Fake Identity Made By Someone Else

This is not only a strange case of social media gone wrong, it is also classified as an unusual form of plagiarism.  My friend is named Jon.   Jon Saxton.  When he was in high school (in the 80′s) he was assigned to write a poem.  He is horrible at English.  In fact, he’s awful at most writing tasks.  But he got inspired and wrote something he was good at, math.  It’s a really great poem.  It is also a fully functional equation that really works out.  Here’s the rub.  An acquaintance told a group of students years later about it.  Wrote it down and shared the story.  One of these students posted it online.  Time goes on and the story grows and gains a life of its own until, “Ta-Da” Jon Saxton has become Dr. John Saxon (an entirely imaginary person that is a combination of a few real people including a math book publisher).   Once one person has constructed a background (unintentionally or otherwise) the damage was done.  It is unlikely poor Jon could ever retrieve his poem today from the hundreds of sources who quote it and attribute it to someone else.

A Math Poem
by Jon Saxton (not a math book publisher)

A dozen, a gross, and a score,
Plus three times the square root of four,
Divided by seven,
Plus five times eleven,
Equals nine squared and not a bit more.

Forced to Take on a False Identity

There are people who are not allowed to participate in social media.  Typically these people have a police record, are on a registry, or are hiding from someone.  Most would prefer to be open and out.  Those that still try to participate on social media must create a false identity to hide behind.  Of those who do hide, some are actively seeking inappropriate meetings while a few others are struggling to keep or make friends who are appropriate.  I recently had an opportunity to talk to a hidden individual.

“It makes me sick to my stomach. All those @$$holes who abuse this medium and I pay the penalty. I’d much prefer to use my own name and picture, but when I did and tried to contact someone who objected, I was “outed”.  Now  I’ve simply dropped off the face of the planet and live with it. It is simply an extension of the “Registry” – which is a good idea in theory, but horribly executed. I could go on, but I’d be ranting.”

While the rest of us ponder our own self-identity and how to present ourselves to others, some people have been isolated and shunned far more deeply than an Amish kid who decides to stay on permanent rumspringa.  In some cases, prisoners have more access to social media than do former prisoners and those on certain registries.  Yes, something happened to get those individuals in those situations but a limited number abuse the system or were accused of a crime that social media users would be susceptible to.

The UnSelf

We like to portray ourselves in the best light so the thought of having to come up with an identity that isn’t our own unwillingly is an uncomfortable proposition at best.  Remember to also be careful to evaluate your sources and ask questions to ensure you have the right quote for the right person.

To better understand the phenomena related to self-identity, I’ve spoken to a few people who are members of individual projects or a group of projects.

Daily Self Portraits

This image is an example of an individual project focusing on self portraits.  This kind of project often features small children because they change so much in the first year of life.  What has caused this person to take a picture of himself for the past 215 days?  Without knowing him or having access to his thoughts, we don’t know.

A more typical example for a video 365 project is small children.  Here is an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7m4SYE4oNU

Exploration of Self

Some people take pictures of objects, events, or inspiration for their projects.  I recently spoke with a friend who mentioned her 365 project while I was working on this topic.

Me: “Why did you decide to do a 365 project?”

Friend: “I wanted to start my project 365 after watching how well [common friend]‘s went last year. I was hoping to be able to look back over the course of the year and really be able to tell a story of my life with pictures. Obviously with baby on the way I couldn’t have picked a better year to start this. The key thing I have learned is that I have to keep myself constantly motivated in order to post a picture everyday and I notice that I’m slightly more observant of the little things in my day.”

Me: “Why was [friend 2's] such a success in your opinion?”

Friend: “Well for me personally I saw hers as a complete project of self expression. She’s a baking goddess and most of her pictures were of new foods she made, her beautiful family, or new experiences they had as a family. I just wanted to be able to capture a little bit of that in my own life.”

Me: “You are the first person I’ve run across that I know personally that has attempted one of these. Do you consider it an artistic
outlet or a self-help-esque “self-identity” exercise? or somewhat both?”

Friend: “haha well actually my brother and I both started it this year without knowledge that the other was. I think that I’ve learned that my
life is much more task oriented than I thought it was, as lots of my pictures revolve around rehearsals or regular events of my life, but I’ve also managed to make some artistic shots when I find something to beautiful not to use.

I actually think my other project has help me with my identity. I’m also posting a song everyday of this year. And that has been
according to the mood or events of the day as well.”

Me: “Did you start before you knew you were preggers? Just curious if mom-worries played into decision?”

Friend: “Yes I did. Funny enough I think I concieved baby the first of January so I started the same day I got pregnant, but of course didn’t know til the end of January. So I had close to a month of pictures already under my belt. and I actually used my project 365 to announce my pregnancy to my friends.

Actually, my favorite picture so far is the one I used to announce to friends and family that we were going to have a baby.

I found it interesting to note that my friend felt that music was more expressive and self-introspective for her.  Looking around we can see 365 projects on all the major music-related sites.  Here is an example (although not as daily as they would like to be) from SoundCloud with a link to their website.

http://soundcloud.com/groups/365-songs-in-365-days

Some projects focus on a photograph and then blog about their images and try to intentionally explore their own motivation, success or failure, and what it might mean.  Some people only write about their experiences in ways that would formerly have been called a journal or diary.  The blog can act in the same way and is a tool that allows you to do this.  Since you are reading THIS blog, you have experience in this tool.  Here is an example of a 365 project which seems to be posted weekly. http://kpspears.blogspot.com/

Conclusion

So, is it necessary to do a 365 project in a specific way?  It appears that the projects are as individual as the people who attempt them.  The effort is to follow-through, success may not be whether posting has occured daily but rather on what an individual learns about themselves in the process.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar/19/albert-einstein-archives-theory-of-relativity

Obviously, Einstein is a rock-star personality who contributed significantly to human existance and our society, but what would the man of 1950 (five years before his death) think of the access and sometimes personal nature of these documents?  First, Einstein knew his scientific work was important and left certain pieces to his chosen benefactor (a university) well before his death and ensured the same entity was set to receive “his papers” after his death.  He also collected these papers, scientific and personal.  He did not instruct anyone to destroy any papers (personal or private).  Would he, as a celebrity scientist today, do the same?

Consider that today’s teen writes and posts thousands of words of personal and incidental information about themselves, friends, relations, and activities quite publicly without being a “rock-star” personality.  As a generation of potential “stars” convinced accidental fame through some lottery-esque happenstance is innevitable, are their ideas diluted in the medium?  How many of us would want to see the post-it notes and bad poetry of a youthful nobody 50 years dead?  Will a data-mining exercise 50 years from now wonder why so many individuals commented on something called a “Macchiato” almost daily or just consider us several generations of self-centered egotists?

Einstein as Social Media is a boon to researchers of all kinds looking at an example of a remarkable person long after their death and in a potentially new light, perhaps our individual musings and self-centered posts will also, someday, be a boon to someone.

Join my self-identity project discussion at http://twitter.com/Faye_FN25, view my self-identity image gallery at http://bit.ly/ztUMrw on Flickr, or a presentation on self-identity and social media at http://bit.ly/JshaAp on Prezi.

http://ccac.gothic-printing.com/docs/2012_CCACnews_issue1.pdf

1. I’m not as good at reading a ton of things online as I used to be.  I think 44 year old eyes have something to do with that.  I’m scheduling an eye appointment as soon as I can between terms.  Also, my expectations of the quality of online documents may be colored by my work on Accessibility and a large federal website.  I’m used to making someone else make it all better (and occasionally doing it myself)… but having no resource to “fix” the old, bad, graphical PDFs is somewhat distressing.  I guess this is something many universities suffer from?
2. Making an honest effort to communicate any problems to your professor promptly will save you in the end.  They are human and have problems they have to deal with also and are willing to work with you IF you let them know soon enough.  Remember they not only have several courses of students to work with (online and often in person) they also have lives, families, and issues just like each of us.  Be polite, be realistic, and follow through with what you promise to do.
3. Work hard to keep each course seperate in your mind, files, and calendar.  Blending similar tasks may seem like a good idea at the time, but if you don’t coordinate with both professors before hand you could be commiting a form of plagerism (which NO ONE wants to see).  This will help you keep the time challenges (see previous posts) to a minimum and let you focus on one task at a time.  DO spend time on a calendar and/or task list EVERY week.
4. When offering required criticism to fellow students remember they may have very different formative experiences than you, temper bad news with positive points as often as possible, back up your comment with facts and references, and remember you will be in the cross hairs soon enough!
5. If you have a comment about the university, program, or course, let someone know but also be prepared to be offered a job, task, or new requirement to help fix what you’ve identified.  A university is a community of like-minded individuals trying to share knowledge.  The individuals that make it up are often under-funded and doing their level best to help you succeed.  You have to do your part also to help yourself, each other, your professor, your program, and your school.
6. NJIT – even an all online program can become a social community if you let it.  Buy the t-shirt, support the sport program, check out the student associations, and participate in your NJIT community.

Go Highlanders!

“I always refer back to http://www.section508.gov/ where most of us go to get advice, best practices, latest news, etc. You’ll also want to review the regulations/guidance of the specific agency you’ll be working with. They may have some preferred methods or practices.

With that said, these are my personal key takeaways:

1. Section 508 is 95% good design (websites, applications, documents, kiosks) and maybe 5% disability-specific things that help certain groups get to our content. I can tell you that I make use of many of the “accommodations” and I have no disabilities. Also, many of the visual items are much more widely useful than people give credit (ever looked up the actual percentage of color blind people or thought about how many people have trouble hearing… including a grandparent or elderly neighbor…shouldn’t they be able to use your website, application, kiosk, or document?).
2. There is NO profession, job in the government, or piece of information that you can say with assurance “no one with that disability will need this”. I’ve had many occasions where someone has said, “well it would be nice to comply but that’s a lot of effort to help no one. No one who uses a screen reader can do that job!” On every occasion I’ve been able to locate the exception to that statement. Although disabled persons (the blind and deaf seem to be focused on most) are employed at a rate less than non-disabled and have a harder time getting jobs, they are not just a problem for a manager, they are dedicated, productive, working individuals just like everyone else and have access to many more tools than ever before.
3. Making accessibility (not just 508 compliance) an every day thing is key to really successful communication to everyone, not just the disabled. If your goal is to communicate with as many people as possible, why not be compliant?
4. There are as many different ways of accomplishing compliance as there are grains of sand. The best focus you can have is to repeat this phrase, “how can I make this useful to as many people as possible?” Also, there is no sense reinventing the wheel, make sure there isn’t a common best practice “everyone” is already using, go ahead and do that too, at least you’ll be a familiar problem if it isn’t quite right. “

I would suggest to my NJIT-PTC cohorts that accessibility is just as important in public and educational forums.  The key is that we are communication professionals seeking to communicate to the widest audiences possible.

The U.S. Access Board has released for public comment a revised draft
refreshing the Board’s Section 508 standards and its Section 255
guidelines which address access to computer hardware and software,
websites, media players, electronic documents, telephones and cell
phones, PDAs and other ICT products.

Announcement: http://www.access-board.gov/news/ict-draft-rule.htm

Complete revised document recommendations:
http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/refresh/draft-rule.htm

Official place to make comments: http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=ATBCB-2011-0007
(click the “Comment due” link beneath the appropriate document. Note
you have only 20 minutes to complete the form – I suggest you have
your comments drafted in another tool before opening it. Although we
discuss Section 255 less often, I would advise reviewing it in case
pertinent changes affect you or your advocacy. )

You can also attend one of two public hearings (one in DC the other in
San Diego):

January 11, 9:00 – Noon
Access Board Conference Center
1331 F Street, NW, Suite 800
Washington, DC

March 1, 1:00 – 3:00
27th Annual CSUN conference
Manchester Grand Hyatt
One Market Place
San Diego, CA

Take time to participate in your government!

As a full-time grad student, full-time IT worker, and having several other responsibilities it can be challenging to manage time effectively.  I recommend the use of a calendar tool to map out activities each week.  Initially I was doing this task Sunday evenings to review the work necessary for the week starting on Monday.  Unfortunately I found that this was not effective because each of my three courses had slightly different calendars (starting on different days of the week) and had due dates that varied more than I had realized.  One course had sizable project due each week on Monday, which was pretty difficult to build into a schedule of one day.  It also made sense to do much of the reading and pre-work for this course prior to that larger project each week.  I ended up trying to do all the tasks for this class a full week prior to the “advertised” week.

In a two week period, I also ran into some major complications of my professional career requiring almost my entire attention and causing me to miss a few deadlines in two courses.   I had to balance the return on investment (ROI) for the work vs the school work. I was able to recover most tasks within that next week with the understanding of the professors and hard work once my professional work was settled.

Flexibility in scheduling, evaluation of tasks, reevaluation of due dates and ROI are all important factors of effective time management which gets everything done and lets you live your life too.

I’m going to be using the population totals to determine survey sizes for two surveys, an experts survey to find out more info on costs, availability, etc. for ASL vs CART (and other technologies/translation types) and a general population survey about attitudes toward CART. From these and a study of current laws, I’m hoping to determine a set of recommendations for CART advocates to use to promote the use and inclusion routinely of the resource in public venus covered by ADA and the other educational, etc. regulations. The hope is to bring CART to more populations who need it, including HOH and newly-deaf counselors, public venus, general populace, etc.

Responses to Online Inquiry

Karen M: Have you looked at DCMP.org? They might have clues. For example, at  http://www.dcmp.org/About/Vendors/Captioning.aspx you can find a U.S. Dept. of Education approved captioning vendor list. Poke around to find more, or write to them.

Michele P: I’ll bet the Registry for Interpreters for the Deaf would have an idea. I don’t see any figures on their site (http://www.rid.org) but they’d probably be eager to help if you called to pick their brains. There’s also a World Association of Sign Language Translators that could be of interest. (http://www.wasli.org)

Catherine H: Register of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) might be a source as it is the national association. They and National Association of the Deaf are the ones developed the national certification test for interpreters.

Dwight D: Good luck with this. To my knowledge there are no entities that track this information, just as there are no statistics that track how many Deaf people (Who use ASL) there are.  RID has over 15,000 members, but this could be misleading as some are Corporate Sponsors, some are supporting (Non-Interpreter) members, etc.  There are a lot of people who call themselves “Interpreter” but have no training. There are Interpreters who stay under the Radar because they lack the credentials required to legally interpret in their area.  Will you include Certified Deaf Interpreters (CDIs) in with interpreters?  This list of why you will have a hard time tracking these numbers goes on and on… As for Communications Access Realtime Transcription (CART) – Wow, I have no idea how you would track that either. Are you including people who do C-Print (A program developed at NTID)? Or just CART?  Please, if you find information, please please pass it on. But you may have picked a Thesis topic that will prove to be nearly impossible if it depends on accurate numbers of these populations.

Catherine: Your definition of Interpreter is very broad. I’m about to graduate from an ITP and have done supervised interpreting but am not certified yet. Would you count those who are certified by states but not nationally? As for CART, I would be interested in that date myself.  Register of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) might be a source as it is the national association. They and National Association of the Deaf are the ones developed the national certification test for interpreters.   As part of the Illinois Deaf and Hard of Hearing Commission Task Force, we are hoping to poll Illinois court reporters to determine how many of us provide CART. Of course with having a state CSR test and licensure program this process could provide some reliable data from which to extrapolate a CART provider number. I would think if you contact state court reporter associations that would be a good start, especially those states with CSR licensure, and ask if they could or have already perform(ed) a survey of their memberships. Also, you could post on listservs such as the Broadcast Captioners listserve, as many captioners also are CART providers, and ask people to respond to a survey.

LE: As far as we know, Illinois is ahead of many other states in terms of licensing and record-keeping for speech to text providers. Catherine, do you know which other states are doing this, planning to?  As everyone in this discussion so far knows, yet worth including: about 98% of 36 million Americans who are deaf, deafened, or have a hearing loss, do not use sign language as their primary language, and require CART for participation, inclusion, and access. This is one of the reasons the CCAC was created to raise awareness about the needs, and the study Faye is doing will contribute to that also.  Those who are Deaf  and use sign language as their primary language also use CART from time to time (e.g. when studies or cinema, theater, Internet videos, more).  The question about how many CART providers exist is a good provides), and of course all join in advocacy for captioning inclusion for many human situations such as work situations include many fine details/numbers which are helpful to review on a transcript that CART provides), and of course all join in advocacy for captioning inclusion for many human situations such as cinema, theater, Internet videos, more).