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Re: The Carl & Bob show
It must be Friday afternoon.
>
>While we're all getting anecdotal about identity here, a little (exactly
>irrelevant) factoid for your next lecture or presentation... If you take a
>listing of the first names of schoolchildren in the Chicago Public Schools
>system, you'll find an enormous listing of unique names. Almost all of them
>belonging to black children, and, I believe, unique or almost unique names
>form a sizeable majority of the total black schoolage population...
And then there is George Foreman, and George, and George, and George,...
thereby violating the assumption that except for college dormitories,
jails/prisons, and army barracks, a street address is normally sufficient to
uniquely qualify a name.
Interestingly, when I was working with the NADF, someone at MCI did a study
of duplicate names (Smith) using one of the phone CD-ROM programs. The
single most common duplicate first name in Florida for people with Smith as
a surname turned out to be Reit. Since none of us had ever known or heard
of _anyone_ named Reit, this was a real surprise. Maybe it was a varient
spelling of Rhett, as in Gone with the Wind? And then someone remembered
Real Estate Investment Trust. It turned out that this was an artifact of
the telephone company's policy for directory listings. Same thing in Los
Angeles, where it costs a lot of money to have an unlisted number, but they
don't require you to use your right name. So there are lots and lots of
people named Smith with no first name or initials, all located in the 90000
ZIP code, and all with different phone numbers.
Bob