People's Court today, Friday, 12/18

Can you hummmm a few notes of that tune? I don't recognize it.

Reply to
Muggles
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The older I get the higher my error rate gets.

Reply to
Muggles

t the correct numbers.

Anyone can make a mistake. To really foul things up requires a computer

Reply to
Unquestionably Confused

It's not that far fetched. Soundex was originally used by the census department to try to match surnames. The algorithm encoded the characters into a letter and four digits. The problem was surnames often change spellings like Snyder, Snider, and Schneider, and it was an attempt to group possible matches.

It worked fairly well when they were dealing with northern European surnames but broke down badly with other areas.

There have been a number of attempts to improve the matching algorithms over the years and one is to determine how many edits it takes to get from A to B like those puzzles where you change one letter at a time.

Common typing mistakes should be easy to identify. teh and yuo come to mind.

Reply to
rbowman

If I tried it years ago I may have converted. After 55 years of typing I'm not so interested in change. My guess is too many die hards not willing to learn and teach it.

Long term it may be the best, but short term it could be a nightmare doing the changeover in a company with hundreds of keyboards.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

I was agreeing with you. That 's why I said definitely. It's the most likely way to have done that, for that word.

The summer after my first year in college, I worked at the US Army Finance Center** in Indianapolis. This is not what wikip or google says but what they told me there was that Soundex was invented by a guy who worked there. Since he invented it partly, largely, entirely on government time, or in accordance with his employment contract, he offered it to the army but they didnt' want it. I'm not sure if they gave up their rights for no money or what. But then he pursued it and ended up selling it back to the army for mucho money, enough that he was rich.

Maybe that's why the army didnt' want it at first, but it's what they used when I was there in 1965. I saw personel records. Not details, but enough to see the name and the Soundex code, and one of the guys explained to me the relationship, the system.

I'm working on one myself. No kidding. I'm pretty far along and if I'd get off my butt, I'd be out there in 2016 trying to sell it.

**I might have been called a math trainee, but I didn't do any math. I was an errand boy, but they did give me time to read the manuals that went with two early business machines. I forget the second one but one was the card sorter, the one you saw on the $64,000 Question. It's manual is really less than 2 pages but one paragraph is not obvious,and it relates to another story from 13 years later when I was working at the Office of Workers Comp.
Reply to
Micky

I'll tell you the story here. As I said in another thread, I was a claims examiner for the federal Office of Workers Compensation, at

45th and Broadway in NYC. Claims examiner sounds a lot better than it is. At training they said we'd make decisions involving hundreds of thousands of dollars (for permanent disability cases) but in fact, they're never going to let someone in the first couple/few years make a decision like that. we were basically pencil pushers.

To show how we were regarded, at one time there were stacks of something that had to be put in numerical order. I didnt' want to create 100 piles, but 11 years earlier I had read the manual for the card sorter, and it gave a better way. First sort on the 1's column, then on the 10's, then on the 100's, and so forth. This way you only need to make 10 piles. It's counter intuitive to start with the right hand columns, but it works that way and not the other way.

After the first step, the 221s, 131s, 541s are all together. After you sort on the 10's column, the 721s, 221s, 521s are all together. After the 100's column, if the numbers are no more than 1000, they are all in the right order.

Four or five of us were on loan to a guy in an office 50 feet away, and he came by and saw what I was doing, and he was nice enough, asked me about it. I assured him it would work, but he didnt' believe me and told me to do it the obvious, harder way. So I did. I think we only spent 2 more hours on this job, but it's an example of how arduous it has to be to be smart and work in a lowly job. It's clear from reading biographies that some smart guys either go out on their own or are in business where they can get promoted, but this entry level job wasn't one of those afaik. I was only there for about

3 months.
Reply to
Micky

When I worked on mainframes, one time I printed a new page for every line.

It was hard to save paper after that first year, when I realized I could waste more paper in one day than I could save in my lifetime.

Reply to
Micky

It's been around a long time but there have been a lot of new improved versions. I've used it for address validation and it works fairly well for police dispatchers who can't spell. It can get weird though. BEACH, BEECH, BIRCH are okay but sometimes the encoding gives you unexpected candidates. Explainable, but still unexpected.

Reply to
rbowman

You haven't lived until you've fed a PostScript document to a non-PostScript printer. PostScript is actually a reverse Polish programming language so what you wind up with is a program listing with bits and pieces of the actual text embedded in it.

Don Lancaster pushed PostScript about as far as it could go. iirc he was using it to drive an x/y table.

Reply to
rbowman

[More detail than necessary because I'm emailing this to someone]

Having more names than expected for the same code is not a real problem. The goal is to cure the "opposite" problem. The goal is to be able to find multiple names with multiple spellings and misspellings and multiple correct, slurred, or mis pronunciations for each of them..

Wikip doesn't make this clear, when it says " so that they can be matched despite minor differences in spelling" It's far broader than that, because vowels aren't considered at all, and, as you know, consonants are grouped together so that any that can be mistaken aurally for another get the same numeric code. So what most people would consider major differences in spelling get the same code.

The goal is to prevent misfiling and to be able to find whatever has been filed, even if one doesn't know how to spell or clearly pronounce the name.

For example, in Latin American Spanish, b and v sound so close to each other that they have to name them b-burro and v-vaca. (In print they look different but in speech the b and v can be indistinguishable, even to a Latino, unless maybe he knows how the word or name is normally spelled and it's spelled normally. But a Latino or an Anglo using Soundex doesn't have to know whether it's a b or a v because they both get the same code. They don't have to know when filing, or when retrieving. Not that Spanish was the driving force. Even in English the sounds are similar. You and I might not notice, but people who get names to spell all day long do.

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Although putting s and z with c, g, j, k, q, and x might be a counter-plan, because it seems to me the first two couldn't be confused with the other 6.

Reply to
Micky

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