> Note: this is advocacy for education in clear quantitative > language and is a border-line off topic rant... > > The other day I read a paper from a student who used notation > like 2e-4 in the text - blech! I sent it back for revisions.
You have sent it back for revisions just because the student used a version of the scientific notation that can be routinely found in literature? Hm. I am _teaching_ my students to understand the scientific notation in the form "1e-20" etc. - for example, because many programs in the field (including R) are representing real numbers using this version of scientific notation. I wouldn't penalize a student for using it in a scientific text. That's what the proof reading is for (if the editors are picky). > Lately I have noticed here and in other places this tendency to > use floating point notation (also referred to as exponential > notation) where scientific notation is appropriate, and vice > versa. The notation 2e-4 is a convenient way to express floating > point numbers with a simple text string, but it is certainly not > scientific notation. Depends how formal and picky you wish to be. 2e-4 is the same as $2\times10^{-4}$ to me as it is for most people, I guess (e.g. look at the Wikipedia entry). > No wonder you had trouble googling it! Nope. The problem with googling is that most of the pages you get when googling for "R" do not refer to "R" as the statistical language. Cheers, January -- ------------ January Weiner 3 ---------------------+--------------- Division of Bioinformatics, University of Muenster | Schloßplatz 4 (+49)(251)8321634 | D48149 Münster http://www.uni-muenster.de/Evolution/ebb/ | Germany ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.