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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @11:34PM (1 child)
My wife worked at a small (100-ish) employee place where the owner cared about the employees (family picnics, etc.), but then he sold out to a huge company and retired. They then brought in a new CEO from halfway across the country who was cut right out of the shitty napolean complex MBA CEO types. She even brought her best friend along and put her as the HR head, but of course this person wasn't an actual employee, but she ran her own small company, so HR was suddenly run by a contractor. But my story isn't about the morally and legally corrupt goings on (you used to be able to see a lot of examples of that posted on Glassdoor, at least until they started requiring employees to post 5-star ratings), but when she came in, they clumsily did that 1-2-3 rating thing, where they would get rid of you if you got a 3, etc. It was all the rage about 10 years or more ago because "Jack Welch did it, so if I'm going to be recognized as a great CEO, I'm going to do it too". What was hilarious was that they made the managers rate everybody, but in the end there was confusion whether it was the "1" or the "3" that was bad. It was all just an excuse to get rid of people "legally" by claiming they were poor performers. It sounds like that is what was going on here. It didn't matter how well the spreadsheet reflected reality, they just needed a crutch to justify reducing headcount (which means reduced costs, which means bigger CEO bonus!).
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Saturday August 08 2020, @12:22AM
I could understand that being the case in a lot of situations. Ours was different. The problems were not due to a management change or corporate buyout. Our collapse was in no small part related to the economic downturn at the time. Getting rid of the highest paid people was probably part of it, as krishnoid mentioned above. It was definitely not about manager/CEO bonuses since eventually the whole contract was canceled and everyone on that contract was let go, managers included. So, everybody got the chopping block eventually, but the spreadsheet was just used to make the cuts in ways that made very little sense to any of us(as team leads).
Only a couple of very small side contracts that had no overlap with ours survived.