Could this be because of security issues - to prevent ID theft? After all, your academic records are private and confidental, so you wouldn’t want any yahoo with an internet access to be able to request them, right?
Likewise, that a lot of records are still stored on paper is not only inertia, but also better. Look at how quickly both media formats and file formats changed in the past 20 years - anything that was saved on a 5’ floppy disk or written in an old now obsolete program is now dead if nobody had the budget/ foresight/ time to convert everything all the time; but a paper record from the turn of the century is still there and easily readable without using antiquated machinery.
I think part of the problem is that when typewriters were switched to computers PCs, that all those specialized typists were let go, because everybody could write their own letters now! Only now people have to spend time learning specialist programs beyond Word and Excel, which are not standardized; if company A bought Endnote, but Institute B bought Citavi, all the time you spent learning Endnote is useless, and your wonderful list of citations you produced can’t be imported and compared.
Having dedicated typists today who would experts with several programs would be useful if everybody in the same area would use the same programs, but would cost additional money for the companies.
So everybody keeps using Word and Excel because they come with almost every computer.
Regarding LaTeX, is there a decent GUI for it yet? I used it when studying Maths at University in the 90s, but I’m a computer guy. I could handle a complex formatting language. I’m just not sure that the majority of people can.
As a happy latex user, I find it astonishing that someone finds it unusable. A week ago, a friend sent me 3 word files, only one of which could be read by my wife’s version of word (I don’t have any version since I never use it and have no intention of paying for it). On the other hand I can compile any tex file ever written (including one from 1984). Tex was frozen in 1989, but the front end latex based on the tex engine continues to evolve. In addition to all this (all completely free, BTW, and essentially public domain) is literally thousands of add-on packages for special purposes, nearly all public domain as well. I use lots of diagrams and have written a special purpose package for drawing them that is just a front end for an extremely powerful, but very badly documented (with obscure syntax) picture drawing package.
I have been involved in a collaboration with two others for about 8 years. We meet for a month once a year, but otherwise, the whole collaboration is carried out by email, using text files, or, when compiled, pdf files. But all the editing is carried out on the text files. Every version is stored on my home computer, on my office computer, or in dropbox. At each stage, one person–mostly me–“owns” the file and is the only one who can change it.
To get back to the OP, my family doctor still keeps all his patient files handwritten. Every hospital, including each of the several branches of the McGill teaching hospital, has its own system for recording patient information. When I broke my ankle I originally went to the nearest hospital, which is McGill’s original hospital, but no longer does orthopedics. They did an x-ray and the ER doctor looked at it online. Fine, but she sent me to a different branch and, although they also have their x-rays online, they couldn’t access the first hospital’s system and had to redo the x-ray. Had it been a physical film, they could have simply handed it to me, but no, I had to undergo a second x-ray. I think this lack of interchangeability, caused by incompatible systems adds expense to the system and also leads to poorer care. But I cannot imagine the cost to change it now.
Right, because judges do literally nothing else besides sit behind a bench in their robes - no research, no paperwork, no supervision of flunkies, no meetings with lawyers or police…:rolleyes:
Or did you actually think that you, as a juror, were really seeing everything that goes on in court?
Nah. The University of Minnesota lets you request an official transcript online. You log in with your university authentication, so it’s just as secure as class registration and tuition billing.
I worked in a prison. Let me tell you about the wheel.
You’ve probably seen some movie or TV show set inside a prison. You have a long hallway of cells with a control panel at the end. And you probably saw a control panel that worked electronically - one that had electric motors to open and close the cell doors and all the guard had to do was flip switches.
Most prison units do work like that. But as I noted, prisons existed before there was electricity. And they had a system called the wheel.
There’s this long steel bar that runs the entire length of the unit. At the end of the unit there’s a bunch of levers with one marked for each individual cell. The guard flips the switch for each cell he wants to open or close and a small bar at the cell drops down and connects the long bar to the cell door.
And then he goes to the heart of the system, which is a massive cast iron flywheel. It’s about four feet across and weighs a few hundred pounds. It’s set in a vertical frame and the guard pulls on it and gets it spinning as fast as he can. Then he pulls a lever next to the wheel and that drops in a gear which connects the wheel to the long bar. And then the momentum of the spinning wheel will pull the long bar and the cell doors connected to the bar open.
I worked at a prison where this sytem was installed when the prison was built in the 1850’s and this was state of the art. But a hundred and fifty years later it’s still being used. Which perhaps puts e-mailing Word documents in perspective.
She wasn’t told that as a non-lawyer she was incapable of understanding the law. She was told that she didn’t understand the law, which was itself clear to most other laypeople from her constant carping about how she had only lost because the judge was biased against here (and how she could only lose on appeal if the appellate panel was biased).
pravnik is absolutely correct when he says lawyers don’t write to obfuscate, but for clarity. He left something out, though, which is that lawyers write for a specific audience: other lawyers. Legal writing presumes that the reader has an understanding of certain vocabulary and concepts which would take dozens or hundreds of extra pages to explain in the text.
ralph is bitching about how antiquated the law must be because it uses Latin. Leaving aside the issue of whether medicine and other biological sciences are antiquated because they use Latin, let me explain something, ralph: it’s not the Latin terms that make law hard for a layman. It’s the English terms.
I took eight years of Latin at school. I know more Latin than 99% of the practicing attorneys in this state. It’s not helpful. Even attorneys who know how to conjugate verbs in Latin won’t use non-standard Latin terms because nobody else will understand them. Use of Latin in the law is limited to a relatively few words and phrases, all of which are found in any decent legal dictionary (and are generally decipherable from the context anyway).
It’s the English terms of art that are complex. Words that have one meaning in conversational English often have a completely different (or worse, subtly different) meaning in legal English.
IME, at least in the non-profit world, it’s because CRMs designed for fundraising are either more expensive than most non-profits can afford, or because they just aren’t suitable for what the average non-profit needs (or, in the case of far too many CRMs, both). It’s also my experience that MS Access, which could be a good solution for organizations that can’t afford a proprietary CRM, is just far too clunky and (at least for a non-programmer) difficult to use.
So, people use Excel because they can’t afford any better and they don’t know any better. On one of my lists right now someone is asking what another non-profit who’s got a 5,000-constituent record base in Excel can use. The mind boggles that someone could even handle 5,000 records in Excel without being terrified that a misplaced formula could wreck the whole thing, even with regular backups.
I just got back from signing paper work for a new job. Tons of forms, most of which asked for the same info: Name, address, SSN and dependents. Had it been automated, it would have been a 20 minute process.
And double damned sure you weren’t going to roll a giant wooden ball through it while I’m diving in it. Talk about an Indiana Jones nightmare!
re: the OP – I kind of think dentistry is unbelievably antiquated. I mean, they can do laparoscopic surgery using a computer-controlled laser and camera through a tiny incision; they can correct some conditions using gene therapy…and they removed my bad tooth with pliers and leverage and some swearing. Why does so much of dentistry involve things that look like meat hooks, and scraping, and yanking, and drilling?
It’s like if they made a short child taller using a medieval rack instead of precisely-measured doses of human growth hormone.
I am baffled why some people want faxes. The real estate industry is eaten up with it like a plague. While working with a realtor, I have seen several documents that were chain-faxed 2 or 3 times that were rendered completely unreadable.
How about this you stupid morons, take your word document you just made and make it a PDF. Now email it to me. Now I can sign it, scan it and send it back to you as a PDF. See how easy that was? And it doesn’t look like @#$.
Major organization here (1000+ people) doing project scheduling still emailing excel files out, trying to manually incorporate all the changes, with no rev control aside from “Dave has the master file, talk to Dave”. When someone helpfully suggested this year “Shouldn’t you use a database?”, a 20-year old newbie was hired to use MS Access to code our enterprise master scheduling database.
Naturally, once more than a dozen people attempted to use MS Access simultaneously, it chronically locked up, crashed, corrupted, etc. Now, a single person does data entry into the locked-down single-user Access file on a restricted server. The data is collected on Excel files emailed to him. Management declared successful implementation of the “new tool”.:rolleyes:
Partly this is due to the piecemeal fashion in which the paperless office movement worked.
I work in the workers’ compensation litigation field. Most insurance companies have gone entirely paperless. However, the still need a means of dealing with paper, since lots of offices (especially law offices) are not paperless. So they have giant scanning centers.
This creates its own inefficiency. For example, one of the insurance offices I deal with stores every scanned document in .tif format. Their system can’t handle .pdfs.
So, if I send them a .pdf, the adjuster has to manually print it, and have someone from the scanning center come and pick it up, and scan it again.
Sure, they could just convert it directly to a .tif, but it’s less work for the people who have too much work to do this way.
Anyway, I’m sure you can see why they want a fax: faxes print (or publish to .tif) automatically.
Bingo. This ties into something I’ve argued here before on this matter. I’m not a lawyer, I’m a computer geek, and what I see when I look at codified law is a programming language. It’s a tightly-defined language aimed at making things as clear as possible to a court. The court system is a vast, heavily parallelized computer built out of dodgy processors, the body of laws is the program, cases are data inputs, and common law is the bug-tracking/expert system.
Laws are complex because the code is written with those dodgy processors in mind, and consequently have extremely strict definitions and syntax, and a whole bunch of internal error-checking. It’s an effort to restrict the court to doing exactly what the “programmers” intended, rather than running off into the tall weeds every time an unusual case comes up. Even then, the code breaks down a lot when a case pops up that the error-checking didn’t account for. When that happens, the common-law subroutine kicks in, and the court tries to match the scenario to the expert system records so that the system’s response to the pathological data is at least consistent.
Think of it as writing programs tailored specifically to first-generation Pentium processors; you go through all sorts of hoops to avoid the floating point error, and then you add checks to see if it still somehow managed to screw up 2+2=4. Mostly it won’t, but you check anyway, because if you let a faulty calculation through, it could cause serious problems with future operations.
The problem with all that is that the programming language Legalese mostly looks like English, which leads people who know English, but not Legalese, to feel they should be able to understand it at a glance. They wouldn’t expect to understand a program written in C or LISP without studying it, because the differences from English are obvious. That’s why the Latin words and phrases are important, really–they’re obvious keywords for things that you don’t want to risk get muddled up with the perpetually shifting meaning of an apparently equivalent English phrase.
Up until about ten years ago, banks were undoubtedly the world’s largest handlers and shippers of small scraps of paper. When all flights were temporarily grounded after the 9/11 attacks, the banking industry in the US was in panic mode as millions of checks were marooned all across the country and unable to be transported, moved or processed.
We now have Check21, which allows for the electronic transmission of pictures of checks, but that only puts a digital face on things. The system still is based on physical bits of paper, but being able to send pictures of checks at least speeds up the process.