Dearly eParted

We were out for a lunchtime walk when my friend Rob Brueckner asked "Can we change the subject?" as I had been talking about a book I was reading at the time called "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers." The book takes a gentle literary exploration of death around the world; looking at rituals and customs of several different cultures as well as some new methods for handling human remains.

In western society we quickly get itchy around the topic of death. I believe this is in large part owed to the value we put on life. I won't speculate about how the subject is dealt with in other cultures and refuse to be bated into arguments about whether or not we put a high value on all life, but it's safe to say that our own personal life is typically quite precious to us. I don't mean to belittle other cultures--I simply don't know them well enough to speak on their behalf. The ancient warriors of Sparta, Kamikaze pilots in World War II, and today's suicide bombers in the Middle East all share a sense of nobility in death that is alien to most of the folks I know.

Here in the "modern, western world" we are starting to develop lives that extend into the virtual world. Beyond online shopping carts, bank transactions, correspondence, and job hunting, we have prolific online social lives. I befriended a baker in Melbourne, Australia as we played Monopoly on Pogo the other night. Not that long ago as I prepped for a job interview, I bought my PlayStation Home avatar a suit, tie, and shiny shoes (total cost $1.96 US dollars). The game Second Life takes its name from the notion that we are beginning to lead online lives in step with our corporal lives. When I go into a bank for just about anything these days, the tellers explain to me that I can do just about everything (except deposit rolls of coins) without the aid of a teller these days. Most of my interactions with my banks, my retirement accounts, the unemployment office, and all my friends have become online activities.

So what happens to our online lives when we die? In most cases, they die with us. When my friend Ed Rojek passed away I sent a final email to his old email account for personal closure. I knew no one would read it but I felt such a loss. He had been taken away so young; I needed to send one last message.

There have been several news stories about families trying to get passwords to their departed loved one's email accounts and being refused. I used to be very staunch in my thinking on this topic. Of course they were refused! Email accounts are like diaries...filled with the minutia of our personal lives. Inboxes become our virtual desktops full of receipts from online purchases, usernames, passwords, membership agreements, travel confirmations, letters from significant others--often VERY personal correspondence.

I recall how after an argument, a woman I had a legal agreement with (I feel identifying her more directly would be slanderous) chose to break into my Yahoo! mail. It wasn't hard for her to accomplish--I had set the security question to be "What is Mason's (my younger son's) middle name?" --information she was well aware of. At the time, I had no reason to believe she would attempt anything so malicious as this invasion of privacy. She deleted a lot of sentimentally valuable email as well as wrote and called several old friends. The good news is that most of them called me to laugh about the trash talking she did, and the better news is that I now write cryptic security questions with twisted answers. I myself often have a hard time getting back into an account if I am challenged for this information.

My point is that my basis for thinking about online property was forged in the heart of a serious violation of my privacy. My personal inboxes are currently a mess with very little organization and tons of spam. I don't know why my children would ever want to wade through all that crap, but with some years since suffering an online attack I have healed and find my mind in a more peaceful place. How better to come to a deep understanding of who I am? Gigabytes of people laughing with me about the good and bad times we have shared. Trials, tribulations, tawdry attachments. My boys don't know half of my friends very well...if at all! They have very little idea of how I participated in focus groups, user groups, charity events and even joined a couple of professional guilds. I don't know that they would want to go through that stuff, but I plan to welcome them in.

CNN ran an article the other day about a site designed to tackle this issue. This is an interesting approach. At first, I found the article discouraging, as it had the picture you see at the top of the blog post. I thought the aticle was merely about online venues to pay final respects where everyone can see your thoughtfulness. Where there is one such site, there will be many. The thought of cheapening final words to a friend by equating them to an online birthday card seemed as cold as Phil Collins faxing his wife divorce papers. This just seemed like another way to milk the grieving for more cash.

The good news was the article was in fact about something a little less shallow. It talks about the website Legacy Locker, which offers a means by which users can bequeath access to their accounts to those they leave behind. This informs loved ones which accounts the departed wanted them to access and it takes the fuss out of getting usernames and passwords.

I am personally exploring the site. If for no other reason, I think my kids would get a kick out of some of my passwords. I believe this is a very useful service. Although it's not popular to think about death in this culture, it is an inevitability that is best met well-prepared.

Non-sequitur: a fish

I awoke today from a crystalline dream about a fish I had as a child.

It seems as though to achieve official blogdom, a blog must have the occasional random entry. This entry will serve that purpose. While this blog is an attempt at chronicling my professional meditations on UI/UX I do state that it also observes my pursuit of life and liberty.

Since I was laid off almost two months ago (where has the time gone?) my sleep pattern has changed radically. Mostly by that I mean I now sleep occasionally--almost regularly. In fact last night I overslept. Around the time the alarm went off I was in the spell of a most compelling dream. I turned off the alarm in a state of semiconsciousness and managed not to fall out of the dream.

The dream was about a goldfish from many years ago. Somehow I had discovered it still alive while going through some odds and ends that I still have at my mother's house. It was clearly ecstatic to see me and when I put my hand in the pristine water of the fish bowl it pressed against my hand affectionately like a loyal dog. I felt that the water needed to be changed and as I followed my old water changing methods the goldfish kept trying to escape. I managed to keep it in the bowl but as I set it down to resume cleaning this very persistent fish started climbing over the edge of the bowl in a most unfishlike manner.

I lowered the water level and set the bowl on a towel as it had gotten wet on the outside. After doing so I again turned to resume cleaning duties. With this the fish started jumping out of the water like a dolphin at an aquarium. Flipping in the air...attempting to keep my attention.

I brought the fishbowl downstairs to show to my mother and brother for whom the fish continued to perform its antics. They were spellbound by its very athletic prowess. My fish was most definitely a special fish.

When I finally woke hours later the dream was still fresh in my mind's eye. My love for the fish was strong and I was struck with how much I missed it. I remembered vividly understanding that the fish wanted me to dip my hand in the water--it wanted to snuggle against me. I had a connection with it such that I knew that behind my back it was trying to get out of the bowl to follow me. I intuited that it wanted me to be impressed with the tricks it had learned. And the whole time, I was in awe because this fish was decades old and had managed to find sustenance and keep its own bowl clean in my absence.

I don't know what the dream means, but I woke up happy and refreshed from what was an amazing dream and a very restful night of sleep. What an amazing dream!

P.S. Happy Birthday, Dad!! 68, woo!

Semantic taxonomy

My focus of late has been on the things I know and am closest to. As I analyze this, it is mostly because (not to beat a dead horse) I am a job seeker and when job hunting we push our strong suit. If push came to shove and I had to describe myself I would angle my classification of self as a soldier of study--I fight to keep learning. My biggest joy is comparing what I've learned today to what my kids have learned. When we get our first chance to speak at any given time, I ask "What did you learn today?" and often I hear back "Nothing; today was a review day." "Nothing?!?" I will challenge them "...EVERYONE learns ALL the time!" After a good eye roll and a deep sigh they try and turn the question around and I am always ready for them.

It was with the realization that I have been so outwardly focused on selling my wares and playing up my strong suit that I felt as though I had ceased my quest for fresh knowledge. Meditating on this I thought long and hard about what keywords had been popping up in disparate conversations. What memes had been at play that I had not been attuned to?

The answer to this soul-searching question is "Semantics" and "Taxonomy." It was that simple. I had been having conversations with former co-workers, sparring partners, executives, and college classmates and these words were popping up in conversations independently. Now I am supposedly a smart guy, although sometimes I feel like arguing that point, but I discovered that my understanding of those two words was only cursory.

I decided to delve into it further. So as to only plagiarize from my fellow soldiers, I won't quote a commercial dictionary (although I did consult a few), but I'll pull definitions from my favorite meme repository: Wikipedia.

Semantics:
Semantics is the study of meaning. The word "semantics" itself denotes a range of ideas, from the popular to the highly technical. It is often used in ordinary language to denote a problem of understanding that comes down to word selection or connotation.

Taxonomy:
Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification. In addition, the word is also used as a count noun: a taxonomy, or taxonomic scheme, is a particular classification ("the taxonomy of ..."), arranged in a hierarchical structure.

A search on Semantic Taxonomy did yield a few interesting hits. My first result yielded an interesting abstract on improved web search via A Personalizable Agent for Semantic Taxonomy-Based Web Search. The authors combine their expertise in business, computer science, and engineering to address "the problem of specifying Web searches and retrieving, filtering, and rating Web pages so as to improve the relevance and quality of hits, based on the user’s search intent and preferences." This article was the first place I found use of the term "meta-knowledge." The goal is to determine the user's intent under various conditions and allow the user to construct a mechanism for derivation and instruct the search engine in the nuances of criteria for various search conditions. The study relies heavily on the user pre-anticipating search goals, but I would hypothesize that with enough empirical data, the system could start to denote trends and might be able to intuit valid and relevant results without as much training. This is a fascinating concept.

The second result in my search was geared towards linguistics. This abstract, Semantic Taxonomy Induction from Heterogenous Evidence, proposes "a novel algorithm for inducing semantic taxonomies. Previous algorithms for taxonomy induction have typically focused on independent classifiers for discovering new single relationships based on hand-constructed or automatically discovered textual patterns." In contrast to the first abstract's use of "meta-knowledge" this study instead cites "global knowledge." An interesting departure, far closer to my vision of intuited results. I admit that their pages of formulaic ponderance left me a bit cross-eyed, but they bring it home in terms of seeking applicable novel hyponyms for perceived hypernyms. While the study spends a lot of algebraic energy I couldn't fathom in my brief recognizance, their conclusions corroborate my impression of the first abstract: with enough empirical data and good formulation, semantic taxonomies will bring increasingly relevant information to the fingertips.

So my cursory understanding of these two memes and how they find themselves intertwined is now much deeper. Semantics, still something I know I will find myself arguing for the sake of precision in communication, is also crucial to context within data models. Taxonomies, which I had been using correctly but had not given much consideration to their application in search environments, now hold significantly greater depth, both in terms of data structure as well as organization.

I cannot wait for my kids to turn the question "What have you learned today?" around tonight--this one's a doozy! So, for the sake of your own quest, please allow me to ask: what have YOU learned today?