[PLUG] The wrong app

David Mandel dmandel at pdxLinux.org
Sun Jan 25 23:02:02 UTC 2004


On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, Ed Sawicki wrote:

> I'm teaching a college course and I'd like to give my
> students some rough stats on how often people use the
> wrong program for given tasks. I see it frequently but
> I wonder if my experiences are typical....

I don't have any statistics.  In fact, I suspect one might
have a difficult time defining "wrong application" in an
objective way that would allow one to obtain meaningful
statistics.

On the other hand, anyone with any experience sees this problem
all the time.

I remember BLM/Oregon capturing meta data on their GIS inventory.
This involved capturing complex information about survey field notes,
physical maps, digital map files, and so on.  This resulted in
thousands and thousands of records - all captured as individual
MS Word documents.  Yes, MS Word!!  Just try to search these to
get a complete list of everything using State Plane Coordinates
or having a certain accuracy or containing data before a certain
date or ....  I don't know if BLM ever converted this stuff to
a data base or not, but the MS Word documents were filled with
trival inconsistancies which would have make the conversion
difficult and expensive.

On the other hand, BLM was one of the earliest organizations to
realize the difference between GIS (Geographic Information Systems)
and CAD or computer graphics.  To this day, one sees organizations
putting their maps into AutoCad or even paint packages without
ever considering the desirability of doing geometric calculations
and/or data base manipulation on the data.  You see this in city
engineering departments all the time.

Another app people seem to shy away from is statistics.  One sees
a lot of data analysis attempted in spread sheets that really
should to be done in a decent statistical package.


                                          Sincerely,
                                          David Mandel
                                          Chief Activist
                                          Portland Linux/Unix Group
                                          560 SE Alexander
                                          Corvallis, Oregon 97333
                                          (541) 684-4644 at work
                                          (541) 730-5285 cell

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                          Other Affiliations
   David Mandel                        http://www.DavidMandel.com
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