What processes are unbelievably antiquated?

In My Humble Opinion
1

This thread has been a long time coming. My girlfriend is a PhD biologist. I had no idea, until I met her, how antiquated many aspects of “doing (real) science” are, in particular when it comes to publications and collaborating on said publications.

To share drafts, my girlfriend and her supervisor are still e-mailing Word documents around to each other. “Merging” changes consists of staring at each document version and working out what the other has changed, or agreeing not to change the document at the same time. Similarly, I’m having palpitations at the thought of her thesis stored on only on her local hard drive and on a backup portable hard disk, lugged around everywhere. Her bibliographies are handled by some shitty Word plugin that seems to fuck up her bibliography information literally every other day. Her co-workers are all using different versions of Word, requiring them to save in a billion different formats to actually share their documents, and so on. Further, she has to pay (or rather, her grant holders do) for all this shit: EndNote, Office and so on, cost a small fortune.

The worst part about this is that there’s established tools designed to handle many of the issues that she’s encountering, and these tools have been around for decades. When I, as a computer scientist, write a paper, we store all our drafts in a Subversion repository, hosted on a remote machine backed-up to hell and back. Short of a nuclear war, there’s no way I’ll be losing work, and I can sit on any machine in the world with a Subversion client installed and start work. Further, every collaborator can edit the paper locally at the same time and then merge their changes back into the master copy stored on the repository using Subversion’s merging facilities. Conflicts are tracked, and every version of the document is stored, in case I decide I need to roll back to, say, how the document looked on Tuesday afternoon at 2pm.

Papers and theses are universally written in LaTeX, a tool which handles all the problems she seems to have with renumbering figures and creating tables of contents properly. Bibliographies are handled with BiBTeX, which just works, and requires only a plain text database of bibliographical information to function; entries can be cut-and-pasted and e-mailed around to each other. Even better, these tools are free, slow to change, and virtually bug free.

It seems to me that lab based scientists, by simply switching to writing papers like computer scientists and mathematicians do, would increase their productivity immensely.

What other processes do you think are ridiculously antiquated?

2

On the subject of lab science, the lack of an electronic lab notebook in most labs is starting to seem antiquated IMO. So much of the data is stored electronically but we have no coherent, overall command structure to marshal it in the form of a lab book.

The e-lab book is now standard in big pharma companies, so it can be done and is the norm in some sectors of industry. The IT commitment is serious, though, so you can start to see a possible problem with implementing it in universities. Imagine if the software went down for it - Don’t think about going home until you get this lab-book back up is not something you can say with a straight face to a uni IT team (IME). Also consider the archiving commitment.
People are challenging this cynical view, though. I’ve been to a few UK meetings this year were people are pretty serious about getting it on track for chemistry. It could make a serious impact.

3

Data management in general. Most databases are stored in Excel format.

4

Literally MS Excel? I find that very suprising. Why would anyone do that?

5

Wait, your saying Word and EndNote and Office are antiquated compared to Tex and Subversion repositories? Tex was first released in 1978 and has been more or less frozen except for bug fixes since 1989. Office was released in the early 80’s and has major changes with every version up to last year. I agree Tex is a superior way to do academic papers, but I think part of that is because it is antiquated, and therefore very stable and well understood compared to newer programs that are constantly being tweaked by Microsoft and the like.

6

Literally. The major reason is that they simply don’t know that there are other, better options.

7

I am continually amazed that fax technology continues to persist in business and government. In settling my late wife’s affairs, I have been dealing with a lot of insurance companies and government institutions, and they all asked me to send faxes, rather than an emailed PDF. I can cause my computer and scanner to generate a fax, but the result is always inferior to a PDF, and I can only attribute the dogged endurance of fax technology to sheer inertia.

8

Sometimes the tried-and-true (if antiquated) methods simply work better. I spent 2002-2009 doing technician work for a crop research program, and after all manner of attempts to adopt some sort of electronic method of field data collection we went back to using paper & pencil. Really. The simple fact was, we could not find any kind of electronic notebook or data collector that would adapt to our unique needs or stand up to environmental conditions of heat, cold, dust, wet, distance from power sources, etc. At the end of the day, week or whatever we’d come back to the lab and manually enter the data from our notebook into desktop PC’s, usually in less time than we’d spent fooling with trying to interface the various electronic methods we’d tried. High-tech isn’t always better.

Incidentally, the research lead, who knew nothing about field work, nearly had a fit about our “retro revolution” (until she saw how well it worked), but as others have mentioned, she also insisted that everything had to be done in MS Excel. She knew better tools were available, but refused to take the time and effort to learn anything different.
SS

9

Inventory control in “Mom and Pop” business.

10

You think a system is antiquated because it uses old computer software?

On my old job we were still using some technology on a regular basis that pre-dates electricity. And not because it worked better - we just never replace the old stuff.

I used to love reading how the government throws money around as I was working with equipment that was literally purchased in the nineteenth century.

11

Determining legal ownership and the value of certain types of property can be very antiquated. Want to know the true boundaries of the land that has been in your family for over 100 years? The surveying equipment is good enough to mark a boundary at a fraction of an inch but that doesn’t do you much good when the deed to the land is sitting in a courthouse in the form of old papers and references landmarks that aren’t even there anymore or have been moved over time. We have GPS now but that won’t help with the old stuff if the original boundaries weren’t clearly defined.

You want to know if those old stock certificated are worth anything? It can be done if we trace the entire financial history of the company from the time they originated, take into account takeovers, and adjusts for splits but it won’t be easy. No web tool can make that easy.

My family has tens of thousands of acres of mineral rights but in the first half of the 20th century that are paying off now. I am surprised that anyone can figure it all out because they are just based on old documents sitting in courthouses and some of them are fractional shares subdivided through wills and other types legal documents. There is no one place you can look for these things. You have to have a professional pull all the records and work through it in chronological order like a puzzle and distribute it among living heirs that live all over the country.

12

I have to ask, what did you do?

13

Wait a minute. You say that Word/Endnote ect is antiquated and Latex is the future? I could not disagree more.

I used to use Latex for writing papers but gave up a few years ago do to the many issues Latex has. For writing mathematical papers that have only text and equations, then Latex could possibly bne the best thing. But if you need to go beyond that (tables, figures, ect) it is an absolute nightmare. Tables in particular were horrible. Worse still was the fact that I was the only person in my group who knew how Latex, so it made collaboration difficult.

I think that many of the issues with collaboration in Word have been fixed nicely. I write a paper, I give it to my boss, and he makes changes. When I get it back Word tells me exactly what has changed and allows me to make my own changes which are again seen. That makes collaboration very easy. Similarly Endnote for me “just works” much the same way that bibtex does. And my university has site licences for all these things, so it costs us nothing to get them.

I think you also have to remember that not all scientists are computer people. One of the people in my group is brilliant at making supported nano-catalysts, but horrible at using computers. It has just never been a priority for them to learn more about them and they have really no interest in computers either. They can work with Word/Endnote, but they would simply refuse to work with Latex. It would make writing papers even more of a computer ordeal for them. I think it is telling that you are a computer scientist and recommending Latex. Latex is the sort of thing that looks good to computer scientists (because it makes writing like programming:) ) and horrible to everyone else.

Calculon.

14

The American courts are run incredibly slowly and inefficiently. This is because the people who control them (clerks) are political hacks/appointees who have paid substantial monies for their jobs.
The legal procedures are old and written in antique language (lots of latin terms), and are designed to be obscure (you need a lawyer to decode them).
All in all, it is a 13th-century system that lurches along and is very expensive.
Why isn’t brought into the 21st century? Simple-a lot of people are making a lot of money off it.

15

IIRC the New York sewer system (or some other major city) or maybe even other major cities in general litteraly roll a giant wooden ball down the passagways to clean them out. No, I am not making this up.

16

Um, no? I’m not really sure what your complaint is.

Are your complaints that procedurally, things move too slowly? (I might be inclined to agree, but this has more to do with overburdened court systems than anything else.) Do you think standard law practice manuals are written in Latin? (They aren’t, and neither are procedural guidelines.) Do you think you need to be a lawyer to understand practice rules? (No…because your complaint is about clerks?)

Further, do you think the American system was constructed in the 13th century?

Or is your complaint that the justice system is built on centuries of decided case law, which has to do with the decisions judges make, and very little to do with whether or not your case gets heard this Thursday or next Wednesday?

17

Works fine for me. What were your issues?

18

Quote:Are your complaints that procedurally, things move too slowly? (I might be inclined to agree, but this has more to do with overburdened court systems than anything else.) Do you think standard law practice manuals are written in Latin? (They aren’t, and neither are procedural guidelines.) Do you think you need to be a lawyer to understand practice rules? (No…because your complaint is about clerks?)

"Overburdened court systems? With judges that work 20 hour weeks?
Every case that I have been a juror on has take 4-5 times as long as it shold have. Court starts at 10 AM-lunch break at 12:00 ( 2 hors). Court ends at 4:30.
Give me a break. Overburdened, indeed!:smiley:

19

I bet you think teachers are slackers too, what with getting off at 3:00pm.

20

The judges and attorneys are working when you are not in the courtroom, and there is much more going on in a trial than the jury sees. This has been previously explained to you, in the posts following yours in the linked thread.