http://www.windley.com/archives/2008/12/a_member_of_eastern_standard_tribe.shtml

@Robin Capper: carry it a step further, abolish time zones, and do everything in UTC.
Time zones (at least in the US) were invented to solve a problem (railroad schedules), now they’ve become a problem in some ways – although most software can deal with them

@all: It’d be sufficient for software to make reasonable guesses, as long as you have the opportunity to make corrections to its guesses.

In general I think that’s a correct statement about AI. Not having a body, and not living in society, software can’t experience life and and learn from it.

OTOH, software can detect patterns. One of those patterns is that softball games in the spring and summer in New England occur at certain times but not others on weekdays vs weekends. Lots of examples of this pattern are discoverable on the Internet.

Okay, but it’s not just a bad example. It’s demonstrative of the problems of context in social situations. It’s not simply that software’s too stupid.

I do agree in general, though. It would be a better world if everything worked without me having to communicate what I want.

time & date but NOT the day of the week! It just

drives me crazy!

Exactly.

And getting it right doesn’t necessarily mean nailing everything. In this case it’d be great if the data entry software could assimilate some contextual clues, make some assumptions, show you what it assumed, and then enable you to easily confirm or correct.

It’s interesting to think about how to help the software acquire those contextual cues. I’ve never thought about this until just now, but suppose that you told it where you intended to publish the information. The situation of that XLS file — its neighboring pages and their connected sites — provide all sorts of clues about the softball league schema, in the Roger Schank sense of the word schema.

My concern is that the requirements for context are pretty intense and the software designer is going to bolt certain guesses about that into the software in ways that can never always be right.

One that gets me has to do with understanding time changes. When I calendar something, what if it is something that is happening in a different time zone than I am in at the time? (Outlook makes me crazy about this). How about start times and end times in different time zones (or different daylight-time adjustments), as when recording departure and arrival for an international, or cross-country flight.

I have no idea how we can get that “right” and I suspect that it will involve my being able to somehow specify the exceptional cases easily while there are reasonable defaults for the usual cases.

If I did calendaring like that, as a power user I might want an easy way to introduce some custom templates for events or time situations that I could easily assert for a calendar item.

But the parsing bit is not the hard part. Actually, it is fun to do. Knowing the context and tacit conditions (such as baseball game times) is the hard part and maybe the problem is to get the computer out of the way in a helpful manner rather than putting it more in the way.

Something to think about. A great illustrative case. Thanks.