Fwd: Re: RFC: Statistics in Subsurface

Willem Ferguson willemferguson at zoology.up.ac.za
Thu May 14 12:04:14 PDT 2020


On 2020/05/14 18:24, Dirk Hohndel wrote:
>
> Willem, those are some very strong statements that initially provoked 
> a rather negative reaction in me. Calling someone else's proposal "not 
> up to modern standards" feels borderline insulting.
> As a matter of fact, yes we can show vertical labels. They are also a 
> complete pain to read. I would argue that the readability of a 
> horizontal chart is actually much better than the vertical one that 
> you so strongly argue for.
> I did a quick survey of some of the other dive logs that have screen 
> shots of their statistics pages up on their web sites. And they seem 
> to be about equally split between the two different approaches.

I apologise unreservedly if I appeared insulting to anyone.

>
> To me in the end this doesn't really matter. I don't think I'd ever 
> use this other than to test that it works. Which is true for two 
> thirds, actually, more likely 80% of the features in Subsurface.
> What I do care about is that we continue to build something that stays 
> maintainable, stays usable, and serves the need of a broad user base. 
> That's why I refuse the frequent attempts to turn Subsurface into an 
> asset management tool. And that's why I will gently push back to 
> attempts to turn Subsurface into tool for statisticians. There are 
> great tools for those purposes. Use them.

I attach a suggestion that, to me, what it does is to actually plot the 
raw data points and show what the mean value for each dataset is (red 
bar). This is much more usable than a mere report of min, mean, max. For 
instance, for the wetsuit dataset, the bottom two points are probably 
outliers (possibly erroneous cylinder pressures or cylinder type entered 
into the dive log?) and one might consider not using these to interpret 
the data. For wetsuit, it appears that SAC mostly varies between 13 and 
21, and that the min and max values indicated are not necessarily so 
useful. For the semidry suit data, the data points are much more 
cohesive and the min and max values plotted are possibly more useful. It 
depends on the person looking at the graph to use the min and max as 
plotted, or to use some other way of interpretation. This would provide 
a good impression of the distribution of the SAC data for each suit type 
and still provide mean, max and min values. And I think most persons 
should be able to interpret the diagram easily?

Kind regards,

willem







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