WhatFinger


The electronic world is taking over.

For the History Museum



Have you seen a mail box lately? They are going the way of the dodo. Time used to be when there was one on nearly every corner. Now you are lucky to find one at all. History museums must have a field day collecting them.

Blame the Internet

With online banking, internet shopping, and anything else done from your home computer with a few keystrokes or mouse clicks even hand-writing is going out the window. I wonder when they will stop teaching it in school. Not that I can be particularly proud of my cursive scribbles. Of course I have a valid excuse for myself, arthritis and general old age wrist fatigue. My writing is certainly a far cry from the calligraphic master pieces of the past. Just go to any philatelic show and look at the hand-written address on any envelope mailed a hundred years ago.

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At times I have had difficulty deciphering my own hand-written notes scribbled on a pad of paper. It’s so much easier to type your missives or record them, and then have them speech-recognized and converted to a written text. That said, this technology is far from perfect.

Speech Recognition Software

I get various (electronic) newsletters and the like which are obviously using speech recognition software somewhere along the process. It can easily be recognized from all kinds of spelling errors resulting from misinterpretations of the spoken words. The resulting errors can be annoying, funny and entirely misleading, all simultaneously. In theory, a good proofreading and manual corrections to the written text would take care of that, but it appears even that is no longer in vogue. Remember the news item from a while ago? A particular sentence in a new book was to read “... freshly ground black pepper...” as part of a recipe. Obviously, the text had been prepared from some kind of abbreviated writing or spoken text. The resulting error in the computer interpretation had not been noticed in the proof reading step; it was rather embarrassing. When the book appeared in print, that recipe called for something quite different from “black pepper.” Several thousand copies of the book had to be recalled and destroyed.

The World of Science

The world of science is equally affected by the “paperless” developments. More journals are offering “electronic copy only” subscriptions. It’s just a matter of time when university libraries will no longer have to deal with the daily influx of printed journals as they’ll all become history too. Already many libraries subscribe to electronic versions only and offer large arrays of computer terminals to access the articles. I remember, some 20 years ago, out of the blue I received a phone call from an outfit in Europe asking me about my views on the future of printed versus electronic journals. My view then was exactly what we see happening now. Publications will all be in some sort of electronic files (the pdf format has taken the world by storm), in color, searchable, and accessible to any subscriber. All you need is a subscription and an internet connection. In fact, there are already various journals and news services which publish electronic versions only. The electronic world is taking over. Let me know when you find a mail box. I’d like to plant one on my front lawn.


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Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser -- Bio and Archives

Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser is author of CONVENIENT MYTHS, the green revolution – perceptions, politics, and facts Convenient Myths


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