Thursday, March 28, 2024

September 3, 2001– Newsletter #146

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Goodies to Go ™
September 3, 2001–Newsletter #146

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Greetings, Weekend Silicon Warriors,


I taught the first session of my HTML class yesterday. It
is still stunning to watch a person who is so new that even
the most basic bold flag impresses them. One young lady
said to her lab partner, “I can’t believe I’m doing this”
and all she did was set text to bold and underline. This is
what teachers mean when they say the job is rewarding.


Furthermore, this semester I found that many students did
NOT want to take the class online. 90% wanted the
course as an in-class format. They wanted a teacher and
set hours over the freedom of online. Interesting.


Did you hear…


For the first time, I am going to add to my class rules and
regulations that all cell phones, beepers, and 2-way
communication devices are not allowed unless I give
special permission. If a cell phone goes off, the rule is
that I get to answer it. I say that because research has
shown that students as young as grade school are carrying
the latest electronic gear. The research has shown that it
isn’t just upscale schools either. Cell phones and pagers
are found at every level of the socioeconomic scale.


If you have any money in “online cash” with a company
like Flooz, Beenz or Cybergold, quickly check your
account. Flooz is down. Beenz died on the 26th of
August. Cybergold said that all online money had to be
spent by the end of the month, or it would be gone.


According to the BBC, Hotmail has a hole that hackers
are using to read other people’s emails. The hole is not
mass. One must be targeted to have his or her mail read.
The instructions are apparently spreading all over
newsgroups. Hotmail knows of the problem and CNN is
reporting that the hole is already plugged.


Vietnam has laid out a plan to get up and on the Web.
The Vietnamese Minister of Trade has sent a 10-point
plan to develop e-commerce up until 2005. The ten-point
plan calls for new infrastructure and the protection of
privacy and intellectual property.

Now on to today’s topic…


I get, what I think are, nasty emails from people all the
time. Someone won’t like what I said or will find a
concern with a tutorial and will toss off an email with
little regard for the text.


Often times, if I am set back by an email, and there’s a
telephone number at the bottom, I’ll call. I’ve done it at
least 50 times now. The people who fired off the email
are often a little surprised to be hearing from the guy they
just told off.


What’s funny is that often I’ll take the tone of a letter
incorrectly and once I talk with the person, we become
quick friends and we have a nice conversation.


Man, if there was just a way to place the correct emphasis
and emotion on that text. Yes, I know. There are smiley
faces galore, but they don’t often hit the mark. What we
need is a language.


Hopefully it will contain the letters, “ML”.


Enter HumanML! HumanML stands for Human Markup
Language. Really. It’s being developed by the fine
people at OASIS. OASIS is the XML interoperability
consortium.


In a story released last Friday, it was announced that a
committee has been formed and things are moving
forward to, once-and-for-all, develop a set of elements
that would allow text to carry with it not only meaning
but implication.


If successful, the first applications of HumanML will be
to allow for a physician or psychologist to embed certain
human characteristics into text. A person’s inflection
could be added right along with what was said. That’s
fairly amazing, huh?


Furthermore, the OASIS committee hopes to come up
with tags that will allow for embedding kinetics, or body
movement. The story I read suggested the basic tags
“smile,” “frown,” and “kneel,” among others. I’m sure
that taking it to the next level would allow even smaller
categories of these tags such as a “big smile” or a
“sinister smile.” My guess is that those would be set as
attributes though. Something like:


SMILE TYPE=”sinister”


Would you need to use a height and width attribute in
there also?


As the HumanML committee chair, Ranjeeth Kumar
Thunga, has said, “Subtle, complex human signals are
misread, misinterpreted, not presented clearly, not
conveyed properly, or simply ignored. This is the cause
of various conflicts throughout the ages and day-to-day”.


That’s true but isn’t there a concern in there also? Even
if we do provide the ability to categorize and tag just
about every human emotion and movement, isn’t it other
humans that will be doing the tag placement?


Aren’t those humans going to misinterpret those signals?


Isn’t that why we set all this up in the first place?


Creating all of these tags and allowing them to be pushed
into artificial intelligence and the notes of physicians is
certainly a monumental and noble undertaking, but is it
one we should take?


How many things have you seen and wished we could
“un-invent” them? I’m talking things like certain
poisons, weapons of mass destruction, the Bee Gees.


If we undertake this project and it gets out, then what we
have done is allowed the same humans that have been
messing up for decades to now set their mistakes to a
more solid format.


With almost every call I make or every email I return, I
find a person who wasn’t as upset or nasty as I first
interpreted his or her correspondence to be. Most turn
out to be nice people who wrote their words with a lilt or
a wink and a smile that simply eluded me. Once I was in
contact and could hear the inflections, then it all made
sense. Sure, the person still had the concern but it wasn’t
couched anywhere near as nasty as I first thought.


Maybe you think this would be better if the person
writing the text could use HumanXL. Well, maybe, but
how many times have you said something stupid or made
an inflection you wished you hadn’t?


Using these tags, you make that tone permanent. Take-
backs will be a lot harder. If someone sets your tone a
certain way and posts that to the Web, it’s out there and
even if it is changed, the original is out
there…somewhere.


This is an incredible undertaking and I know I sound like
I am showing up to rain on a parade, but stop and think
about it.


If I can’t read your email without taking it the wrong
way, how on earth can I hope to tag what you say the
right way?


What about that, huh? 😉


>>>>>>>>>>>>>


That’s that. Thanks for reading. I hope you didn’t take it
the wrong way.


Joe Burns, Ph.D.


And Remember: I am just starting my Broadcast
Journalism course. The first week was for setting up a
number of ethical dilemmas and interesting information
meant to spark interest. Here’s one I gave today. We’re
so use to seeing taped news footage these days that it’s
tough to think of a time when TV news was just a talking
head. NBC began their nightly newscasts in April of
1944. CBS started in May of 1948. Douglas Edwards was
the announcer. ABC followed close behind in
August of the same year. ABC had two announcers,
H. R. Baukhage and Jim Gibbons. It wasn’t until 1949 when
NBC debuted the “The Camel News Caravan” that
footage was first used. The Caravan ran until 1956 with
John Cameron Swayze as announcer.

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