As a technical writer, I’m constantly reading, reviewing, editing, writing, and learning about new technology. Most of the time I have no idea what I am reading or doing, so it is my job to do all the necessary research to understand the technology. A good chunk of the day is spent researching and looking up reference material, talking to developers, and exchanging information with other technical writers.
A developer asked me to review an application note for him and that was what I did all day today. Application notes are articles posted on NI Developer Zone that provide technical information about various issues in the instrumentation industry. The articles provide practical solutions and applications of NI products.
The article I reviewed today is about electrocardiographs and how to use LabVIEW to analyze electrocardiograms (ECG). I’ve never even heard of the word electrocardiogram before until today. So guess what I did? I spent half the afternoon on Wikipedia learning about ECG, heart rate variability (HRV), and ECG signal processing. Some of the readings were interesting while others were coma-inducing. I was knocked out for a good 15 minutes dreaming about heart beats and emergency rooms.
Anyway, there’s a section in the article that explains some of the mathematics behind ECG analysis. There’s one particular description of a variable I was stuck on for a while.
“The square root of the mean of the sum of the squares of the differences between adjacent RR intervals.”
At first, I thought this was just a poorly written sentence. Then I thought about it for a while to see if I could write the equation out. Perhaps there was a better way to rewrite the sentence so that it doesn’t sound so arcane. Then I asked another technical writer who majored in mathematics. She said this is a typical *** equation (I forgot the name she mentioned). Did more research. Stared at the equation for another few minutes. And what was the conclusion? I haven’t figured out yet. It was late and I called it quits. I’ll try again tomorrow.
The joy of technical writing!
Believe it or not, I like doing this sort of thing and figuring stuff out. If only food coma wasn’t an issue.
Reminder to self: DO NOT eat a big lunch on a work day.
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no one answered my question…. is 10 K RMB per month a good salary in Qingdao…pls give details….
