Numbers and letters. Letters and numbers. So different and so equal.

Because after all they are signs. Signs that are intertwined to create meanings. To create stories.

Our particular stories may only contain the numbers to mark the moment in which they happened.

Our collective history, on the other hand, can only be explained from the study of the numbers, the amounts: a country’s GDP, per capita income, unemployment, the average age of the population,. ..

But … how can we understand ourselves if we are some sort of illiterates in regards to knowing how to handle the numbers and the probabilities?

Between the profession we do fun about the ways in we fill the gaps of our anumerical culture with whisfullthinking and superstitions: «A man who traveled a lot was worried about the possibility that there was a bomb on his plane. He calculated its probability and, although it was low, it was not low enough to leave it quiet. Since then, it always carries a bomb with him in his suitcase. Because he says that the probability that there are two bombs at the same time on an airplane is infinitesimal. «

Well, we usually live self-deceiving ourselves. It has to do with our laziness to do the calculations or, simply because we do not know how to do them. Could we at least recognize that we do not know?

When we want to translate numbers and/or probabilities into our environment, we make a lot of mistakes and bad assumptions. It becomes palpable that we do not have enough numerical culture.

Because even if mathematics is between us from almost the beginning of time, the bulk of society is refractory to them. Not because our brain can not understand them. Only because we have not been taught in the mathematical look. In general terms, school doesn’t provide us with the numerical and probabilistic reading of the reality that surrounds us: physical, social, economic, …

We live in the time of data. The statistics have gone further so that the Data scientist can use this Big data: Random forest, Boosting, K-means clustering, …

But all his work will remain unaccessible to us as long as we don’t achieve that every person in the company and anyone in the street is able to interpret the data in the same way as they can interpret the words in a text.

We need «Data literacy» to become data literate people just as we once became literate people. And that can only be done if we have a numerical culture.

I start this web section as a means of contributing to increase our data literacy by increasing our numerical culture, our empathic capacity, our ability to observe and our historical, anthropological and social background.

I am a physicist who likes people a lot and, therefore, stories, our stories.

I have been fortunate enough to be able to live a historical moment: the one of the union between sciences and humanities.

Why do I think this?

Because today we can continue to tell stories invented to highlight universal values – but listen … what do we mean by invented stories? – and at the same time we can, through the study of data (big data) explain in a novel way the reality that we are all creating.

I trust us, humans. And within this confidence, my spirit is to humbly contribute to making visible, through graphics and stories, the point where we are and the future we are creating, whether it is beautiful or ugly.

Because we can only go where we want if we are able to look at the clear, complete, sincere and whole image of where we are.

Shall we start?

Juna Albert

juna@junaalbert.com