Greetings Economists, Les Schaeffer writes, content summary is an interesting idea, but how to do that?????
Doyle, I'm sorry I used the word summary in the loose sense that my business environment does. I was thinking of some way to reveal the first two or three lines of an email in list of emails (in which they all reveal the first two or three lines of the individual email) in say a thread of emails. That's what I meant by summary. I see that done with various types of lists of emails and seems like it's feasible though I don't know how programming intensive, or scripting intensive it might be if it's not off the shelf. I tend to think about classification as a part of a larger set of ideas. Attention structure, emotion structure, etc. which the human sciences are making headway. Let's take list conversation, the conversation is the value producing part of lists. Blogs as some people point out are more directed than lists. My infatuation with say Max Sawicky's blog tells me blogs can accomplish some directed thinking that it is hard to accomplish in a more mass conversational environment. However, I got it that blogs have democratic limitations. Mass conversational structure is really how automation can address socialist goals. We have easily known bottle necks like how many people can participate in a conversation before the thread is lost. How does a thread or thought that is a sort of classification of knowledge get propagated in a larger body of people? The attention to lurking tells me that people question the validity of people who just read and don't participate. Well, we can speculate that reading and writing more fully engages the mind. But automation might address that more cogently. When a lot of people address an issue, big science, being a good example there are a variety of tools that get used. Peer review puts the issue of stability of thinking into play. Automation has to address that sort of 'hand-eye' labor, because that is a bottle neck to brain work. To end here, it's my view that text based communication makes it difficult to address the components of automating conversational structure. We can put eye tracking devices on a list participant to see how they read, but the main way the brain works is parallel processing. So I would presume successful automation would have to automate the content of conversations in such a way that the parallel processes (attention, emotion, classification, etc.) can be 'rationalized'. thanks, Doyle Saylor
