A Sofer, Sopher, Sofer SeTaM, or Sofer ST"M (Heb: "scribe", סופר סת״ם) is a Jewish scribe who can transcribe Torah scrolls, tefillin and mezuzot, and other religious writings. (ST"M, סת״ם, is an abbreviation for Sefer Torahs, Tefillin, and Mezuzot. The plural of sofer is "soferim", סופרים.)
By simple definition, a sofer is a copyist, but the religious role in Judaism is much more. Besides Torah scrolls, Tefillin, and Mezuzot, scribes are also necessary to write of megillot (scrolls of the Song of Songs, Book of Ruth, Book of Esther, Ecclesiastes, and Book of Lamentations), Nevi'im (the books of the prophets, used for reading the haftarah), and for gittin, divorce documents. Also, many scribes function as calligraphers—writing functional documents such as marriage contracts, or ornamental and artistic renditions of religious texts, which do not require any scribal qualifications and to which the rules on lettering and parchment specifications do not apply.
The major Jewish law (Halakha) pertaining to "Sofrut," the practice of scribal arts, is in the Talmud in the tractate Maseket Sofrim. In the Torah's 613 Mitzvot (commandments) the 613th is that every Jew should write a Sefer Torah in their lifetime.(Deut. 31:19)
A scribe is a person who writes books or documents by hand in hieroglyphics, cuneiform or other scripts and may help keep track of records for priests and government.
The profession, previously found in all literate cultures in some form, lost most of its importance and status with the advent of printing. The work could involve copying books, including sacred texts, or secretarial and administrative duties, such as taking of dictation and the keeping of business, judicial and, historical records for kings, nobles, temples, and cities. Later the profession developed into public servants, journalists, accountants, typists, and lawyers. In societies with low literacy rates, street-corner letter-writers (and readers) may still be found providing a service.
The most important was a person educated in the arts of writing (using both hieroglyphics and hieratic scripts, and from the second half of the first millennium BCE the demotic script, used as shorthand and for commerce) and arithmetics. Sons of scribes were brought up in the same scribal tradition, sent to school and, upon entering the civil service, inherited their fathers' positions.
Scribe is a server for aggregating log data streamed in real-time from a large number of servers. It is designed to be scalable, extensible without client-side modification, and robust to failure of the network or any specific machine.
Scribe was developed at Facebook and released in 2008 as open source.
Scribe servers are arranged in a directed graph, with each server knowing only about the next server in the graph. This network topology allows for adding extra layers of fan-in as a system grows, and batching messages before sending them between datacenters, without having any code that explicitly needs to understand datacenter topology, only a simple configuration.
Scribe was designed to consider reliability but to not require heavyweight protocols and expansive disk usage. Scribe spools data to disk on any node to handle intermittent connectivity node failure, but doesn't sync a log file for every message. This creates a possibility of a small amount of data loss in the event of a crash or catastrophic hardware failure. However, this degree of reliability is often suitable for most Facebook use cases.
A medical scribe is a paraprofessional who specializes in charting physician-patient encounters in real time, such as during medical examinations. Depending on which area of practice the scribe works in, the position may also be called clinical scribe, ER scribe or ED scribe (in the emergency department), or just scribe (when the context is implicit). A scribe is trained in health information management and the use of health information technology to support it. A scribe can work on-site (at a hospital or clinic) or remotely from a HIPAA-secure facility. Medical scribes who work at an off-site location are known as virtual medical scribes and normally work in clinical settings.
A medical scribe's primary duties are to follow a physicians through his or her work day and chart patient encounters in real-time using a medical office's electronic health record (EHR) and existing templates. Medical scribes also generate referral letters for physicians, manage and sort medical documents within the EHR system, and assist with e-prescribing. Medical scribes can be thought of as data care managers, enabling physicians, medical assistants, and nurses to focus on patient in-take and care during clinic hours. Medical scribes, by handling data management tasks for physicians in real-time, free the physician to increase patient contact time, give more thought to complex cases, better manage patient flow through the department, and increase productivity to see more patients.