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Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

bbc.com

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Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

#361

Post by rbanffy »

gxs wrote: post #334
TeMPOraL wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would imply non-tech people having some surprisingly deep visibility into technical details. What they really see is Excel vs. some contractor doing "a system". The reality is that Excel is available today and works, and scales up... well, until it doesn't. Still, you have data entry that everybody in the field understands, that's rock solid (so no need to unit test anything), and has a tried and true authentica…

Not to mention the "system" solution will have to go through its own debugging and will undoubtedly have bugs in it for some time after initial release. On top of that, there is STILL room for human error as a user is still the one actually inputting data and designing the experiment/data flow. I'm going to get mauled on this forum given the audience, but parent comment reeks of the technical elitism on this forum an…

> Not to mention the "system" solution will have to go through its own debugging and will undoubtedly have bugs in it for some time after initial release.

Doing code reviews in Excel is hard if the developers are pathologically disciplined. It's impossible most of the time.

And so is debugging.

It's very unlikely any such system would face these limitations and would silently ignore data the same way Excel did.

Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

#363

Post by ksenzee »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #345
TeMPOraL wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would imply non-tech people having some surprisingly deep visibility into technical details. What they really see is Excel vs. some contractor doing "a system". The reality is that Excel is available today and works, and scales up... well, until it doesn't. Still, you have data entry that everybody in the field understands, that's rock solid (so no need to unit test anything), and has a tried and true authentica…

Excel never works for math, at any scale. It's a constant trashfire of "looks fine" until it shows a result someone doesn't want, and then an error is found that changes results and the cycle repeats. Excel is nice for visualizing and browsing data you already have, and informally searching and sorting for hypothesis generation.

> Excel never works for math, at any scale.

That is patently untrue. I've borrowed and lent money based on Excel spreadsheets, more than once. That's small-scale math with real-life consequences, and Excel is an excellent tool for the job.

Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

#364

Post by srtjstjsj »

retbull wrote: post #336
sjansen wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not while complying with privacy laws. I would be much more upset to find out a governemnt employ on a deadline used Google Sheets or Airtable to share my medical data instead of an Excel doc on a secure government file server.

I don't really agree with much of google any more but I was at one point fairly involved in a project there. They do have some more secure systems for government use that isn't the crazy leaky ad cesspool gmail and docs is.

Where are the ads in Docs?

Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

#366

Post by ploika »

strbean wrote: post #341
sjansen wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not while complying with privacy laws. I would be much more upset to find out a governemnt employ on a deadline used Google Sheets or Airtable to share my medical data instead of an Excel doc on a secure government file server.

Ah, HIPAA. Having looked at the marketplace for HIPAA compliant solutions for educational therapy patient record keeping (patient CRM, whatever the industry term is), I'd feel so much safer having my data in the hands of Airtable than the absolute dumpster fire that was every offering I saw.

HIPAA is an American regulation, not a British one.

Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

#367

Post by rvba »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #271
rvba wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, who is qualified to write programs in any programming language, if both programmers and developers frequently have errors in their code? https://cve.mitre.org/cve/

That exactly right, noone is. Thats why noone uses C++ or javascript in safety critical devices Even in 'normal' industry its is a huge problem and we need safer languages, i.e. Rust (merits to be seen)

People went to the moon and came back long before Rust existed.

Lots of operating systems were written in C or C++ and they allowed to achieve many things.

Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

#369

Post by TeMPOraL »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #345
TeMPOraL wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would imply non-tech people having some surprisingly deep visibility into technical details. What they really see is Excel vs. some contractor doing "a system". The reality is that Excel is available today and works, and scales up... well, until it doesn't. Still, you have data entry that everybody in the field understands, that's rock solid (so no need to unit test anything), and has a tried and true authentica…

Excel never works for math, at any scale. It's a constant trashfire of "looks fine" until it shows a result someone doesn't want, and then an error is found that changes results and the cycle repeats. Excel is nice for visualizing and browsing data you already have, and informally searching and sorting for hypothesis generation.

My 4th order Runge-Kutta ODE solver I did in an afternoon in Excel the other day, because I didn't want to pirate Matlab to do a homework assignment, begs to differ :). Not to mention, the entire financial industry and many (most?) small businesses.

Lots of people use Excel for various types of math, and it works fine, if you know what you're doing. Excel not being idiot-proof doesn't mean it's not usable.

And that's all without writing a single line of VBA.

(We can have a separate discussion about some of the newer Excel features, like automatically suggesting what kind of statistical analyses to perform on your data - I consider this to be a potential future source of serious fuckups, as it allows people to easily transform data using methods, whose assumptions and implications they do not understand.)

> "looks fine" until it shows a result someone doesn't want, and then an error is found that changes results and the cycle repeats

That's a feature, though. Excel is interactive, which means you get ample opportunity to do sanity checks on results (both partial and final) as you work on your sheet, as well as immediate feedback on corrections. In "properly written" IT systems, this is rarely the case - you end up discovering a problem further down the chain, and have to figure out which component did something wrong, and why.

Re: Missing Covid-19 test data was caused by the ill-thought-out use of Excel

#370

Post by mcv »

nickff wrote: post #353
sheetjs wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was literally cited by Britain's finance minister George Osborne as justification for UK government austerity: > As Ken Rogoff himself puts it, "there's no question that the most significant vulnerability as we emerge from recession is the soaring government debt. It's very likely that will trigger the next crisis as governments have been stretched so wide." https://web.archive.org/web/20100414205630/http://www.co…

People often cite papers which support their positions, but correlation does not necessarily imply causation, and the paper is rarely decisive.

Not the paper on its own, maybe, but it bolsters other arguments. If someone already wants austerity, an authoritative paper saying that's better will make them want austerity more, and gives them a strong argument in discussions with opponents, and may sway people who are unsure.
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