← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Avalanche
Thread ID: 7411 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2003-06-16
2003-06-16 23:26 | User Profile
Experienced genealogists are familiar with the Soundex Code. Soundex was "high tech" in 1918 when it was invented by Robert Russell. In a nutshell, the Soundex Code provides a means of identifying words especially names -- by the way they sound. Soundex was used extensively by the WPA crews working in the 1930s to organize Federal Census data from 1880 to 1920. Soundex has also been used for many state and local census records and is very popular in genealogy software and databases. [like Chapman is C-155, using first initial C, then using the following consonants, p, m, n, which would include lots more names that have that same combination]
Soundex is an imperfect method, at best. It does often match names that sound alike, but it doesn't work that way all the time. It also frequently groups together names that do not even come close to similar sounds. For more information about Soundex, see my "Soundex Explained" article in the July 15, 2002 edition of this newsletter at [url=http://www.rootsforum.com/archives/news0228.htm]http://www.rootsforum.com/archives/news0228.htm[/url]
The U.S. government is now using Soundex in an attempt to identify potential hijackers before they board airliners. However, the process seems to have misfired. No terrorists have yet been identified, but many innocent travelers have been inconvenienced. No experienced genealogist would be surprised at this: we all know that Soundex doesn't work that well. A recent news article claims that the anti-terrorist software cannot distinguish between the last name of terrorist Osama bin Laden and punk rocker Johnny Rotten Lydon. So why is the government using Soundex to check airline passengers' names?
According to a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the United States No-Fly List uses a Soundex algorithm to match names. Designed "to quickly summon passenger names or to catch deal-hunting passengers making duplicate bookings," the result has been a disaster. The system has only managed to rack up a slew of false-positives. The problem has become so bad that there is now a "Fly List" for chronically misidentified passengers."
You can read more about this in the San Francisco Chronicle article at: [url=http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/06/08/MN253740.DTL]http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...08/MN253740.DTL[/url]