Posted on 05/22/2011 5:54:39 PM PDT by Nachum
Many a time. Usually after observing that a database query that should have taken about 3 milliseconds took 3 seconds. Oh stupid me! I forgot to declare an index for that foreign key!
At your typical old-style deeds registry, they maintained a grantor/grantee index (card file transitioning to database at the time I last used a physical one, in the late eighties). So, if you were interested in a house owned by Billy Bob Jones, you went to that index and found the most recent conveyance under that name. It had a book and page number. Then you went into the stacks, pulled down the cited book and turned to the cited page. There you found the deed whereby Jimmy Earl Smith, et ux, sold the property to Mr. Jones. It had a reference to book and page with the deed that conveyed the property to Mr. Smith and his old lady. Etc.
Typically, there was a bank of coin-operated copiers in one corner of the records hall, into which you could pump nickels and dimes if you needed to copy any of the documents.
These days, you can do the paper chase online in many jurisdictions. The deeds registries contract out the work to a relatively small number of firms who scan and index all the documents and maintain a sub-website for the registry. Typically, you can search by owner or property location. You get back a list of documents. Then you can download tiffs of what you need (or are just nosy about). Some will also have aerial photographic maps of the lots and ground-level photos of the properties. With condos, you will often find floor-plans of the units.
I was not clear enough in my question. I did not mean an index as it relates to a database, but an index in the classic sense of a book index.
Have you ever created a human readable index?
An Index for a book is not a Concordance. A good index is more useful, but must be created with human intuition not by software alone. A good index often has cross-references and Double-Posting of synonymous terms.
What I was trying to describe was done to index items that had no real category system in place. It was created after the intuitive arrangement of the items in the catalog by paging through the printed copy and creating index entries from 30 years knowledge of the industry. Trade terms, slang terms and Vendor names where it made sense to use them.
Often catalogs have what looks like an index, but really is not an index. Computer software processes efficiently, but the output often is not that human readable.
For a long time my tag line was: “Bringing order to apparent chaos is the highest form of creativity.”
*******
FACTCHECK short form Obama certificate: Out of curiosity, I checked Obama's short form at FactCheck to check for smiley face and for the "x" in the word "THE" instead of "H".
1. Onaka stamp: The Onake stamp on the short form, in my opinion, is slightly different than the Onaka stamp on Obama's long form certificate.
2. The so-called "Smiley" on Obama's long form certificate: I don't see the small marks that make up the "smiley" face on Obama's long form Onaka stamp that I see on Obama's long form certifcate with the naked eye. Maybe my eyesight is bad, burt, again, I didn't see the marks on the short form that I see on the long form that make up the so-called smiley face. Of course, 2007 was 4 years ago, and so the Health Department could be using a new Onaka stamp by now, because the 2007 one could have worn out.
3. "x" in long form birth certificate: On the short form, I don't see the "x" in the word "the" that I see on the long form certificate.
4. There could be a simple explanation for why there is a "smiley" in Alvin Onaka's name and a "x" where a "H" should be.
5. So to try to clear up this mystery of the "smiley" and the "x", I suggest the following: Someone ask Onaka to stamp a piece of paper several times with his stamp.
6. Then we could compare Onaka's stamp on the blank piece of paper with the stamp on Obama's long form certificate to see if they match.
7. NOTE: Maybe there are several Onaka stamps lying around at the Health Department that clerks use.
8. If there are several Onaka stamping tools, then someone could try to get as many samples from all the stamping tools so that we can compare them to the Onaka stamp used on Obama's long form birth certificate. We want to see how many of the Onaka stamps have the smiley face and the "x" in the word "THE" instead of having a "H".
9. Again, 2007 was 4 years ago, and the stamp that was used on Obama's short form in 2007 may have been thrown away and replaced by newer Onaka stamping tools.
10. As I said, there is probably an innocent explanation why Obama's long form certificate has the Onaka stamp with the "smiley" and the "x", but I don't think we can be sure until we are able to check Onaka stamping tools at the Hawaii Health Department, especially if the clerks use more than one Onaka stamping tool as they process numerous birth certificates requests every day.
11. Also, maybe one of the clerks secretly put the smiley face on one of the Onaka stamps just to have some fun in the office, and it had nothing to do with a forger playing around with an Onaka stamp.
1. The original is obviously paper. That’s why the upper left corner denotes curvature. The original paper artifacts include bending, preprinted plus typed content (and distortions common then and near-unheard-of today), poor quality troubling to subsequent processing, etc.
2a. I presume the documents were transferred to microfiche at a suitable time, causing some [more] distortion in the image. At one time this was impressive technology.
2b. The documents may have been scanned from paper instead. Either way lines up with my experience of the era.
2c. Either way, when talking massive libraries of governmental records, storage space was at a premium. Clever (and now problematic) space-saving techniques were applied to block out needed sections, save different parts at different qualities (signatures deemed important, typed or form text less so), and store only blocks that mattered; this saved a LOT of space, and the pieces would be used to reconstruct a legal copy. I remember this technique as being “oh-wow cool” tech.
3. How the document is later rendered depends on what is needed and what technologies are available. The image components having been saved at varying sections and resolutions, an add-on package could be provided later to generate PDF or other late-model document formats. So long as we’ve got the original data, we can render it into any modern format, which may be a bit of a hack job (but it works sufficient for legal needs).
4. Large-scale document automation systems have been around for a long time. Governments are a prime candidate for early adoption: they’ve got vast archives to digitize, and near-unlimited funds to do it with. A state department would indeed be an early adopter of such technology. The data is probably still stored in some fairly old format, converted to PDF as needed.
5. I remember studying industrial-scale document automation products around 1986, and recall the document compression process I’m harping on.
HI having gone thru all the effort to digitize vast mountains of governmental paperwork, and having certified legal equivalence thereof, there is no bureaucratic need to either re-scan everything from the originals nor to re-render the data into non-fragmented form. (Remember: classic mainframes and massive COBOL systems still process enormous volumes of data. Those systems still work, and the enormous cost of upgrading isn’t worth the cost of straight maintenance.) They’ve got the data, the system works, you ask for a copy of an original BC in HI and they’ll give you a legal copy generated to PDF from the fragmentary varying-resolution data stored in “ancient” file formats. It’s not just credible, it’s sensible: why spend millions to overhaul legal data to produce output that looks exactly the same and takes up orders of magnitude more storage? Legacy systems don’t go away: all too often they’re cheaper to maintain than replace, and “how it works” isn’t sufficiently documented anywhere other than the source code and/or executables; it works, it’s not broken, don’t fix it just because it’s old (their mantra, not mine).
They may or may not have the originals. Since the digital copies are legal equivalents, and messing with decades-old paper is time-consuming and damaging, when you pay your $20 for a copy you’ll get the rendered digital version, not a photocopy of the actual original (hence my Zapruder example).
Eminently sensible.
Do you have any direct knowledge of the document records system in the HI Department of Health???
There have been so many exposed untruths about his records that nothing will make HI credible concerning this.
He is and forever will be a Fraud....
Nothing direct. Not my business. Just have been in the computing industry for upwards of 30 years; have seen a lot develop and change, including document automation and image processing in ways which make me look at BHO’s alleged BC and say “yeah, it’s legit - ugly thing, with lots of overlapping artifacts, but still legit.”
The real fraud is right there on the form for everyone to read.
He’s a British subject.
And nobody notices.
Eminently sensible.
******
I'm sorry, but are you saying that Obama's long form birth certificate is a fake or not a fake?
I am just your average home computer user and not a professional person who works with computers for a living, so I had some problems following your explanation.
Your explanation was written clearly, but, as I said, I am not as technically advanced as you and others here when it comes to understanding how the Hawaii Department of Health made a copy of Obama's long form birth certificate, so I hope that you understand how I had trouble following a lot of your message.
For instance, I thought Hawaii officials said that they made a copy of Obama's long form birth certificate from an original that was bound in a book.
Thanks for any help that you can give this layman when it comes to understanding modern printing methods as they apply to the way Hawaii officials made a copy of Obama's long form birth certificate.
So, again, does your explanation say that Obama's long form birth certificate is a fake or not a fake? Thanks from a layman.
Short answer:
It’s a lousy photocopy of the original. Crummy, but legal proof.
Long answer:
I’m saying it’s not a fake. It’s a legally true, albeit poor, copy of the original. It’s a complex issue, with lots of overlapping technical nuances that confuse and distract the ignorant, but in the end it’s legitimate proof.
The bound-book original paper was likely scanned into a computer (or photographed, then that photo scanned) decades ago. To save disk space, lots of clever shortcuts were applied to that image to make the file very small while retaining enough detail to be legal. That image file sat there for a long time. On request, that stored copy was used, subject to lots of technical contortions, to create the PDF image released at whitehouse.gov.
Those who do not understand the history of document imaging technology will be confused by the “artifacts” (errors & distortions) caused by old techniques and how they interact with conversion to new techniques. Those who _refuse_ to believe it’s real will use _any_ point of confusion as alleged proof it’s a fake; everything they’re pointing out as “proof it’s fake” looks to me as proof it’s real. (And I’m as interested in proving it a fake just as much as anyone.)
Bonus answer:
Everyone is also overlooking the fact that it’s legal proof he’s a British subject, and thus he’s not eligible as President.
For the same reason people who take the Da Vinci Code seriously are pathetic.
That IS pathetic, but that doesn’t mean that his arguments lack validity in his expose of this obviously forged “document”.
If you take the naive approach — index every lexical word except for stop words
like the
and and
— that you can do with a short program in a language like Ruby or Python. But you will indeed end up with something like a concordance — simultaneously too much information and not enough. To turn it into a useful index, you would need to work it over manually, removing most of the entries and regrouping and recharacterizing others.
A useful book index is probably beyond the limits of artificial intelligence as it exists today. Maybe Google could take a stab at it. You could submit a manuscript, and Google would shoot it back with all the interesting words and phrases marked, perhaps with interesting categories suggested. Interesting in the light of their global document sea, that is. That would be a start, but you'd still need to review it and add, subtract, and categorize entries.
I just fired up Word, which I hardly ever use (I have Office for the Mac, and I use Excel and sometimes PowerPoint, but hardly ever Word, except to read the occasional Word document). I see it has what looks like a fairly intelligent indexing facility. You highlight the word or phrase, and a pre-filled form pops up. You can hit Return, or you can modify the category, subcategory, etc. So, maybe my hypothetical Google facility could accept Word documents and return them with suggested index markup added in Word format, which allows you to hide the markup when working on other aspects of the document.
Indexing a deeds registry or a vital records office is a much simpler process, conceptually at least. You just need to add the contents of certain well-defined fields to a database, hopefully associated with a high-quality image of the original document. Baby's name, parents' names, hospital, city and state, date and time, unusual circumstances, such as non-hospital or late filing, noted. You don't really need parents' races, but, hey, why not (even if the values are self-reported). Once you've got the database, producing a short form is trivial. And so is producing the long form, if you scanned the originals.
Glad to see a few folks weren’t completely misdirected by the deliberate BC diversion. Corsi and the others are just muddying the waters by throwing every kooky internet theory at the issue, rather than pinpoint the central issue of his British father.
Then he certainly found an equal match in YOU!!!
Corsi mentioned that he has several contacts inside the HDOH working there. They alerted him to the fact that a forgery was being prepared and was utlimately placed into Obama’s file.
These people are the whistleblowers. They go with the media in tow together with Tim Adam’s affadavit and claim a criminal act has taken place.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2724427/posts?page=52#52
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