Math at the workplace
Yesterday I had a meeting with some of the testers. They were complaining because the column labels on the excel sheet that they were looking at were written incorrectly. The label read
"650<=x<7777"
meaning the value was greater than or equal to 650 and less than 7777. But they misunderstood it. First was "What's being multiplied?" This took me a minute before I realized that many people use "x" as a multiplication sign. After some explanation, they moved on to a basic misunderstanding of what the inequalities meant. They couldn't figure out what x was supposed to be bigger than. They wanted to write it like "650 > x < 7777". After an explanation that that was all wrong and why, they wanted to just write it in English. The problem here is signaling which if any end points are included. If your statement is "x is between 650 and 7777" or "650-7777" it isn't clear as to whether the end point is included or not. If it is, then that causes all kinds of problems in terms of specifying the next range, especially when you are dealing with real (as opposed to integer) values.
After an hour of this, we got them to drink the Kool-Aid and agree that our original method is the most precise. However, if we ever get around to writing a user guide for the tool, I'll make sure to include a section on "Basic Inequalities and You."
"650<=x<7777"
meaning the value was greater than or equal to 650 and less than 7777. But they misunderstood it. First was "What's being multiplied?" This took me a minute before I realized that many people use "x" as a multiplication sign. After some explanation, they moved on to a basic misunderstanding of what the inequalities meant. They couldn't figure out what x was supposed to be bigger than. They wanted to write it like "650 > x < 7777". After an explanation that that was all wrong and why, they wanted to just write it in English. The problem here is signaling which if any end points are included. If your statement is "x is between 650 and 7777" or "650-7777" it isn't clear as to whether the end point is included or not. If it is, then that causes all kinds of problems in terms of specifying the next range, especially when you are dealing with real (as opposed to integer) values.
After an hour of this, we got them to drink the Kool-Aid and agree that our original method is the most precise. However, if we ever get around to writing a user guide for the tool, I'll make sure to include a section on "Basic Inequalities and You."
posted by mypetrock at 2:52 PM
1 Comments:
OMG!
I thought ignorance was supposed to be bliss... but aparently it has more to do with being on committees.
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