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