Re: one more pen-l option

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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