May 12th, 2008

Should you choose an unusual name for your baby?

in: Communicate, Standing out

The US Federal Government announced recently that its terrorist watch list contained nearly 800,000 names.

Richard Reid, who tried to blow up an airplane in December, 2001, had a fairly common name. www.namestatistics.com says that Richard is the eighth most common name in the world; and Reid is the 232nd most common last name. According to www.yournotme.com, there are 227 people in the UK named Richard Reid. With those odds, people with a common name are increasingly likely to be mistaken for someone on the list.

Some people whose names are similar to those on the watch list—or are listed—have countered by putting search technologies to use in their defense. Hasan Elahi decided to put his whole life online when he was mistakenly added to the watch list.

I like my name (now that I’m out of grade school.) Alistair is pretty unusual, and there are only 2,500 people with my last name in North America. But I mostly like it because it’s unique. Today, we live in a searchable world. Once upon a time, a familiar name might have made an appealing name choice in the schoolyard. But today, uniqueness has its advantages.

For one thing, I don’t have to share my search results with others.

Common names can be unfortunate when data collide. In May, 2007 the Wall Street Journal discussed baby Search Engine Optimization. The conclusion? Skip that playground-friendly name in favor of one that makes your offspring easily searchable.

Detecting and correcting mistaken identities is a difficult problem. Healthcare is plagued with data problems (something Google Health hopes to address.) Depending on the health facility, between 3 and 40 percent of patients have more than one medical record assigned to them. Inability to uniquely identify a patient is a violation of the 1996 HIPPA guidelines.

As with most problems, Las Vegas has seen—and tackled—them first. Anywhere that money flows freely and that cheating can steer more of it to one person, identifying risky individuals is an important business. In 2006, Jeff Jonas described the problem of identity correlation in Las Vegas in a fascinating IEEE article. Jonas sold his company to IBM and runs the Entity Analytic Solutions which—no surprise—consults for the TSA.

The Business Intelligence industry is among the fastest-growing sectors in information technology, fueled not only by companies like Microstrategy and Business Objects but also software giants such as Oracle (with its acquisition of Hyperion), IBM (having bought Cognos), and Microsoft. Analytics firm Visual Sciences also makes its money from government contracts, having found that the same tools that track surfers work well for bad guys.

With the growth of Business Intelligence and data mining technologies, cleaning data effectively in order to avoid mistakes is essential. In fact, distinguishing between nearly-identical data and duplicates is an essential part of maintaining a database. Business insights from analyzing information are only as good as the data we give them.

Most of the techniques employed by medical companies, casinos, and Business Intelligence firms try to clean up data, removing duplicate records while merging supplementary information. In other words, they try to eliminate redundancy while aggregating data. And the fundamental problem behind this is uniqueness—whether it’s a patient, a card-counter, or any other kind of business data.

For programmers, a the most reliable piece of information that can be used to keep things unique is a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID). If you have a unique ID for a patient Michael Smith, you can be absolutely, positively sure that they aren’t the same as a Michael Smith with a different ID. In essence, a GUID is a way of identifying something uniquely in the context for which it is used.

On the Internet, our GUID is our name. A unique one means it’s easier to find you (which, ironically, makes you an easier target for identity theft, since someone can collect more information that’s definitely about you.)

Choosing a name is a quandry. The right name doesn’t just make it easy to search for your kids; it can also stop them from being mistaken by watch lists. The right name might be the difference between quick travel and a lengthy delay. Rare names mean you’re easier to find and notice, and less likely to be mistaken for an erstwhile evildoer. On the other hand, common names mean you’re less vulnerable to being spied upon and imitated.

So name your precocious children uniquely so they can trumpet their accomplishments, and give your paranoid ones a bland moniker so they can blend in.

Tags: naming, searches, uniqueness

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.