331–340 of 518 posts
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Does anyone use mm.dd.yyyy?
Germany does. Probably the majority of Europe too
Infuriatingly, the paper announcing the new guidelines of renaming genes, a work of fundamental importance to all scientists in the world, cannot be read without an expensive subscription to the journal. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-020-0669-3 Thanks science (sarcasm!)
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Is that January 2, February 1, January 2002, or January 1902?
In Excel? It's January 2nd of the current year, which again is probably the most common use
But here's Excel's trick: you type in 01/02, Excel interprets that as January 2nd and switches it to the underlying OLE date format (some number in the 40000s). Ship that Excel file across the ocean were they would write Jan 1 as "02/01", and it shows them the date as "02/01." Excel uses your local date format preferences.
This is one reason why it is important for Excel to convert the raw input to another format. I'd probably prefer that it didn't touch it for CSV files, but I get it for .xlsx
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isn’t the saying, 80% of everything is garbage?
Yeah, but one would hope that science has a higher standard. 80% garbage results in science sounds catastrophic to our understanding of the world, and in particular when it comes to making policies based on that science.
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I don't disagree completely with this, but just want to point out that it's kind of a bad smell to have computational biologists who are - as someone in the article puts it - computationally illiterate. I have met lots of these types over the years, and usually their methods are kind of a gong show. If you can't properly sanitize your data inputs on your column headers, why should I trust that you've treated the rest…
It's also my experience of research in biological sciences that it is a widespread belief/fact that in order to get published in a top journal, the analysis methods must be "fancy", for example involving sophisticated statistical techniques. I worked on computational statistical methods so I'm not against that per se, but the problem is that if you have the training to contribute at the research front of an area of b…
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Yes, and? It should be a simple checklist item for any scientific journal to ask the author whether they used excel or not. If they say yes, reject the paper unless they can show their work hasn't been affected negatively by using excel.
On the practical side, how would people show that their work hasn't been affected negatively by using Excel? How would the journals evaluate that? I suspect this would just become another box to check - yes, we use Excel, yes, we checked the results, like the last 50 times. Intellectually, it feels snobbish to single out Excel like this. I'm a software engineer in science, and I generally agree that scientists should…
It's not coincidental that big evil FDA/pharma requires people to sign - on paper - their lab notes (and to have lab notes, and to sign that they calibrated the equipment, and that they checked for common mistakes).
And yes, I know this costs a lot, and that this is sort of a pipe dream. And I'm not saying this is the best solution. Renaming genes might be a lot better, because it just allows the field to move on, and Excel will eventually die out, or at least researchers will move away from it - maybe to Jupyter, if we're lucky.
So, all in all, of course Excel is just a symptom, but society is already pretty stubborn when it comes to financing R&D and progress.
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I have a strong feeling that, if people really put an effort into reading and replicating more papers, we would find that a lot of what's being published is simply meaningless. In grad school I had a subletting roommate for a while who was writing code to match some experimental data with a model. He showed me his model. It was quite literally making random combinations of various trigonometric functions, absolute va…
> It was quite literally making random combinations of various trigonometric functions, absolute value, logarithms, polynomials, exponents, etc. into equations that were like a whole page long and just wiggling them around. Technically, we call that a "neural network". Or "AI".
Yes. It just turns out it's a particular human, whose analysis is very very dumb.
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Yes, and? It should be a simple checklist item for any scientific journal to ask the author whether they used excel or not. If they say yes, reject the paper unless they can show their work hasn't been affected negatively by using excel.
That doesn't solve the analysis problem downstream when a non-expert is getting started, doesn't know about Excel's anti-features, and starts doing analysis using the only tool that the world has ever told them is acceptable for tabular data. Ideally excel would change, but since we know it won't, and we want to work with lots of people with minimal problems, we must adapt.