SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 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.