[ale] sloppy coding in breath tester

[Jim Kinney]

Absolutely agreed.

In jest, my adviser told me if the theory says the data is a straight
line, only take two data points. If it's a line of a particular slope,
only take one. :-)

Sadly, I have run into far too many people who don't get why that is
both funny AND wrong procedure.

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 11:59 AM, tom <tfreeman at intel.digichem.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 15 May 2009, Jim Kinney wrote:
>
>> On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 9:16 AM, tom <tfreeman at intel.digichem.net> wrote:
>>
>>> I only scanned the link, so ...
>>>
>>> There is another possiblity - the authors were never CS trained at all.
>>> I'd guess that many of the people writing code for the breathalyzer were
>>> originally engineers or scientists with a dominant background in
>>> instrumentation. Coding would have been pickup activity which started
>>> taking over their lives like kudzu. Hence sloppy code due to a lack of
>>> background.
>>>
>>
>> I disagree. I would suspect the bad code to be from a coder with lousy
>> math/science skills not a science person with lousy code skills.
>>
>> There is a big difference between teh average of an array of values
>> and the average of an array of values plus a new value.
>>
>> But without knowing details of who the bonehead was who didn't do due
>> diligence verification this all just blowing smoke.
>
> Well, we definitely agree about the blowing smoke part here.
>
> So, as you expect, here is some more smoke...
>
> While not directly coding, I have seen some PhD chemists do absolutely
> horrible things to a simple algebraic expression in support of their
> notions. One of those was also a major "supporter" of using statistical
> methods - like performing a regression on three variables which had the
> constraint a + b + c = 100. Einstein wondered why some of us laughed
> behind his back.
>
> Basic ignorance isn't limited to any field of endevor. Which is sort of
> what I was trying to imply earlier on
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>



-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness