• mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        I do it all the time at work as an engineer. Red/bold for bad numbers, green/bold for good numbers. Maybe orange/bold for mixed bag

        • Vlyn@lemmy.zip
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          2 months ago

          Red/green isn’t really a good combination due to color blindness. Either go blue/orange or at least add icons like ↑ and ↓ next to it.

          • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works
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            2 months ago

            or at least add icons like ↑ and ↓ next to it.

            C# in Excel can’t even properly pull values from a table correctly. No way I’m going to waste 2-3 trying to make it concatenate non-alphanumeric characters into cells.

            At work, there isn’t anyone I have to send tables to that is colorblind. And if that changes, they can make a request. Until then, I’m sticking with red/green

            • Vlyn@lemmy.zip
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              2 months ago

              C# in Excel

              What is this abomination you speak of? Are you creating your reports by going C# into Excel? O.o

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Yeah. My conditional formatting makes some of my Excel tables look like I’m defragging my harddrive.

  • kautau@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Well, rainbow tables are really valuable in certain disciplines, just not those rainbow tables

    • zqwzzle@lemmy.ca
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      2 months ago

      What if they’re rainbow coloured rainbow tables? (The thought that someone would print out rainbow tables for their thesis is slightly amusing)

  • Monument@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 months ago

    A friend once revived an email riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors from her boss that critiqued her (appropriate) use of exclamation points. Specifically, that appearing cheerful was not professional.

    Some people just like to be miserable.

  • Zacryon@feddit.org
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    2 months ago

    Not using colors in scientific writing is discarding a valuable information channel and therefore inefficient. When you are already limited in the allowed word count, this can speed up conveying information and reduce cognitive strain on readers (and possibly yourself). So it’s a win-win.

    This should not end in chaos though, where colours are more confusing than helpful.

    The times when we had to print out each and every single page on a crappy black/white office printer are luckily becoming more and more a thing of the past. So even this is no longer a good reason to not use colours.

    • The Stoned Hacker@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Be sure to be careful and thoughtful in your color palette though because if colors are important to the understanding of information then it should be accessible.

  • mushroommunk@lemmy.today
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    2 months ago

    I’ve only ever been academia adjacent and I’m glad. Some of the most soulless people I’ve ever met. It’s the lab grunts who know how to party. Until they have the life sucked out of them to meet some arbitrary writing spec for a journal

  • Barbecue Cowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    Haven’t been able to locate the definitive source, but there are several of these out there with Faith and Professor Kutaywa.

    Believe it originates somewhere on LinkedIn, but very rare for a LinkedIn meme to escape the platform.

  • RunJun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    I understand that colors can color, heh, our perceptions but being a primarily visual animal means that we can digest information much quicker through color.

    Without seeing the charts, I can’t say if the Prof is just being a curmudgeon or not.

    • dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 months ago

      the context is all there … Faith is a graduate student working on their masters thesis, in the thesis paper they included tables that they presumably color-coded (maybe different columns had different colors), and they used multiple colors such that it was “rainbow colored”.

      Apparently the thesis advisor did not like the presence of color and advises using APA guidelines on how to style & format the tables: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/tables-figures/tables

      • taiyang@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Interestingly your link doesn’t mention use of color or lack there of. It does say elsewhere that you shouldn’t do it for decoration, though.

        That said, things like this are more dictated by the journal you publish to and a thesis has to imitate that. Solution? Graduate and start a journal that requires beautiful color tables, lol

        • dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          2 months ago

          yeah, I think the email is probably fake and made for internet points / humor

          I have heard horror stories about how specific formatting has to be for a thesis or dissertation, though - and often those rules are very specific to a particular university or even department. So it’s also possible for rules like that to be local and not from a universal standard like the APA guide.

          • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works
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            2 months ago

            yeah, I think the email is probably fake and made for internet points / humor

            Eh, you’d be surprised at how far some people will go to criticize women in STEM fields. It’s not everyone, and I doubt it’s even a majority, but there’s enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if this is true.

            Or maybe the OOP is a mathematical Lisa Frank. Idk

            • dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              2 months ago

              no denying that people criticize women in STEM (as a woman in STEM myself), but there are series of “dear Faith” email posts that collectively seem a bit unlikely in their tone and situation, which is what makes me think it’s more likely they’re fake than real

              that said, this particular email seems more plausible than the other one about plagiarism.