351–360 of 518 posts
> Sometimes it’s easier to rewrite genetics than update Excel
rather than y'know, scientists cant properly use a tool they're using.
bad journalist.
edit: it even seems some of the commenters here stopped at the byline. quelle surprise
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LibreOffice Calc is free and doesn't corrupt data. It also has full support of UTF8
In the case menctioned in the article, LibreOffice is on par with Excel. Don't believe it? Open up LibreOffice, type "MAR-1" or "SEP-2" in any cell, and look how easy is your data corrupted. I have meet some other glitches: identifiers in the form of "1E123" get turned into scientific numbers. The column was something like "1A123", "1B123", etc. Those things are sneaky: you can have thousands of rows, and Excel/LO do…
That "scientific mode" is called text. Assign the column type Text during CSV import and nothing is converted to numeric or date.
Not worth it for the Microsoft power brokers. Very much worth it for a lot of people.
And so the world is sometimes shaped by the narrow money interests of a very small group.
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In grad school I had a friend that was doing olfactory (smell) research on rats with tetrode drives (wires in their brain). He was looking at the neuronal response to smells that they gave the rats and had a few signals to match up. There was the signal from the arduino running the scent gates, the amps that reported the weak neuronal currents, the nose lasers that gated the ardunio, etc. He was having a hard time ge…
I keep seeing this sentiment when it comes to those in the natural sciences, but it makes no sense. I could replace "programming" in your above little bit with "mathematics" and it would be just as weird. Our modern world runs on computers and programs, just as our modern world and modern science built itself on mathematics and required many to use it. So too the new world of science may require everyone to know to p…
Sure, it would be great if we all had more time to learn how to code. Coding is important. But I'd say the onus should be on coders to build better tools and documentation so they are empowering people to do something other than code, rather than reduce everything to a coding exercise because making everything look like code means less boring documentation and UX work for coders.
I mean, biology is in fact a full on degree program and you pretty much need a PhD before you're defining an original research topic. It's not because biologists are dumber and learn slower. It's that biology is complicated and poorly understood, and it takes years to learn.
Contrast this to coding... you don't even need to go to college to launch a successful software product, and the average person can became proficient after a few years of dedicated study. However, this is a few years that biologists don't have, as their PhDs are already some of the longest time-wise to finish.
The decision to rename genomes is totally consistent with the biologists MO: if a cell won't grow in a given set of conditions, change the conditions. Sure we can CRISPR edit the genes to modify a cell to to grow in a set of conditions, but if it's usually far easier to just change the temperature or growth media than to edit a cell's DNA.
My take away is that this is more a failure of programmers and/or a failure of their managers to guide the programmers to make tools for biologists, than of biologists to learn programming. Sure, coders get paid more, but they aren't going to cure cancer or make a vaccine for covid-19 without a biologist somewhere in the equation. And I'm glad the biologists developing vaccines today are doing biology, and not held up in their degree programs learning how to code!
Programmers love to complain about Excel, but we happily use YAML, which has essentially the same footgun: certain strings (like 'on') need quoting if you don't want it to interpret them as something else.
We programmers also complain a lot about YAML, though maybe not enough and not as much as about Excel. But some YAML footguns like the country code for Norway being interpreted as a boolean are reasonably famous, and I think widely regarded as a bad idea.
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!)
copy paste the DOI into scihub
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I was thinking that perhaps the autoformat options could be explicitly shown in the column headers number date currency A B C and you could click on the format to change it. Italics could show assumed formats, bold could show user set formats. I'm newly returned to (very minor) Excel use and assumed formats with no feedback seems wrong. My situation is dates _not_ being picked up as dates and it not being obvious tha…
I would be happy if Excel supported some way to specify the column type in the CSV itself. Ie first row headers, second row data type/hint, subsequent rows the actual data. At the moment users need to remember every time they import the CSV to specify A data type for each incorrectly handled column. Suffice to say they don’t always remember... and with large CSVs with hundreds of columns it’s just a pain.
This would allow existing CSV tools that work with data files to continue to work without modification, while CSV Schema aware tools could make use of the schema.
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Excels usability isn't bad though. Which is why everyone uses it. It falls down in this (and lots of other cases) but if you want to see what good usability looks like, look at what people use.
Everyone uses Excel because it's a tool everybody learned at University or even highschool, nothing more, it's not because it's good at all. It's a terrible app but Microsoft managed to shove it everywhere in education. Same for Words. Unfortunately Libre Office and co tried to reproduce the terrible UX of both software, while coming up with inferior functionalities because they had to try to maximise compatibility w…
It's honestly amazing that Excel hasn't fixed this issue. It's pisses off an enormous number of users especially in basically any non-US country (even if 01/02 is a date, it isn't the second of January in most of the world...)
Just type '01/02 or ="01/02" and get on with your life