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posted by chromas on Friday August 07 2020, @04:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the ' dept.

Scientists rename genes because Microsoft Excel reads them as dates:

Microsoft Excel’s automatic formatting is normally helpful for finishing spreadsheets quickly, but it’s proving to be an agent of chaos for geneticists. The Verge has learned that the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee has issued guidelines for naming human genes to prevent Excel’s automatic date formatting from altering data. MARCH1 (Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1), for example, should now be labeled MARCHF1 to stop Excel from changing it to 1-Mar.

The names of 27 genes have been changed in the past year to avoid Excel-related errors, HGNC coordinator Elspeth Bruford said. This isn’t a rare error, either, as Excel had affected about a fifth of genetics-related papers examined in a 2016 study.

Journal Reference:
Mark Ziemann, Yotam Eren, Assam El-Osta. Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature [open], Genome Biology (DOI: 10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7)


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  • (Score: 2) by Booga1 on Friday August 07 2020, @05:43AM (2 children)

    by Booga1 (6333) on Friday August 07 2020, @05:43AM (#1032770)

    And hence, probably the highest paid, so win-win for management.

    Yep, nailed it right off the bat there. That's pretty much how it went. It was like watching some sort of real life video game where management thought they could just trust the numbers to tell them all they needed to know about the people working for them and how things were going. The realization did come months later as the time to solve cases got worse and so did the customer feedback scores. By the time management realized what was going on, it was too late. Anyone who saw what happened to the good workers moved on, leaving us with the mediocre and true underperformers to try and save the contract. Of course, that didn't work and the remaining team of 50+ people had to be let go when we lost the contract.

    BTW, that notalwaysright link you included was pretty "good" in the usual way those stories go. So many messed up stories on there...

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  • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday August 07 2020, @06:40AM (1 child)

    by krishnoid (1156) on Friday August 07 2020, @06:40AM (#1032782)

    W. Edwards Deming is frequently misquoted [deming.org] as having said that you can only manage what you can measure. He was talking about quality, but customer support/satisfaction seems like it should be another one of those things.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @02:59PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @02:59PM (#1032926)

      "Measure" these days is just more bullshit busywork in the form of self-eval questionaires that you dump on the losers, I mean workers. Then hand it off to "AI" or "Excel" to sort the list. As someone above already mentioned, your best people often don't score well on busywork measures.