Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Michael D. Thomas" <mdthomas AT mindspring.com>]

Computers are learning to recognize facial
expressions as emotions. Opens up new
avenues in UI design. Now, in addition to
knowing where the mouse pointer is and what
your user typed last, you can know how 
they *feel.* 

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-000032322may07.story

You can program empathy in to 
your applications. Your Sales Forecasting
program can tell the manager is having a bad
day and pad the results a bit to soften the blow. 

Or, your install program can tell the user is 
frustrated, determine that there is no way the
user is going to be able to tolerate all of the bugs
in the actual application, and just refuse to continue.
This will save the users from a lot of pain.

Perhaps an emotion-enabled list serv can aggregate
the emotional responses of those reading the list's email,
map the aggregate to audio and stream a continuous
community wail from a web server.

Is this good??

Should everything be digitized?

Don't get me wrong, human emotions have 
their place. They are quite nice in a lot of
ways. But I'm dubious about them
in the context of a UI language.

Seems to me that computers do best with
simple languages that have a small set of inputs.
1's and 0's, HTTP, curly brackets and terse
code. 

OTOH, the language of human emotion is highly
semantic with many tokens.

All this talk of "reading people's faces" sounds
a lot like Ada to me, the DOD language known
for having *way* too many keywords.

Is exciting on some levels. I can't wait to
see the first viruses written in this technology.
How about a program that senses that the user
is getting mad, learns what makes the user mad,
and keeps making the user madder until the user
completely looses it?

Cheers :-)