Here’s a more technical one: health information
It’s a huge pain trying to transfer health information, between patients, doctors, different clinics, hospitals, etc. If you try and move far enough, your records might get transferred as a bunch of PDFs or scanned images on a CD.
There is no good standard that ticks all the boxes, so it’s not just a matter of getting everyone to agree. A solid standard that addresses all the needs would be amazing, and it would help improve healthcare so much.
People would get control over their own health information (as much as appropriate without causing unnecessary harm), and we could properly use health tracking data from biometrics devices for personalized care. We could do large scale studies using properly anonymized data, and we wouldn’t have proprietary systems to try and work around.
Best of all, you could go to a new clinic/hospital/ER and you wouldn’t need to enter the same information all over again (likely missing clinically relevant data along the way).
Have you tried the OpenEHR standard? What’s wrong with it?
I should have worded it differently, it’s possible there is a best standard that I don’t know enough about. I don’t know enough about OpenEHR, but that’s something I’ll read more about :)
FHIR is an excellent standard.
I completely agree. All the different EMR systems make doing any research just that more tedious. And like you said it’d be so nice to just walk into a health care facility and not worry about paperwork
Some EHRs are pretty good about this nowadays. Epic, for example, allows you to share info across health systems. The user has to enable it though, which is a problem due to low adoption among older patients.
Also, this will be less of a problem in coming years due to increasing consolidation of health systems.
I can’t speak to much of this, but I have a friend who works on the technical side of health insurance. Specifically he is helping with FHIR. I did some HL7 work a long time ago which lets health systems talk to each other. FHIR is supposed to be a more comprehensive offshoot (I asked if it was HL7 on steroids and wasn’t corrected).
Unfortunately, I may have misunderstood. My career took me a different path than his so I’m way out of date on it.
Date formats. Can never tell if dd/mm/yyyy, mm/dd/yyyy, yyyy-mm-dd…
The yyyy-mm-dd format (ISO 8601) is the only one that is unambiguous, because no one so far in history has ever used the yyyy-dd-mm format (at least until some xkcd-reading jokester probably will start using it just out of spite). I use ISO 8601 everywhere. It has the additional benefit that filenames get sorted correctly in lexographical order.
As someone that works with huge amounts of data with dates in varied formats… PLEASE let this be standardised. :')
I was gonna reply the “S” in “ISO” stands for “standardization” but apparently ISO doesn’t stand for anything.
I was expecting a KFC situation, but no:
Because ‘International Organization for Standardization’ would have different acronyms in different languages (IOS in English, OIN in French), our founders decided to give it the short form ISO. ISO is derived from the Greek word isos (ίσος, meaning “equal”). Whatever the country, whatever the language, the short form of our name is always ISO.
Many years ago, I came across a forum that formatted dates yyyy-dd-mm. That was such a traumatic memory that I still remember it.
ISO-8601 has the answer for computers, and maybe humans too. It’s the last way you mentioned for everyday use.
This is why I always use letters for the month when I can. There’s no confusing 3 Oct 2023.
March 8th, 2023?
Yes, very good, you used the letters just like they said.
Only way I’d do it is by pissing everyone off. DD/YYYY/MM
how about YYMDMDYY
YMDYYDMY
YMCA
YTMND
Yeenage Tutant Minja Nurtles D
Let there be carnage: DD/YY/MMMM
The key you need to press to get to bios.
Fuck yeah. I can’t believe this isn’t already standard
It’s just five options, no?
F2, F8, F11, F5, Hammer?
Esc
Del
Also some laptops will have you push a paperclip into a hole or press some special vendor button (like the “vantage” button or what have you on Lenovo laptops).
Don’t forget Del
CEO compensation vs employee compensation.
CEO pay has skyrocketed in comparison to the pay of the employees, this needs to change.
Why is that an issue? If they are the founder of the company I think they deserve it, and if not, there must be some logical reason why they pay that person so much…
I think they’re saying it’s an issue specifically in reference to how employee wages have grown in comparison. If we look at previous decades, you’ll see that CEO and other executive level pay has increased substantially, and has absolutely left employee pay in the dust. That isn’t to say people shouldn’t be paid more for a good or important job, but we should probably be keeping a watch to ensure those with plenty don’t take even more from those with little. And if those at the top are taking more, historically, than their fair share, then that needs brought in line.
This is a very good response. Thanks for writing.
I’d bet most people can get behind the idea that those in leadership positions or saddled with greater responsibility should be compensated more. The issue for me is the magnitude of that compensation.
If they are the founder, they are likely not a public company yet and can grant themselves stock at great rates. Most do-ers aren’t CEOs, they are busy doing.
In the USA, it would be to metric. Pretty much everywhere else in the US, NASA, military, science, it’s all metric.
It’s not even a case of ‘everywhere else’, it’s actually ‘everywhere’.
It’s just that some sections of that ‘everywhere’ take the metric system and add an abstraction on top of it.
The imperial system literally defines itself by the metric system.
Pants sizes. For women, drop the even/odd numbering for women and juniors and move to waist and inseam like men. For everyone, implement some sort of standard policy where the actual measured size can’t be more than an inch off the stated size (to account for variability in manufacturing and such).
Yes, great answer! Not just pants though, we need a standard size for all women’s clothing.
standard policy where the actual measured size can’t be more than an inch off the stated size
Yes please, I’m so tired trying to guess if this 33 is a 34, 35, or 36.
sometimes the clothes measurements are body measurements, and sometimes it’s the exact measurement of the cloth itself, and sometimes it’s the circumference of the relaxed waistband.
Camera lens mounts, increased competition within systems would be great.
I thought everyone bought Canon adapters and called it a day lol
Micro Four Thirds was an attempt to do that. It didn’t work out so well.
I don’t know about just one thing, but I’d love to see electric tools all use the same battery interface set of specs. It’s like the bad old days of cell phone chargers
Sometimes I think about standardized retail packaging. What if there was a set of boxes/containers, and they all stacked together nearly and transported nearly. Could save a lot of time and cost on shipping and shelving and potentially make automation easier
Well, it’s not cardboard, but I am absolutely fascinated by euroboxes.
A europallet is 1200x800mm.
Then there are euroboxes of 800x600mm, 600x400mm, 300x400mm etc.
They are stackable, reusable and recyclable and come in different types. Fully enclosed, with lid, with grid walls etc.
Machinists use them as toolboxes, bakers to transport bread and veggie vendors stack have their products on the market in euroboxes.
Singular front panel connector plug.
A set of standards of course!
Social networks should be standardised on activity pub.
Networks are a winner takes it all situation. Standardise and allow competition within a network. Then innovation will happen much faster. We are like Romans not using the steam engine. Future historiens will wonder why we were stuck so long.
We’re getting there, with Threads implementing AP soon and any network that doesn’t do so will be locked into their own world (usually, for the worse).
The problem is that we might get a Google situation, where at first the company adheres and complies to the standard, but then they innovate so fast and confusingly, that they essentially define the standard, and all other networks have to keep up to remain part of the main flock.
In a winner takes all – that would be Google, and we will see much of the same dark patterns with AP protocols as we do with Browsers now.
Exactly
So often, the big players who have the power to grow and support standards in a major way are shitty corporations, and the altruistic, ethical organizations are tiny and broke and feeble
I think this abides by the idea of this post, but I would standardize language across the world. Whether it is an existing language or a new language doesn’t really matter or maybe a mix of the biggest existing languages.
I remember reading a book where in the future everyone spoke a combination of English and Chinese. They seem pretty incompatible though.
It’s such an interesting idea, isn’t it? Theres a lot to gain but also, a language can mean a lot to people: identity, community, history. If we’re at A, I can look ahead and see the benefits of getting to Z, but I have no idea what all happens in between.
What a dystopian nightmare!
Is it? When migrant workers are able to speak the same language as the natives, they would be able to integrate faster and look out for one another better.
Right now, large corporations make use of migrant workers who are unaware of their rights in host countries to undermine the working rights of the host workers. A diverse workforce is much less likely to unionize, and large corporations know that.
Gonna have to disagree there.
Each language is a culture and each is special, different from every other, and removing or transforming them changes that.
Interoperability between social networks, including messengers and the like, so you can choose what software you want to use, including your own.
fediverse!
Are you aware that’s literally what the fediverse is?
Yes but it isn’t exactly standardized in the sense that it has interop with popular software such as WhatsApp.
Ah, so get more stuff on the fediverse. Good choice.
SQL. There are so many SQL dialects. Only if there could be a way to standardize it…
I mean, there IS a universal SQL standard that all of the major dialects are supersets of. It’s only when you get into the funky stuff that you start finding dialect-specific syntax and features.
