Amperage for Dummies

Our staffers check the links to our nominations on a regular basis, and update the list of deleted and/or rewritten content whenever necessary. Not long ago one of the interns was looking into a post originally written by five-time winner Michael O. Smathers when he saw that it had been sent to the rewrite team by Leaf Group. The resulting work was apparently good enough to fool the current crop of content editor, but the job that Vincenzo Giambanco did on "Capacity of a 15 Amp Circuit" at Sciencing.com was, to be polite, rather... bizarre.

Smathers' version of the post (an archived version is available here) massed a paltry 322 words, although if truth be told, that question could easily be answered in one ten-word sentence: "The maximum capacity of a 15-amp circuit is 1800 watts." Well, presumably you'd have to pad it out by discussing the voltage (the above is for a 120V power supply). Giambanco, apparently ordered to "punch it up" a bit, stretched his "answer" out to almost 600 words. That would have been fine, except that Vincenzo found it necessary to introduce his topic by telling people that,

"The flow of electricity runs through the human body. Electric signals are produced in the human brain between neurons and neurotransmitters (dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin), all of which require current or the flow of electricity for the human body and the human brain to properly function."

Wait, what? WTF does that have to do with the capacity of a 15-amp circuit? But wait, there's more. Giambanco also found it necessary to share,

"The fundamental unit of charge per electron is 1.6021765 × 10−19 coulomb or Q..."

...which, although factual, isn't pertinent to the question at hand. Vincenzo then found it necessary to pound out 162 words to rearrange Ohm's law (V = IR) as P = IV, and then required another 40 words or so to spit out the answer, 1800 watts.

We were surprised that someone who claims to have been a physics teacher for five years (apparently misrepresenting his alma mater to either LinkedIn or Leaf Group) couldn't find a way to be more succinct, especially given that the target demographic of the website is an eighth-grade education.

So what do we have? An off-topic introduction followed by a tangential discussion of basic physics, all to answer a question that could have been answered in a couple of sentences. Of course, our Dumbass of the Day seems a little verbose; which is borne out by his Leaf Group bio, in which he referred to himself, by name, four times.

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