-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Political Innovations Your Senator Will Soon Be a Robot No wonder he wants Flesh Control Now! A Cambridge, Mass., company that has devised an artificial intelligence software package that can read and respond to e-mail confirmed Thursday that it has a new client -- the US Senate. The company is General Interactive Inc., and it was cofounded by V.A. Shiva, an MIT graduate who bills himself as ``Dr. E-mail.'' Shiva and GII have come up with an automated system that, in theory, would allow computers, rather than people, to answer many of the e-mails voters send to their senators. That could come in handy for the Senate, which a few months ago was awash in e-mails churned up by the impeachment hearings. ``This solution will help senators reduce processing time when tracking and responding to e-mail received from their constituents,'' said Steve Walker, the Senate's manager of Web and technology assessment. Terms of the contract were not disclosed. The Senate contract is quite a coup for Shiva and GII. Five yars ago, Shiva was running a start-up that helped Cambridge artists sell their work on the Internet. Today GII makes a software package called EchoMail that analyzes, tracks, and responds to e-mail - in most cases without requiring a human to read individual e-mail messages. Among the firms that have hired GII are Nike Inc., AT&T Corp., and IBM Corp. According to Shiva, the same technologies that have helped another client, Calvin Klein Inc., sell perfume may be an ideal tool for 21st century democracy. EchoMail ``is a phenomenal tool for listening to constituents,'' said Shiva, 35, a one-time wunderkind who worked on his first e-mail system as a New Jersey teenager. Bored by high school, Shiva became part of a team that devised a pioneer e-mail system for Rutgers University in 1979. Two years later, he enrolled in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where over the years he has studied pattern-recognition analysis, a key component to EchoMail. According to Shiva, EchoMail is the digital equivalent of an oil refinery. At an oil refinery, raw crude is pumped through various filters that separate it into coal, tar, and petroleum. EchoMail uses several methodologies, including artificial intelligence and pattern-recognition, as its filter as it refines a volume of e-mail. Recognizing words by their shapes, the system can log, route, track, understand, and respond to thousands of e-mails. The software is so semantically sensitive that Shiva boasts it can detect the attitude of an e-mail's writer. In the case of impeachment, the system could have categorized huge volumes of e-mail into voters for and against impeachment; those strongly pro Clinton and those who detested him; those from a Senator's state and those who were not; and Democrats vs. Republicans. (All this assumes, of course, that a constituent reveals this information in the contents of the e-mail.) What's more, EchoMail can update e-mail sentiment on a real-time basis, giving it some of the aspects of an instant opinion poll. ``People tell you who they are in an e-mail,'' he said. ``So you can extract valuable data from studying a person's e-mail, and that can go into a company's marketing data base.'' What's more, EchoMail can use that data to compose and send an e-mail response to the sender of the original e-mail. Suppose a constituent e-mails a Senator to express concern on such subjects as Medicare and gun control. In theory, EchoMail could sort through the senator's position papers on those issues, string together prefabricated paragraphs from its data bank, and then fuse them into a coherent, seemingly personalized whole that would be sent as a response. In most cases, a human aide in the Senate office would never read the constituent's e-mail; EchoMail would simply extract all useful information from the message and log the constituent's concerns and e-mail address into the Senator's data bank. Instead of having to sift through thousands of messages, a Senate aide could simply be presented with EchoMail's overview of what's on the minds of voters. To a business that receives 60,000 e-mail messages a month, the potential cost savings can be enormous. According to Shiva, it can cost a business about $9 to process a consumer inquiry by telephone. It can cost the same business about $5 to have a person read a consumer's e-mail and respond to it. But for a business client using EchoMail, the cost of analyzing and responding to a consumer's e-mail can drop to under $1, Shiva claims. There may be other benefits as well. EchoMail yields more valuable information for a client's customer data base than a call center processing a phone call, said Bruce Padmore, GII's chief technology officer and another MIT graduate. According to GII, EchoMail processes about 80 percent of a company's incoming e-mails without human intervention; the remaining 20 percent is referred to EchoMail's human acolytes. Shiva offered examples of how EchoMail has worked for his clients. Nike, for example, was recently the subject of allegations that it uses sweatshop labor, prompting many people to write angry e-mails to the Oregon sneaker company. GII's EchoMail sorted those complaints by attitude - just how mad was the e-mail writer? In many cases, the writer had mixed feelings: Love the sneakers; hate the labor practices. To each group, EchoMail could send an e-mail response, thanking writers for their interest and directing them to a special Web site created by Nike's public relations team. At the Web site, Nike sought to refute the allegations. Not only did EchoMail help with damage control, but it also let Nike send follow-up e-mails a few weeks later, once writers had cooled off. A follow-up e-mail might alert someone to a new product or forward a firm's newsletter about women's soccer. Last fall, GII was part of a team that developed an e-mail soap opera that was the heart of a marketing campaign for cK one, a fragrance from Calvin Klein. Conventional ads introduced a plot line and the soap opera's initial characters. The ads also invited the public to send e-mails to the characters they identified with. Consumers who responded had their e-mails answered seemingly by the characters, but, in reality, it was EchoMail sending the messages. ``You might get e-mails two days in a row, and then not hear from them for a week,'' said Calvin Klein publicist Diana Lin. ``It's just like in real life.'' Many young consumers resist the hard sell of conventional advertising but seem more comfortable with revealing information about themselves in a medium such as e-mail. ``This is about establishing relationships,'' said Shiva of Calvin Klein's strategy to cultivate brand loyalty. GII is hardly alone in promoting e-mail as a marketing tool. Many big advertisers now recognize that e-mail should be a part of their Web marketing efforts, said Melissa Bane, director of Internet marketing strategies for the Yankee Group, a Boston consulting firm. Several firms, including GII, have sprung up to serve that need, and Bane envisions a future period of consolidation when some of these firms could be acquired by the likes of IBM, Microsoft, or portal companies such as Lycos or Yahoo. GII makes money in two ways. It sells EchoMail to clients, then charges them based on the volume of e-mail it processes. A private company, GII discloses no financial information. When the company was formed five years ago under a different name, its initial mission was to help Cambridge artists build Web sites to sell their work on line. At its founding, the company brought together Shiva, who was studying for his doctorate in pattern recognition; Padmore; and Zoe Helene, a Brandeis University artist who once aspired to be a Disney animator and is now GII's chief creative officer. Over time, Shiva saw his doctoral studies in pattern recognition and his interest in Internet marketing converge. Explaining Shiva's change in focus from helping struggling Cambridge artists to becoming ``Dr. E-Mail'' to Fortune 500 companies - and now the US Senate - Helene said, ``At some point, we needed a way to pay the rent.'' The Boston Globe, June 4, 1999 No Wheaties Allowed Crisis Hits Cycling as Champion Fails Blood Test Yeah? How about the toenail test? What about the math test? Morons and their stupid tests. ''Pantani, Why?'' said the big headline Sunday in the Italian newspaper Corriere dello Sport, echoing the question that a shocked nation was asking. There was no immediate answer from the star bicycle racer and national hero. Marco Pantani was in seclusion at home after he failed a blood test and was not allowed Saturday to start the next-to-last stage of the country's biggest race, the Giro d'Italia, which he was leading by more than five minutes. The news that an idol had been disgraced by implications of doping sparked a wave of disillusionment among Italians. But not only Italians. The embattled sport of professional bicycle racing this time finds itself involved in a scandal that implicates its charismatic leader - the reigning champion of the Tour de France. If bicycle racing was in trouble, now it is in crisis. The 29-year-old Italian, the winner last year of the Tour and the Giro - the world's two most important bicycle races - showed a level of 52 percent in the count of red corpuscles in the blood sample he gave to inspectors early Saturday. The permitted level is 50 percent in tests administered by the sport's governing body, the International Cycling Union. He was immediately barred from competition for at least two weeks. On the awesome peak of the Gavia, 2,621 meters (8,650 feet) high and a major climb in the Giro, a crowd estimated at 200,000 waited vainly to cheer Pantani on. When the word spread that he had been disqualified, a great sense of anger and sadness swept the fans, according to the French sports newspaper L'Equipe. ''For me, it's the end of a dream,'' said a man identified as Francesco, 65. ''He restored a sense of pride to Italy. But that's over now. He tricked us, and I can't forgive him.'' Another fan, Andrea, who was wrapped in a pink flag to match the pink jersey that Pantani had worn as the race leader, was equally bitter. ''This is a catastrophe for bicycle racing,'' he said. ''Enough! It's all over. What's the point of waiting for the race to come by? Why should I applaud the riders? They're all the same.'' Even Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema sounded stunned. ''At this time I can imagine the bitterness felt by this great cyclist, a bitterness that I share,'' he said. The newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport, which organizes the Giro, devoted its first 15 pages Sunday to the case. In a front-page editorial that he described as one of the saddest articles he has written, the editor, Candido Cannavo, said: ''What hurts me most is the sharp sense of betrayal, on both a human and sporting level. I don't know how far Pantani is to blame or how far he is a victim of shameless provocation, but it's betrayal all the same.'' Far less prominently, the paper reported that Ivan Gotti, an Italian with the Polti team, had taken the lead in the race. When the Giro finished in Milan on Sunday, Gotti donned the overall winner's pink jersey, just as he did two years ago. Despite Gotti's victory, the team's sponsor, Franco Polti, declared that racing was in crisis. ''Let's stop the sport for a year and talk about all the problems,'' he said. ''Then begin again from zero.'' Sounding equally depressed, Jean-Marie Leblanc, head of the Tour de France, said, ''We thought everybody understood that times had changed. Obviously not. ''I don't know if this is the fault of Pantani alone or of somebody in his team. I only know that those who did this are irresponsible.'' The blood test that Pantani failed is technically not a drug test. Introduced in 1997 ostensibly to safeguard riders' health, the tests hint at the use of an illegal performance-enhancing hormone, EPO, which bolsters red blood cells and thus the amount of oxygen that is carried to muscles. There is no blood or urine test that can identify EPO. Pantani, who rides for the Mercatone Uno team with a shaved head, a ring in his left ear and the nickname of ''Il Pirata,'' must pass another test of his hematocrit, or red blood cell, level after he finishes his 15-day suspension from competition. Hours after the race set off without him, he emerged from his hotel and said that he was crushed. He noted that he had known setbacks before, including a collision with a car that kept him from riding for a year, and then added, ''For now, I'd like only a little respect. I'm sorry for cycling, which, once again, comes out looking�'' He did not finish the sentence. But others did. A wide range of riders and officials admitted that the sport had been discredited again by an ongoing scandal related to drugs that began last July in the Tour de France. ''This is bad news for the whole family of racing,'' said a French rider, Cedric Vasseur of the Credit Agricole team, at a race in France. International Herald Tribune, June 7, 1999 Selling Stock with Sex Goldman Pimps for Japanese Money Look! Beautiful women! Therefore give your money to me. Goldman Sachs, the US investment bank, hopes to ignite excitement in Japan for US-style mutual funds by sponsoring a television show featuring glamorous actresses who explain financial concepts in a fun way. The programme, called Mani Enjiru! - or Money Angel - will be launched this month to run on Tokyo TV every Saturday morning. Goldman Sachs said it was spending "several million" dollars sponsoring the show. "We are using TV because we think it has a wide range," said Yasuyo Yamazaki, president of Goldman Sachs Investment Trust Management. He added that the programme was the first of its kind to be directly sponsored by a foreign financial firm. The move by Goldman Sachs comes as Japan's Big Bang financial deregulation gathers pace and US investment banks strengthen their presence in the market. In Japan, Goldman Sachs has become the most successful foreign company in the mutual fund sector in three years, collecting �1,500bn (�7.7bn) assets, of which three-quarters have come from individual consumers. This leaves it the sixth largest mutual fund group among all brokers in Japan, with three times the assets of its nearest foreign rival, Allianz. The crucial question for Goldman Sachs and the rest of the industry is whether Big Bang can create a mutual fund boom similar to that in the US over the past two decades. Some in the industry believe Goldman Sachs' recent success may be temporary. About 70 per cent of its funds are invested in overseas bonds, which might fall in popularity if the yen weakens or global bond markets fall. Many Japanese consumers also remember the collapse of the Japanese stock market in the early 1990s. However, some Japanese brokers are changing their style, partly to stave off the threat posed by US brokers. Nomura Securities, for example, has recently run a high-profile advertising campaign to entice consumers back to the Japanese stock market and has seen an increase in retail business. Meanwhile, the Japanese government is drawing up legislation that would introduce direct contribution pension schemes, such as the US 401K scheme. Such schemes could also stimulate the mutual fund market, particularly as bank accounts pay low levels of interest. "The Japanese consumer has a high level of concern about financial matters but does not know what to do about it yet," said Mr Yamazaki. "We think this year will be a big year of transformation." The Financial Times, June 7, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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