As I mentioned here some weeks ago several Italian researchers use this
"kWh/h" notation. It means kilowatts. I think kilowatt hours of heat would
be something with a dot operator, not a slash.

This would upset my sixth-grade math teacher.

There are subtle differences between US and European notation. As everyone
knows they sometimes use a comma rather than a period to indicate the
decimal point. Generally speaking Japanese notation is similar to U.S.
notation for everyone except Arata. He invents his own notation, symbols and
vocabulary. He and a few others I have seen often put the units in square
brackets:

16 [kW]

This looks strange to me. An editor wanted to do this with a paper that I
wrote in Japanese. He insisted that is the normal way to do things for
nonscientific publications in Japanese. I pointed him to several
nonspecialists nonscientific articles from newspapers and magazines with
ordinary notation; 16 kW.

Japanese people and Japanese word processors have difficulty with spaces.
This is because Japanese text is run-on, with no spaces between words. So is
Korean and Chinese. so many people from these countries have difficulty
remembering where to put spaces in English and other European languages.
They may have difficulty remembering whether to put the space before a comma
or after it. So they often write "16kW" with no spaces, especially in
newspaper articles.

By the way, here are the official rules for units and notation:

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/

I tell everyone they should follow these rules but I myself do not follow
them. (A typical Dad attitude: "Do as I say not as I do.") NIST says you
should separate thousands with a half space, but I use a comma; 3,000 not 3
000. I am not going go looking for a non-breaking half-space every time I
want to write a number. Besides, most people are not familiar with that
format. I follow most of the other rules.

- Jed

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