This is a true story. About 15 years ago I moved to Newton, and my zip code was 02148. All was well. Then one day about 10 years ago, the USPS decided that the "preferred" name of my town (Post Office) was "Waban". It changed "Newton" to the "alternate" name. Unfortunately on that very day they also decided to change the zip code! (This was part of a wholesale renumbering of many towns.)
Every data analyst knows it is not a good idea to change the identifier of an entity. It is extremely bad to change all of its identifiers at once. In theory companies are supposed to subscribe to the USPS lists, which do mark the changes. In theory companies are supposed to allow either the preferred or alternate name. In practice some only allow the primary. In practice some do not bother to subscribe, or do not have a reliable system to process the updates. At many web sites (big ones including I recall CNN, eBay, Amazon, NY Times, etc.) I got a wide variety of problems. So said Newton did not exist, or that Waban did not exist, or that my zip code did not match my city, etc. On one site that I really wanted to use I actually tried all 4 combinations without success. I can only conjecture that their system had some subtle flaw -- perhaps it had not been coded to handle a town whose name and zip code changed simultaneously, and so it just deleted it from the database. I have now gone more than a year since this problem has occurred, and so I think the various web sites may have all caught up. P.S. The USPS did this for several, but not all, of the villages of Newton. This is of no benefit to the people who live there. It is a service that the U.S. Post Office provides at the request of marketers, who want to be able to easily distinguish "prestige" addresses by the city name. Hopefully helpfully yours, Steve -- Steve Tolkin Steve . Tolkin at FMR dot COM 617-563-0516 Fidelity Investments 82 Devonshire St. V4D Boston MA 02109 There is nothing so practical as a good theory. Comments are by me, not Fidelity Investments, its subsidiaries or affiliates. -----Original Message----- From: Chris Devers [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, June 17, 2005 11:34 AM To: Joel Gwynn Cc: Boston.PM; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Boston.pm] Geo::Coder::US RE: GoogleGeoCoder On Thu, 16 Jun 2005, Joel Gwynn wrote: > When you get right down to it, this Boston "neighborhood" thing is > just confusing. I work in Dorchester but management likes to put > "Boston" on the stationary, which is confusing because there's an > identical address in Boston proper, just with a different zip code. > Are there any other cities that have similar naming schizophrenia? Sure, I imagine it happens all over the place. As has been noted in other comments in this thread, big towns assimilate smaller towns all the time, so current neighborhood names are often the names of formerly independent political entities. But then, it's not even always assimilation. People all over the world know that Harvard Square is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it isn't, as far as I know, a formal geographic boundary in any useful sense -- it's just a district in that part of Cambridge. But then maybe I'm revealing some ignorance here, as I've lived in the Boston area since I was a kid and yet I still don't actually know what "square" is really meant by the trm "Harvard Square" -- I've always assumed that it's centered on the T station, but that's not actually on Harvard's campus, hence the ambiguity. At $past_job, some of my coworkers were working on a real estate site. For this, they had to be able to handle all kinds of random input from people that, whether or not it was on any formal map, did in fact denote a perfectly well understood geographic area. Harvard Square. Union Square. Mark Sandman Square. Financial District. Theatre District. Leather District. Back Bay. Fort Point. South End. World's End. Greenbush. Queen Anne's Corner. Four Corners. Assinippi. Minot. Humarock. Silver Lake. Cedarville. Just to name a few. All of these are definite places in or around Boston or southeastern Massachusetts, but none of them is an actual town or city. But if you put any of them on an envelope, the mail will very probably get to its intended destination, and if you put any of them into a search string on a real estate site, it has to return results for that area. My impression is that dealing with all these varying names for the same places was the main impetus for setting up the ZIP code system in the first place. As long as you have the right ZIP code on an envelope, you can call your neighborhood Fatty Arbuckle for all the post office cares. Heh. Come to think of it, I might start calling my street that... :-) -- Chris Devers _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
