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Comment by lostlogin | Hacker News Reader

It's not quite the same, and it does't break things so much as make them rubbish, but try getting a radiology information system to talk to a scanner of some description (CT, MRI etc). GE scanners accept Surname^Name. If someone has a middle name it doesn't display or come across to the scanner, so as to save space (I assume). This is fine until you get someone who has a first name with 2 separate words. I discovered it with someone called something like Al Amen as a first name. No hyphen. So now he is called Al. To make the medical images correct we have to incorrectly spell his name and make the RIS incorrect. Since then I look out for this and I have seen lots of patient names broken in this manner. Mid name capitalization also breaks and all becomes lower case. McDonald to Mcdonald etc. Names are horrid to deal with and people (myself included) like them to be correct.

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For a few years my airplane boarding passes said I was PAULA JUNGWIRTH because A is my middle initial. I got a few questions trying to board. I've noticed the last couple years that they print with a space now.

When I flew Lufthansa, I was granted an honorary Ph.D.

My official name is "Aleksandr Feinberg" -- it's transliterated from Cyrillics (hence the "ks") and Russian version of "Alexander" does not put an e between the d and r -- which Lufthansa decided to print on my boarding pass as Dr. Aleksan Feinberg

I recently moved to a house on a street named "Martin Luther King Junior Way East". The service rep must have bumped the tab key while I was signing up for DSL, because I now get mail addressed to "Mars Saxman Junior Way East".

The funny part is that the street name is still filled out in all of its glorious detail - but the capitalization is different, which tells me they did some kind of zip code based address sanitization.

so i'm reading this hilarious thread about names, and i come across a comment from _mars_saxman_...

my word, it's been long-time-no-see, mr. saxman!

-bowerbird intelligentleman

I've never understood why people entering data into a system enter an initial. It's a partial entry. You wouldn't enter a date of birth as 3. On further thought, actually, they do. Then dismiss all the error messages and quit the program to get past the system keeping them in the field waiting for completion. Users seem hell bent on breaking our databases.

I frequently have to enter my first initial and middle name as my "first name". Why? Because that is how it appears in numerous official places, such as my credit card.

The users aren't broken, your database (and your assumptions about names) is.

The data base has errors and faulty assumptions, yes. I have some too, but I do not allow names entered into a big medical system to be anything other than the persons name, minimum of first name and last name, but I go over every record that passes through our scanners and enter middle names too. We have an AKA field where the patient can be called what ever the want, characters and numbers allowed. This is not stuck into medical image dicom headers but appears on the information system which is used when talking to patients or browsing records. Dicom files area transmitted across hospital, out information system data isn't but does transmit reports with a limited amount of patient data on them. Screw ups with identification happen too often already (once is too many) and matter too much to have a load of bad data in the system. Abbreviate anything at great risk. We have lots of people with the same name and same date of birth already, so extreme care is needed.

"minimum of first name and last name"

Bzzzzt! Sorry…

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononymous_person

Wow, that first one is great, thanks. I'm saving that for future reference. Japan seems a hotbed for hard database problems. There is no way any of our systems could handle some of that, and its mostly not our fault - trying getting access to change stuff on medical database software or imaging equipment. It isn't possible.

J Strother Moore[1,2]. Ok, it's his first name.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Strother_Moore

[2] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~moore/

That example came along fast. I didn't expect an Anglo-American example (assumption based on links) and I wonder about the origin? The lack of a period makes it somewhat simpler for system handling, but I wouldn't bet on it sailing through without issue.

My father's middle "name" was a single letter. My grandparents didn't give him a middle name (at least not in English), but the nurse took it upon herself to record what sounded like a middle initial to her, and that's what ended up on his birth certificate. It stood for nothing but the letter itself.

I love it when I get asked that as a security question, only to be told it's invalid (too short). Tell that to Harry S Truman!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S._Truman#Boyhood_and_fa...

Well, that's one way to deal with having to name 10 kids.

Do you think it's impossible that someone's middle name is only one letter long?

Ok, more accurately, people enter names into our database as an initial., as in they stick in a period. Such as John Andrew Doe becomes Doe^John^A., the period is not part of their name. I agree that its possible that is someone's name, but I am 100% certain that every instance I have encountered is incorrect. The various manufactures software we deal with either get confused by middle names or drop them. They also commonly assume that having 2 names in the first name field means that one is a middle name, and drop it. This isn't useful. I have never encountered someone with a single letter name in my workplace (first, last, anything) and so hadn't considered it. I am confident of this as I compare what every person writes on a form as their name with what our system says.

Some people might find their middle name embarrassing, thus choosing to use an initial to keep it secret where it isn't required for anything but disambiguation.

When the middle name avoids confusion with another person and the situation is medical files its about as important as it gets. There is also a legal obligation for it to be accurate with some if our government contract work. That said, they don't seem to monitor accuracy. I spent a lot of time monitoring it though (checking, correcting, hounding data entry inaccuracy serial offenders), and it still causes me cold sweats every now and again.

Some people have surnames that are only one letter.

Particularly names in southern regions of India, where traditionally people would have only a single name (no surname) and when a surname is required they might give the first letter of their father's name.

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