scolding, a crucial public-health concept fell by the wayside. Harm reduction is the recognition that if there is an unmet and yet crucial human need, we cannot simply wish it away; we need to advise people on how to do what they seek to do more safely. Risk can never be completely eliminated; life requires more than futile attempts to bring risk down to zero. Pretending we can will away complexities and trade-offs with absolutism is counterproductive. Consider abstinence-only education: Not letting teenagers know about ways to have safer sex results in more of them having sex with no protections.
Author(s): Zeynep Tufekci
Publication Date: 26 February 2021
Publication Site: The Atlantic