What I have been trying to pick up on is whether the original order was
written as "0.5" or as ".5". The NBC evening news did not get that
specific; the narrator said "point five" but the graphic showed "0.5".
This is extremely important to the issue, of course.
My lab students these days all know how I feel about "nekkid decimal
points". They lose points when that occurs, after a period that is
designed to help them absorb the point.
Jim
On Tuesday 24 April 2001 2012, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > In a message dated 2001-04-24 17:39:47 Eastern Daylight Time,
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
> > TV meteorologist Bob Ryan is giving pollen count in parts per cubic
> > meter on NBC-4 in Washington, DC. NBC-4 is NBC network station in
> > the US Capital. Bob also is Past President of the American
> > Meteorological Society.
>
> The same Channel 4 (WRC-TV) also had a story tonight on medical
> dosing problems. Apparently a child died at Children's Hospital in
> D.C. because the doctor prescribed ".5" mg of medicine (he meant 0.5,
> of course, but didn't write it correctly) and the person who gave the
> medicine measured out 5 mg -- 10 times as much -- and it killed the
> kid. The story also mentioned the number of people who die in
> hospitals due to medical mistakes. I wonder how much of it is due to
> overmedication due to measuring people in pounds instead of kg (as
> most know many pharmaceutical doses are based on mass in kg). My two
> kids went in for physicals this past week and I had to fight to get
> their measurements correctly -- and the nurses thought I was a nut.
>
> Carleton
----------------------------------------
Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII"; name="Attachment: 1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Description:
----------------------------------------
--
James R. Frysinger University/College of Charleston
10 Captiva Row Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
Charleston, SC 29407 66 George Street
843.225.0805 Charleston, SC 29424
http://www.cofc.edu/~frysingj [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cert. Adv. Metrication Specialist 843.953.7644
