Information these days

Both the physician's assistant and the doctor himself mentioned their organization's struggle with a new information system.  Universities have plenty of experience with information, with records, with IT (information technology) and with evolution and change of systems.  

When I began graduate school in 1965, the group of us N.D.E.A. fellows in the department of statistics, measurement and experimental design were told that we would all take a 1 credit course with the program's main professor.  It was in the subject of the computer "language" called "Fortran" (for formula translation).  We worked together and felt our way through just one assignment that kept us occupied for three years.  The basic assignment was to write a computer program that would supply the difference in days between any two dates the professor gave us.  The specifics of the requirement changed from time to time, such as maybe one of the dates would be "B.C." and maybe not.  

When I took my first university teaching job, the campus had already rented a computer that was quite large, quite limited by today's standards and cost $16,000 a year.  It was to be for academic and professorial use and I was to be the brand-new director of academic computing.  I had just that one credit in computing at the time and that was more than most people had.

Since then, the introduction of the Macintosh with its icons and its mouse that made computing easier and more intuitive, there have been many modifications and extensions of computing.  Connecting computers together into what is now the internet and its special branch, the worldwide web, has probably been the most momentous change.  

As a professor, the power of word-processing really changed my life.  I found that despite mediocre grades in 8th grade typing, I could type reasonably well.  I still made tons of mistakes but typing on a monitor allowed me to correct them quickly.  When calculating scores, grades and averages, the spreadsheet was far more powerful than the hand-held calculator.  The basic database enabled records to be sorted and reordered instantly and without errors.  These three tools have undergone improvements over the years.  Add to that, Google's ability to find information of all kinds and the power to send text, sound and pictures quickly in ever larger chunks and we are indeed dealing with a different picture of information creation, storage, use and retrieval than has ever existed before.

These tools and shrinking them to fit into a tablet like the iPad or a smartphone have tremendous power.  The rise of Facebook for social connections and Twitter for speedy, succinct communication, "location" services that take advantage of satellites circling the earth to pinpoint where a given person is are further enhancements to our information toolkit.   People are just beginning to think of ways to make use of them and weave them together into web sites and other sources and depositories and uses.


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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety