Home, sweet home ...

Via Slashdot, the American Department of Homeland Security considers the border to be within a 100-mile thick zone, according to a Wired article by David Kravets, DHS Watchdog OKs 'Suspicionless' Seizure of Electronic Devices Along Border. This generous border interpretation allows for searches on people passing through American border points long after they may believe they have completed this process.

According to a prior Wired article, ACLU Assails 100-Mile Border Zone as 'Constitution Free', and an ACLU fact sheet on what is described as a U.S. "Constitution-Free Zone", this interpretation of the border is being demarcated inland from the outer edge of the US border.

While this isn't happy news for folks on the inland side of that border, this is fortunate for those folks residing in Canada, because a substantial amount of Canada's "population lives in a narrow corridor at the southern part of the country, near the American border."

The 2006 Atlas of Canada from Natural Resources Canada has a population distribution map. Note the proximity of Canadian population to American borders.

Philosophy, contrast, and monetisation

I just caught the trailer for the film, Being in the World: A Celebration of Being Human in a Technological Age

... and was delighted and amused that before I could watch this video about relating to people and objects and all that fascinating philosophical stuff, first there was an ad, an increasing-common way for free services to remain, well, free-of-charge. And not just any ad, but an ad for a new Die Hard film, A Good Day to Die Hard:

Best quoted conversation from A Good Day to Die Hard to contrast the Being in the World video?

"Need a hug?"
"We're not a hugging family."
"Damn straight."

Form follows failure (not function)

In Henry Petroski's 1992 book, The Evolution of Useful Things, he asserts that form doesn't follow function, form follows failure.

Petroski cites a number of people discussing design and failure, including architect Christopher Alexander and designer David Pye. Petroski notes,

According to [David] Pye, "function is a fantasy," and he italicizes his further assertion that "the form of designed things is decided by choice or else by chance; but it is never actually entailed by anything whatever."

Quoting Pye further,

The concept of function in design, and even the doctrine of functionalism, might be worth a little attention if things ever worked.  It is, however, obvious that they do not. .... Nothing we design or make ever really works. We can always say what it ought to do, but that it never does.

Is there a solution? According to Pye,

All designs for devices are in some degree failures, either because they flout one or another of the requirements or because they are compromises, and compromise implies a degree of failure ....
It follows that all designs for use are arbitrary. The designer or his client has to choose in what degree and where there shall be failure. 

Who are you?

Over on Slashdot, a discussion looking at name conflicts in automatically-generated email accounts includes a variety of problems that arise from making assumptions about identity as expressed by names.

(Note: this post has links aplenty, but there's a video from A Bit of Fry and Laurie embedded at the end that's both funny and directly relevant to this discussion.)

Many problems noted in the Slashdot discussion relate to different cultural and linguistic practises, not to mention the need to accommodate non-Latin written scripts.

One Slashdot commenter links to another blog with a post called Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names by Patrick from Kalzumeus Software. The post and its entire comment thread are well worth a read.

Items 32-37 are of particular interest to trans folk:

32. People’s names are assigned at birth.
33. OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth.
34. Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.
35. Five years?
36. You’re kidding me, right?
37. Two different systems containing data about the same person will use the same name for that person.

Assuming a trans person doesn't have complicating factors such as having been born in a foreign jurisdiction using a non-Latin alphabet or a naming convention atypical for North America (which seems to assume firstname middlename lastname is the gold standard), the practise of many institutions of establishing system identity using information from a birth certificate poses substantial problems.

Before peeking at those problems, let's take a brief look at some of the non-trans complications that occur when names and databases collide (through specific comments on the Falsehoods article) :

1. Organisations insist you must be identified by names you never use
2. Due to prior technological limitations your name is changed to a shorter character length yet multiple records may now exist
3. Your legal name is required (by law) yet the database structure doesn't accommodate your actual legal name
4. Multiple cultures and nationalities use divergent standards yet local laws require different standards that conflict with these many divergencies
5. The same person may be identified in different places in different ways in accordance with local practises
6. Some types of assumed names are considered acceptable, while other types of assumed names are considered to be criminal, even if all name usage is actually non-criminal
7. Names may not be registered at all or may be adopted names rather than legal names
8. Conflicts between how a name is rendered by the database and the person's real name results in substantial problems when dealing with large institutions, including government

As noted by one commenter in response to the notion of "don't let the ideal be the enemy of the good" is that "the problem is that the majority of systems in use today aren't even good."

For trans people, these systems seem to be peculiarly not good:

• The system can't handle a person changing gender
• In addition to gender being non-conforming, a person's title (or titles) may vary widely by language and occupation
• Beyond names, a system might also be complex due to being capable of entering highly-divergent sex differentiation
• A system capable of entering highly-divergent sex differentiation may be making assumptions about the actual genetics of the person in question

And of course, unlike married people adopting names as part of a non-legal but commonly accepted tradition, a trans person changing gender causes databases to be destroyed.

Yet appropriate possible solutions must exist. For example, some places--such as hospitals--have to be capable of handling individuals who may not have a name or whose name may be unknown. These records may be tied to other systems with the weight of law behind them, such as a government.

Despite all this, many people want to be called by their proper identity, an identity determined to be proper according to their own norms, not imposed externally.

(Note: this video was sourced thanks to links posted by some commenters to the Falsehoods article.)

Elevate me!

I had a delightful experience today using an elevator in a recently-opened building. Like many modern elevators, this one included voice annunciation to call out each floor. But unlike many automated voicemail systems hereabouts, this one seemed to have an accent somewhat uncommon here in North America--to my untrained ears at least, it sounded like Scottish English.

Which of course, is a lovely opportunity to share a bit of gratuitous elevator humour, from the Scottish comedy show, Burnistoun:

Meditation on mediation

All this talk on mediation of late has me thinking about, well, mediation. Beyond media ecology, mediation has meaning in the world of negotiation. But is media-mediation so different than negotiation-mediation?

Sherry Turkle's TED talk Alone Together includes a brief mention of the problem of communication technology addiction: that the metaphor of addiction is inappropriate because the only way to deal with addiction is to stop using that 'substance' and that's something no one is seriously going to do with our modern communications networks such as the Internet, social networks, or smartphones.

"These technologies are our current partners in the human adventure. The notion of addiction with its one solution that we know we won't take makes us feel hopeless and passive," Turkle says.

While our smartphones might be packed jam-full of gee-whiz apps and capabilities, they aren't actually smart in the way a sentient being is smart. Yet I wonder whether using negotiation tools such as BATNA (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Settlement) and ZOPA (Zone Of Possible Agreement) might be useful in assessing and negotiating the type of relationship we want to have with our technologies?

We're a long way from our technologies being 'smart' in the sense of having a personal say in this negotiation yet these technologies do mediate our interaction with others across all spheres, including professional and personal. Is navigating technology enough, or do we need to be active negotiators?

Mediated life: digital afterlife

An entertaining and surprisingly (disturbingly?) familiar look at what the future might entail:

Who upgrades the upgraders?