It Wrong

Abbot, H. 1993 The Cost of Getting it Wrong. Product Liability International, February. 

Sometimes, scientists just get it wrong. That certainly seems to be the case with lactic acid and exercise. For more than a century, lactic acid was seen as the "bad boy" of exercise. People believed that intense, unaccustomed exercise made lactic acid build up in muscles and made them burn and eventually tire and give out. Some athletes even went as far as to have the lactic acid level in their blood tested. Everyone considered lactic acid a toxic waste product. As it turns out, that is not true. 

GETTING IT WRONG FROM ONE-POINT log Dmem MEASUREMENT... 

As mentioned in Chapter 3, we standardise our reporting of chemical shifts with reference to TMS or the residual solvent peak. Your spectrometer software should do this for you automatically. If it gets it wrong (which is possible if you have a mixed solvent or a spurious peak near TMS), then you can set it manually using your software. 

Just think of the huge costs, both in terms of financial and other resources, and in terms of the distress to individuals and their families, that could be caused by such mistakes. In all areas of application getting it wrong leads to loss of confidence in the validity of future analytical results. Confidence is an important commodity. At one extreme, loss of confidence puts the future existence of the particular analytical laboratory at risk, but more generally it leads to costly repetition of analyses and, in the area of trade, inhibits the expansion of the world economy. 

The mean response can be subtracted from each of the individual responses to produce the so-called responses corrected for the mean. This terminology is unfortunate because it wrongly implies that the original data was somehow incorrect responses adjusted for the mean might be a better description, but we will use the traditional terminology here. It will be convenient to define a matrix of responses corrected for the mean, C. 

Carl Gustaf Mosander, a Swedish chemist, successfully separated two rare-earths from a sample of lanthanum found in the mineral gadolinite. He then tried the same procedure with the rare-earth yttria. He was successful in separating this rare-earth into three separate rare-earths with similar names yttia, erbia, and terbia. For the next 50 years scientists confused these three elements because of their similar names and very similar chemical and physical properties. Erbia and terbia were switched around, and for some time the two rare-earths were mixed up. The confusion was settled ostensibly in 1877 when the chemistry profession had the final say in the matter. However, they also got it wrong. What we know today as erbium was originally terbium, and terbium was erbium. 

Pay attention to little details like final units when you re answering chemistry questions. They re easy to overlook, but they make all the difference between getting the answer right and getting it wrong. 

I preface my lectures on quality assurance in the chemical laboratory by asking the rhetorical question, why bother with quality The answer is because it costs a lot to get it wrong. There are many examples of failures in chemical analysis that have led to great material loss, but as a first example here is a success story. 

Why is it wrong to assume that you are only doing science while you are doing experiments ... 

Once an experimental test section has been given, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) looks at the results. If most test takers get a question right, it s determined to be easy, and if most get it wrong, it s hard. The questions in each section, then, are organized from easiest to hardest. If there are fifteen sentence errors questions, five will be easy, five will be average, and five will be hard. 

Moving too fast can hurt your score. Multiple-choice questions, especially the last few, can be subtle. If you miss a word, or otherwise read the question incorrectly, you ll probably get it wrong. Essays that don t directly address the topic get a zero (the lowest score) no matter how well written they are. 

If later on, you still can t answer the skipped ones. . . Guess. The only penalty for guessing is that you might get it wrong. Only one thing is certain if you don t put anything down, you will get it wrong ... 

To double the pulse power, simply increase the power by 3 dB, as log(2) = 0.3. Because pulse power is the square of pulse amplitude B, to double the amplitude we need to multiply pulse power by a factor of 4, which corresponds to increasing power by 6 dB, as log (4) = 0.6. This leads to a simple rule of thumb Every time you increase the pulse power by 6 dB, you will cut the 90° pulse (fp) in half (because B is doubled). Likewise, each 6 dB decrease in pulse power will double the 90° pulse width. This is a good rule of thumb, but as the actual power settings are not precise, you will normally have to calibrate the 90° pulse at the new power setting to be sure. To make matters worse, Bruker uses the dB scale to describe power attenuation rather than power itself, so that the higher the dB value the lower the power. This is the opposite of Varian s system. Be careful whenever you are setting power levels If you get it wrong, you can burn up the probe, the amplifiers, and your sample ... 

Warning. This is difficult—after all the original authors initially got it wrong ... 

According to eqns. (105)—(107), the dependence of the decay of active centres on time is linear, exponential, and hyperbolic, respectively. The best approximation is obtained by a comparison of the observed course with the rate of monomer decay calculated for the assumed termination mode. This is, of course, a very rough method, which often does not reveal the effect of other components on termination, for example that of the monomer (its wrong addition etc.)... 

The Collowiiig synthetic routes arc incoirect What it wrong wdlh each ... 

Using the assumptions we ordinarily make in calculating the pH of an aqueous solution of a weak acid, calculate the pH of a 1.0 X 10 6 M solution of hypo-bromous acid (HBrO, Ka = 2 X 10-9). What is wrong with your answer Why is it wrong Without trying to solve the problem, tell what has to be included to solve the problem correctly. 

Boerhaave s opinion on the inherent necessity of nature brought him onto a slippery slope again. It smacks of Spinozist determinism. Orthodox theologians believed that to subject nature to mechanics amount to a restriction of God s actions by the rules of an essentially human craft. However, according to Boerhaave the inherent necessity of nature would not restrict the omnipotence of God. Already in 1688, while speaking about the unbroken, eternal and necessary truth of axiom s Boerhaave had referred to the unity of God, and he states that it wrong to say that God s power makes possible... 

Suppose the pressure at a point within a column of mercury in a tube is 74 mm Hg. What is the pressure 5 mm below this point (If this takes you more than one second, you are probably doing it wrong.)... 

Fermat had one of the most famous failures. He thought that if he squared 2 and then raised the square of 2 to a higher power, which he labeled n (a whole number), then the results would be nothing but primes. His formula looks like this 22" + 1 = a prime number. This formula appeared to work until Leonhard Euler proved it wrong. Euler found that if 5 is substituted for n in the formula 22n + 1, the resulting number is 4,294,967,297, which can be divided equally by 641 and 6,700,417. 

Warning. This is difficult - after all the original authors initially got it wrong Hint. How might die DBEs be achieved without a second ring ... 

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