RE: markup race

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

BTW:  it is a tougher struggle in some of these 
databases to get the designers and data owners 
to change sex to gender.  That is why there 
is an "impersonator" field there; not that we 
have to keep it, but I wanted to show how 
some dbs deal with that.  Strange?  Nope. 
Common.

Race never comes up as an issue because they 
assume everyone can use that correctly.  There 
is another field one sees called "ethnicity". 
Weirdly, in national crime reporting systems, 
it only has one value:  Hispanic.  Go figure.

And this is a problem of design by extraction 
from extant systems.  We should be careful as 
Volker's example points out, to question the 
terms and inquire of the context of use.  Almost 
any term is loaded in some context and we will 
run into more of these as we go along.

Len 
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: Kurt Cagle [mailto:kurt@kurtcagle.net]
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2001 10:28 AM
To: humanmarkup-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: markup race


> He has also done much to show how genetic data from present human racial
> groups could be used to reconstruct their past separations. This
> reconstruction, based on the analysis of 58 genes, yields a bifurcated
> evolutionary tree with Caucasian and African races in one branch and
> Orientals, Oceanians, and Amerinds in the other. The main division
appeared,
> according to Cavalli-Sforza, some 35-40,000 years ago."
Interesting. I've had my suspicion for some time that about 40,000 years ago
man invented boats, initially to make it easier to fish locally, but over
time making it easier to follow the largest game source -- whales. The
routes where most human exploration seem to have been made are also whale
migration routes.  This is completely irrelevant to the discussions about
markup, of course.

Here's where things get complicated, however. One way of looking at HumanML
from a physical description standpoint is that it is a measure of
phenotype -- blonde hair, blue eyes, that sort of thing. We know today that
phenotype is an expressive rather than an intrinsic set of qualities that
are based upon genotype; this is one of the reasons why phenotypic
classification is so difficult ... the finer the granularity of the
classification, the more obvious it becomes that phenotype is a poor
classification mechanism, yet at the same time I think it is likely that no
one here wants to tackle the issues of creating a genetic map of human
beings. Just my two cents worth.

-- Kurt


----------------------------------------------------------------
To subscribe or unsubscribe from this elist use the subscription
manager: <http://lists.oasis-open.org/ob/adm.pl>