Identity Management

Relief workers see a stream of people in need, of water, of medical attention. But community services depend on a notion of persistent identity, matching individuals with programs, and tracking progress through those programs.

Ongoing medical care depends on accurate charting, whereas academics work with transcripts and portfolios. Individuals are not just snapshots in time.

To this end, field workers have ways to assist in the establishment of medical records, using Google's CCR-based approach for example, but a strong community doesn't leave identity management only to outsiders.

Record keeping is a vital internal process, whether by word or by mouth, with the extended family a typical repository of vital information on family members. The workplace is another institution for keeping tabs. Some subcultures code personal histories into their uniforms, along with rank and/or serial number.

A strong education system gives students a sense of responsibility for their own identities, what to reveal, what to conceal, which aspects to cultivate, which to retire, all based on reality checking, feedback from one's environment, but of course also based on one's heartfelt desires, intuitions, callings and/or leadings as we Quakers sometimes say.

Speaking of Quakers, we often use journaling and/or web logging to assist with our identity management tasks, going back a few centuries. This practice is in no way limited to just Friends of course, is intrinsic to bookkeeping, to public service.

Autobiography is closely related to journaling, becomes a multimedia enterprise in some cases. Biographies, authorized or not, typically use such logs and/or journals, other self chronicling work, as raw material. Historians and cultural anthropologists study collections of biographies, and so on, helping future societies benefit from sometimes hard won experience.

We all develop habits of mind. Providing students with strong individual identity management skills is part of the work of building democratic societies, wherein semi-autonomous individuals really know what it means to mind their own business, and do so responsibly.

Identity 2.0

My topic this morning relates to a talk I heard at OSCON 2005, from the main stage, by Dick Hardt. His brief: we need identity servers that authenticate to the various services behind the scenes, so we don't have to always re-enter the same stuff. Identity management would become the identity owner's responsibility. Having it all gathered in one place would actually make its theft much harder, as you couldn't get by with only fragmentary data, e.g. just an SSN or credit card number. Banks would "go to the source" and any hack of an Identity Server would be national news, not just run of the mill fraud, a cost of doing business.

Speaking of identity, I've been trying on "Silicon Forest exec" for size. I think that pretty well sums it up. I wrote to Allegra yesterday that I didn't want to be on BFI's Shelter Committee just now, not because I'm anti-shelter (duh) but because I'm trying to clarify my role in the World Game theater. I'm like this computer geek with aspirations to invest more in multimedia (4D Studios), out of my desire to craft some dynamite curriculum for future Silicon Foresters (no, not exclusively).

In order to pass along this culture, a thriving one, we need to leap frog various bastions of Ludditism, including, I'm sad to say, within the education sector itself. Too many teachers feel trapped in dead end jobs, and take it out on their wards.

In particular, I'd like to see a stronger curriculum served through the Pentagon Channel, as I think military investments will make a huge positive difference, if there's real intelligence behind them. The paramilitary gray zone between hot and cold war, is also the zone of disaster relief and emergency management. We're looking to economize through dual-use technologies. The same Fly's Eye Dome skeleton could contain a variety of hardware and software.

A military that knows how to perform civilian duties provides a stronger career path for would-be recruits, as they won't be irrelevant deadweight in peacetime. And for conscientious objector types, a purely civilian trajectory might be plotted, such that if war breaks out, they'll be tasked with the sometimes extreme services our nation has historically required of its peace-loving leaders.

OSCON 2012 Day One

I couldn't see squeezing past those people with Naga in a bag (Python mascot) and my satchel, so separated from Steve and moved to the side of the auditorium.  This was the opening event in some ways, tutorials over, Camp OSCON behind us.

Tim O'Reilly's keynote had a simple message:  Open Source could do more to tell the story of how it's powering the ecosystem.

Like solar energy, it's often under-accounted (under-valued) because the sun drying clothes or growing food is unmetered.  Those little pie charts showing solar energy as a tiny fraction of the economy's input are talking about metered solar panel income.

That's not the same thing as wealth or value.  Most economists don't grok "cosmic accounting" very well, no secret there.  Economics has been pretty weak in the STEM department.

Take Comcast for example.  Who is making billions from whom?  Customers are paying to view content they themselves provide in many cases.  Comcast gets access to all kinds of free content from the Internet, an open bastion of a kind.  How much of this revenue is attributable to "open source"?  It's a question to look at, a story to tell.

Hewlett-Packard (a presence here), other companies (Microsoft), both thrive in and contribute to, this shared ecosystem.

A first principle, says Tim:  reap less than you sew, create more value than you capture.  Feed the commons, don't operate as a net deficit to your community.  Seems like common sense to me.

I'm in another Go talk this morning, more about the history and management within the community than the syntax, which was a focus of the tutorial yesterday.

I may not get much time to develop either my Go language or Blender skills, but they're both a source of inspiration anyway, in terms of what they're contributing and how they show off what humans working together may accomplish.

The education track was dealing in some interesting heuristics, however they happened to map rather closely to the status quo.  There's a brand of positive futurism that envisions a new standard or protocol, but if you admit hybrids (diversity, multiplicity), then we're back to "what's so" -- meaning it boils down to whether we all want to march to the same drummer.  We do not.  Nor do we want all others to do so, bottom line.

Like "metadata" tends to just mean what we carry around "in our heads" i.e. the persona as filter is better (because real thinking is finely tuned) than any robotized search algorithm.  I think we all know that by now.  Hyperlinks are "metadata" in the sense that human beings find the most relevant links, even if machines are in on the act, aid and abet the experience in various ways.

FERPA, ancestor of HIPAA in some dimensions, seems like a goofy law.  Students aren't bound by it, and may blab about so-and-so being a presence on campus.  Indeed, free speech rights conflict with the right to privacy sometimes.  My secrets need not be your secrets.

Democracies, for one, should be more into promising transparency and sharing data than clamping down on the free flow of info.  If you want your affiliation with an institution to remain classified, consider joining a private academy or LLC that makes secrecy a part of its culture, among other students / employees as well.

State funded institutions should be looking at their student populations as closer to public servants.  Public schools are about preparing people for life in a democracy, and a democracy of necessity provides lots of transparency, as well as some secrecy i.e. no one says you can't encrypt or otherwise protect access to your files -- and feel free to opt out of on-line campus directories and/or other records the school server may ask you about.

Better to offer courses on identity management and countering stalkers by exposing them, than to promise some high degree of anonymity and absence from public records of all kinds.  That's to promise the impossible and to set up unrealistic expectations among students.

That being said, if you want anonymity, I recommend distance education academies.  Other students don't see you unless you choose to attend events where you come out of the closet, as it were, as a peer or alum.  Your affiliation is a lot easier to keep secret when you're never seen in the parking lot.

Cramming and Cleaning

I've been looking at "cramming and cleaning" as two of my principal activities of late.

I've got a teaching gig coming up, so feel a need to cram.

The other challenge is digging out from under a pile of stuff in a respectful manner. I didn't throw away my old notebooks (yet), and other media are gradually aggregating: books to the "time capsule," photographs to a room upstairs. I'm under orders from a sponsor not to rent a dumpster (bad for PR to take the easy way out).

Speaking of sponsors, my thanks to one of them for a cell phone upgrade. The previous one was providing "half duplex" some of the time (they could hear me, but I couldn't hear them). This next one, an LG, used and still in good shape, is more both robust and includes the full keyboard I've come to expect from the Samsung.

Given I lug a laptop or netbook, I'm still not in the market for a busy "apps phone" with all the bling. Per my CSN writings, I tend to aim for bigger rather than smaller LCDs. Hypertoons on an iPhone might look cool though.

On the nationalism thread (one of the subjects under study in this campus household), I've been wondering about getting certain classes of student ID approved for trans-boarder traffic.

Some people, classified as refugees, have fallen through the cracks of the nation state system, find gaining citizenship (documentation) an almost impossible barrier. A "reboot city" consisting of high turnover housing and skills training courses (like a college) might provide its graduates with student ID acceptable in at least some other locales.

Along these lines, I once made the suggestion on the PSF list, that Python Nation (a 2nd world) issue passports. These would be souvenir / gift shop items that one might get stamped at a Pycon or EuroPython or other venue. The idea of actually using such a document to get through customs would actually be more prototypical of the "virtual nations" idea. Yes, I see "identity politics" at work here; we're looking for ways to add freedoms, to improve the average global university experience.

[ With all these gigabytes available, we should aim to start a thorough and helpful medical record for any new life, regardless of ethnicity or economic circumstances. This would be an opportunity some might refuse, out of distrust or in obedience to some religious precept. Better to refuse an opportunity than to not have it in the first place though. Electronic medical records in some schemaless document management system (e.g Tokyo Cabinet) might make the most sense.]

As long as one's persistent veridical identity provides some kind of audit trail as borders get crossed, a lot of bureaucratic requirements will be satisfied.

A person with a valid passport and internationally certified student / faculty ID might use either. The Facebook-like chronology (perhaps of border crossings and nothing more), would show if both were linked to the same identity. Scanning the ID retrieves the record within the custom agent's browser. Iconic flags and decals would decorate the average tourist record.

Refugees with accepted documentation, yet still with no citizenship within any UN-recognized sovereignty, might nevertheless get opportunities to visit various campuses in the course of their work / study scenarios. If Harvard had a satellite campus in Uganda, maybe Harvard students could go there using Harvard ID, just as Ugandans enrolling in Harvard through this satellite might thereby gain the credentials to visit Cambridge through a special gate at the airport.

A doctors without borders HQS in Siberia might offer valuable training opportunities, complete with airstrip. You might not need a passport to go there through Russian airspace, by agreement with authorities. Similar facilities and/or transit centers might dot the globe elsewhere.

Your chronofile might still show you'd been there and elsewhere. The average quality of the information on tap would actually be less sketchy than it is today.

We currently live in a dark time when the so-called "undocumented" (more Global U students) are provided with little to no practical recourse in the face of the same unrelenting pressures to move about the globe as those bringing the pilgrims to Plymouth Rock, others to destinations in the Middle East and so on. People are not trees, are not rooted so much as routed by God's will (if you'll accept a religious moniker in this context -- how many pilgrims think of their leadings).

Speaking of Doctors Without Borders, my congratulations to Vino Vixens on Powell for hosting a fundraiser for this group the other night.

:: musicians at work ::

Identity Politics

How one deploys an identity makes a difference.  In identifying as Quaker, I go back to when Philadelphian Friends were somewhat upbeat about a utopia to come.

In the heady 1790s, some of the avatars of industrialization actually thought they could see light at the end of the tunnel, a way out of some Dickensian hell based in class warfare or whatever.

A company town really could be idyllic, not some battle ground twixt management and emergent unions.  Or maybe it's not a "company town" just a town where companies and its universities share a lot of values and resources.  They wouldn't be munitions makers.

Fast forward, and the Quakers' AFSC, like President Hoover (a Quaker), was resisting the allied blockade against Germany, pursued by Britain in 1915-1919.

Likewise, the Quakers resisted the economic sanctions against Iraq imposed by US State Department secretaries Madeline Albright and Condoleezza Rice.

The Nixon-Kissinger policies versus the Vietnamese were likewise cast as morally bankrupt and illegitimate.  Those of us in the liberal wing at least, welcomed Jane Fonda's visit to Hanoi.

But then US intelligencia has long decried Manifest Destiny syndrome and its craven craving for imperial powers.  Such craving is both the weak spot and the blind spot in the American psyche, as many historians will aver.

Any modeling of the USG on ancient Rome's imperial chapters, has never sat well with many who'd supported the American Revolution in principle, George Washington included.

A core goal of the latter was to get free of monarchs and their imperial designs.

Of course calling US policies "imperialist" always sounded kinda corny, the way those Commies talked.  That's until we got to reading the more serious histories and journalism and understood better how the shoe fit.

Anyway, I don't find it surprising that I think a lot like Mark Twain and William James when it comes to the Philippine-American war.  I lived in the Philippines long enough myself to do some thinking on this relationship.

These days I look at Puerto Rico, the lawsuit by the Marshall Islands against the nuclear powers (which the World Court decided not to hear), and the Ban Treaty, working its way through the UN General Assembly, and think this sort of non-violent defiance against nuke heads is very sane.

Working Out

You've probably had the same thought I have, when working out in the gym: gee, here's a lot of energy expenditure going nowhere, a lot of wasted watt-hours. One has fantasies of hooking those exercycles directly to the power grid, at least the building one, and keeping the lights on or something. Those espresso machines take power.

A better solution for some demographics, a Venn Diagram intersection of identity components: age, gender, occupation, current state of health, set goals, expected outcomes, is probably doing housework. This way, you'll kill multiple virtual birds with one stone, reaching moving and standing goals, while adding negative entropy to your space.

If you're anything like me, a guy with internal real estate (several rooms, basement, attic, detached garage), then housework is an endless spigot of chores of varying size and duration, and I'm not only counting or thinking about stereotypical "guy work" just because I'm a male.

I'm talking about vacuuming, sorting books, dusting, excavating old storage piles periodically and recycling their contents from inventory. That all takes work and also hand-eye coordination. 

On the other hand, enough tasks are repetitive to permit daydreaming, and its within these structured daydreams that we plan out what to do next. Unless, that is, you want to surrender your daydreaming time to the studios. Sometimes that's a refreshing alternative, given how professional daydreamers know their business.

Let's set the actual physical tasks aside for a moment and suggest that no matter what your line of work, there's some way to plan your workflow ahead of time. 

As with exercising in the gym, "mental muscles" come in groups (work together) and get tired with overuse (a tautology almost). 

Your faculties benefit from a round robin approach, a spiral staircase, wherein you upgrade gently and gradually when you can, which doesn't close the door on relatively more jarring overhauls and stress tests.

Workout-aholics know to come in with a "lesson plan" or "to do list" and it will likely involve a well-planned sequence of "stations", meaning exercise machines each with a specific muscle group focus.

In computer world, the webserver has to allocate some amount of total bandwidth to each client browser that connects with it. In operating system jargon, you might allocate a process or a thread. A whole process subdivides into threads and is therefore in principle "heavier" than a thread.

Do you have an intense dislike for meetings wherein the way to gain or regain the floor is to interrupt others, even mid-sentence, interjecting somehow? 

Women, on average, trained to be more demur within the patriarchy, were suddenly in management roles without the right default level obstreperousness, and had to take trainings in how to up their level of "bitchiness".

Think about mostly male engineers working all day with operating systems that are indeed "interrupt driven". Everything just chugs along, until the next interruption, in which case the operating system may switch its attention to some other process.

Think of doing housework and getting a call on your cell. Or the doorbell rings. Cell calls go to voicemail but doorbell rings may be harder to ignore, especially if a knock follows. 

Planning models that do not allow for unforeseen interruptions in their conceptualization likely lack enough sophistication for many types of operation, both military and civilian.

Remember, it's your attention span. Consider carefully, not only which machines you'll visit, and in roughly what order (making it up as you go is OK, as long as you know when you've fallen off the path), but also what you'll be doing in your head, with regards to earbuds, VR goggles, or whatever else your workout space comes with. 

Sometimes it'll just be you alone with your imagination. You're ignoring the overhead TVs. What do you plan to think about? Multi-tasking? Event planning? Cosplay? Protein-folding? Your next blog post or YouTube? Explorations in the geometry of thinking?

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (movie review)

One never knows when I’ll dig up an oldie (1949), living in close proximity as I do, to Movie Madness. With expert guidance from elders with past careers in curating, I’ve been getting advice on how best to catch up in certain genres, such as The Western (basically cowboys and Indians, I’d say usually after the Civil War up through when horses got phased out as a common source of horsepower). 

I was doing noirs. I’m also still into books. We finished Pluribus (E9 of S1 is as far as it goes at this point).

I wanna circle (on my own, no prompting) the importance of alcohol in this picture. It actually explores alcoholism in various forms in quite a few scenes, more of them comical than not. John Wayne, their leader, is sober but not harshly judgmental of drinkers. On the contrary, in AA jargon we’d have to call him an enabler, but among soldiers in those ranks no enabling was needed, just steering.

The Indians were actually treated with respect, contrary to my expectations, more like an alien feature of this already exotic, Martian-like vista, strangers in a strange land, and so foreign to the world of Victorian gardeners and the horse and buggy types back home in the homeland. So many mysterious tribes on the move, each with their signature chest-piercing arrows.

The movie opens with people mourning about General Custer’s loss at Little Bighorn, all well before my time. I don’t go out of my way to construct an identity based upon what I read in those particular history books. Some might say I should or need to because of my socio-economic demographic (“Caucasian” as in “from the Caucasus” (not)). That’s not how I use my “we” pronoun, more on that elsewhere (remember, this is Portland, weird around pronouns).

This is one of those epics with the booming voice narrator (at key junctures), telling us the story from some higher level management point of view, with a lot of benefits from hindsight.

The trend in filmmaking would be to lose the narrator, although he (usually it’s a he) makes a big comeback in the spoof Idiocracy, helping us remember how much we might miss him.

The Indians weren’t portrayed, like in many films, as slaves to demon alcohol, not nearly to the level of the white men in uniform (I recall no blacks in the ranks, plus a confederate flag featured in one of the few burials). Not to any level at all. The main chief we encounter towards the end, seems more into weed (or whatever goes into that pipe he shares). He was jovial in any case.

That’s a good word for this film: jovial. John Wayne’s character is so resolutely upbeat and an inspiration to those around him. He’s a role model leader, next to which his number two is aberrationally more immature. We know from the start of the film he’s in his arc of retirement, from military to civilian life, where he’ll have no rank (horrors), a fate from which he’s ritually saved, deus ex machina style, at the end.

The horses are splendid and the speed at which they gallop, the terrain over which they navigate is spectacular. John Ford goes out of his way to show some of the difficult situations one faces if bringing along a horse-drawn wagon, which this convoy was, with women in it. That changes the whole character of the expedition, making it more Oregon Trail in flavor. Familial rivalries break out. Who’s gonna marry whom?

The screenplay focuses more on celebrating the gorgeous southwest, the outdoor life, than it does on gunplay and violence, of which there’s some, but without much in the way of blood and gore. There’s no need to traumatize the audience to tell the tale. This isn’t 28 Days Later: the Bone Temple, even if it does have an otherworldly flavor. Not a scary zombie movie. PG if not G.

I wanna add about Westerns that I haven’t avoided them studiously. I think of two chapters in my life, living in Rome, living in Manila, when I was hungry for movies in general and didn’t much care to pick and choose, although I preferred English audio track to subtitles to pure Italian with no subtitles, which I wasn’t so good at following, although in some movies they make following pretty easy.

So like in Italy I took in quite a few so-called Spaghetti Westerns and have dim memories of driving by De Laurentiis Studios somewhere in the outskirts of Rome.

In the Philippines, going to movies was a lot about air conditioning, getting out of the tropical heat and into a more polar bear friendly environment. The lineup in Makati was first run and the theaters world class. TV was pretty good too, for an American living abroad (an expat).

In Italy I was hungry for stuff in English, given that culture is not so Americanized as I would find the Philippines to be. I’d actually make my way by bus (or maybe mom might drive me) to the British Consulate on Piazza del Popolo as I recall, to watch black and white 16 mm Charles Dickens movies. Their library was pretty decent too, with all those Hardy Boys and other British authored books for children.

Those wouldn’t have been westerns though. More like C.S. Lewis and his Screwtape Letters. I’d gone to a British school when I first got there and took advantage of that special relationship.

Yellow Ribbon does portray the US Calvary as multi-ethnic, in the sense of different flavors of white, such as Scots, Irish and German. The US military is certainly a melting pot, but not like it’s going to be in the Vietnam movies to come (another genre, which I’ve already more explored, not that we’re done with those, as I’m sure there are more in the pipeline).