Many college students do badly, badly in their studies. Lots of D’s. Lots of W’s, I’s, and F’s.
From the world of Chemical Engineers and Intellectual Property (IP) protection:
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Most NDAs protect the ** prior ** IP of parties entering into the agreement, but do not address the IP created by the parties when they work together in the future. Say a plumber and an electrician come together to work on a project. As a byproduct of the collaboration, they find a useful way to route wires through water plumbing. The usual NDA will cover their original IP but will fail to address who will own the new invention.
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Units of measure are messed up all over the world. It is easier to measure things in moles. For example : 1 mole of methane burns to give 1 mole of CO2 and 2 moles of water. The same thing gets complicated when you say it in weights : 16 lbs of methane burns to give 44 pounds of CO2 and 36 pounds of water. It gets even more complicated when using actual volumes.
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Use units that are instinctive to the audience. For example if you are designing a power plant, rather than saying the output in Mega Watts, tell how many homes can it supply power to.
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Most big projects (1 billion dollars +) end in lawsuits - so keep your engineering documentation in order.
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If you have an engineer working on a government project and a regular project , the vacation hours need to be prorated to each of the projects.
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Pipes and Tubes are not the same thing.
In my field, at least around here, internships are pointless.
I’ve never met anyone who works for the department they interned at, and I’ve never met an officer that got hired because they interned elsewhere. When I was a member of the hiring board internships got very little consideration in the scope of everything else. A candidate not having any internships on their resume had the exact same chance as someone who did. And an internship was never used as a tie breaker between 2 equal applicants.
In fact, sometimes internships worked against someone. Interning at an agency that is hiring but they don’t hire you is telling. Why should we hire you when the department you already “work” at won’t?
The only exception to this around here is MPD’s Police Aide position. But that is more of a paid apprentice-style program than an internship. A lot of people mistakenly believe other departments internship program works the same way. It most certainly doesn’t.
Generic medication usually does not necessarily match the name brand in size, shape or color, although sometimes they try.
About half of medications are round white pills.
I probable can only identify 10-20 medications with specific doses by description (ie sertraline 25 is green, 50 is blue, 100 is yellow; digoxin 0.125 is yellow, 0.25 is white) so telling me that your blood pressure pill is a small white pill means nothing to me.
I have a rough idea of how much tests cost if you are paying cash but yours is one of thousands on insurance plans and I do not know your deductible, how much of your deductible remains, your copayment, whether these vary depending on the facility you go to, and what discounts your insurer has negotiated with which facility. You can get that MRI for about $1000 if you pay cash but you might have a flat payment of $300 or they might have a negotiated rate of $500 and you have to pay it all because you haven’t met your deductible or you may have met your deductible so your insurance pays 90% so you will owe $50 or your insurance still charges $300 anyway. The system sucks but I can’t keep all this information in my head. If you are lucky I will at least know which facility is covered under your plan. I also don’t know how much your lab tests will be before I evaluate you because I don’t know what you will need until I see you.
The Hippocratic Oath is not some legal requirement that doctors must swear to in order to be licensed. It is a custom that most medical schools choose to recite because it is a nice sentiment although many use an updated version anyway. It has no legal standing and doctors are not bound to it. It’s a nice guideline to follow, like the Golden Rule. Doctors routinely violate it (for example, I am NOT giving money to my teachers or teaching their kids for free).
“First, do not harm” is not a part of the original oath but a ban on medical abortion is. Stop telling doctors that we have to abide by our Hippocratic Oath. We have better standards to follow.
Slight aside - I don’t know what the legal situation in the US is, but it the UK they are more likely to be deliberately slightly different colours. When I used to work for [better not say] it was policy to colour generics two tones off the colour of the originator. That way they looked a bit similar, but the company considered themselves safe from accusations of passing off, which had been an issue in the past.
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This is interesting and something I tend to think is plausible. It’s also why software “expert” systems are not a great idea.
As a Safety Manager: People will take outrageous risks for very little to no gain whatsoever.
As a Trainer: Being an expert on a topic, subject or procedure does NOT mean that you will be any good at teaching it to others.
My job is basically to find stuff. People want something, they can’t find it themselves, they come to me. 90% of the time I come up with it almost immediately. What’s the big secret? I looked. It’s shocking how many people simply don’t bother to look for what they want.
I’m a Decision Analyst and my secret is that most people do a really crappy job at making decisions or coming to opinions, even smart people.
Humans are wired to take the easiest, most available information and extrapolating from that.
I just read this really cool study where they were teaching judges to be impartial (This is my memory of the study. I’m sure I will err in the details, take this with a grain of salt). They broke the judges into two groups. They both got the same case with the same details. It was about a bar that had committed a health violation. The bar was located at something like 532 45 street. They were asked to determine how much of a fine the bar should pay. In one group the bar was called the 532 bar based on its location. In the other case, it was called the 45th street bar. Guess where the fines averaged out to - One group had fines closer to $500 and the other closer to $50. And these are really intelligent people who have been trained for years on being impartial.
There’s a million ways that the brain can get confused about what’s important and we generally do a crappy job of sorting out the important stuff.
Maybe it’s because I’m an engineer, but “how many homes can it supply power to” is completely meaningless to me, without defining the energy consumption of the average home in the population that you’re using.
Now I have the urge to go ask a man (or woman) on the street if they know what a megawatt is.
“It’s, like, a really big one, right? Like when you bro shows you something on his phone and you go WHAAAAT?”
Many farmers in the USA do not get subsidies.
There’s a great deal more involved in producing a crop than just seeding and harvest. And not everything is planted all at once in the spring and harvested all at once in the fall.
Nearly all work done on farms requires skills that must be learned. Learning them often takes considerably more than five minutes.
Production techniques that provide the highest yield from a given area do not necessarily provide the highest amount of nutrition from that area.
There is indeed no such thing as untranslatable, but I enjoyed collecting some words that come close: untrans.eu (the fun has mostly worn off, I seldom add anything nowadays). Most untranslatable words are indeed not untranslatable, but show that the speakers of a particular language do not care about a certain thing or concept. That is their right.
Engineer here. I’m going to go the opposite direction of Balthisar and suggest that explaining the meaning of numbers is more important than just throwing out the big number. Best to include both.
This is where people who “are not good at math” or, sadly, many science article writers fail. Understanding how things relate to each other, in terms of scale, cause and effect, etc. is, I believe, at the heart of understanding science and technology. When a science article fails to simplify a concept because the author does not understand…I shake my head. Painfully often. Quantifying the items in question can be a very good start. Then all sorts of other features like value judgments can be made.
Example: In support of getting the Artemis “Return to the Moon” mission started, NASA has asked Congress for an extra 1.6 Billion for 2019.
- In a vacuum, which is how this is usually reported, people might think “OMG that is SO much money! We need to immediately protest that this money ought to be spent elsewhere, like to feed the poor, etc.!”
- But if it were reported that an extra 1.6 Billion represents an increase of about 8% over NASA’s usual budget, well, OK then.
I see this all the time when raw numbers are reported with no context.
Of course, sometimes when the raw numbers are omitted and the information is presented only as percentages, that can be misleading as well, especially for small numbers. For example, it might sound alarming that the homicide rate in a town has increased by 100% (i.e. has doubled) from one year to the next. It sounds less alarming when you learn that it went from one to two.
No I don’t know what is wrong with it even though I am qualified, no I don’t know if I can fix it - even though I am experienced, no I can’t tell you how much it will cost to repair even though I know what I am doing - let me open up the casing first and have a look.
The guy down the road who does it for much less money will end up costing more because, he is not qualified, he is not experienced, he does not know what he is doing. He doesn’t even have the proprietry tools to get the cover off.
Prison is not a 3 meals a day holiday, nor is it a time of leisure. Doesn’t matter how big you are in prison - moving large weights will not protect you - you need those little pencil neck staff to protect your ass.
If you have to think about a message on social media, you really ought not to post it if you want to keep your job.
Managers often know what you are doing but you haven’t quite overstepped the mark yet - you will.
Managers rarely know their HR policy rules, rarely know their company rules, rarely know the regulations that require equality, safety, disclosure of information - however Managers always assume their status exempts them from having to know these things.
Managers forget, they too have managers - one day you might need help and advice.
HR departments do not have memories - they only know the latest rules for the latest employees - HR does not maintain records of older but still extant policies and contractual arrangements.
HR is not there for employees.
Managers don’t realise, HR staff are in the same union as me and they too need advice and support.
HR staff often have an insight they will only share with trusted colleagues, especially those who have advised and assisted them.
There used to be (and may still be) a website where you could enter in a numerical value and a unit (eg. 437,000,000 miles, or $1,634,291) and it would provide you with comparisons to values more familiar to the lay person, like “that’s enough money to buy 65 new cars,” or “that’s how many miles Doofus Airlines flies in ten years.”
My store makes more profit on a 16-cent screw than on a $200.00 grill.
It’s almost lying with statistics! The numbers are correct but…you can push the meaning to suit your needs.
Pets from shelters that make future owners fill out 5-page adoption requests, insist on fenced back yards and a host of other requirements are turned back in at the same rate as pets from shelters that let any person over 18 adopt a pet no questions asked.
Pets given as presents have a lower return/abandonment rate than those a person obtains for him or herself. Perhaps ALL pets should be given as Christmas presents.
Having horses saved by being pulled from kill pens and dogs saved by being taken from puppy mills has produced a very lucrative income stream for horse kill buyers and puppy mill owners respectively