p.1 My aim in this book is to rethink the intricate, and increasingly intimate, configurations of the human and the machine.

p.13 The prevailing view within AI [JLJ - the field of Artificial Intelligence] in the early to mid-1980s was that the relation of plans to actions was a determining one. A primary aim of the argument of P&SA was to suggest a shift in the status of plans, from cognitive control structures that universally precede and determine actions to cultural resources produced and used within the course of certain forms of human activity. A starting premise of my argument was that planning is itself a form of situated activity that results in projections that bear some interesting, and as yet unexplicated, relation to the actions that they project. In ordinary affairs, "planning" is an imaginative and discursive practice... through which actors project what they might do and where they might go, as well as reflect on where they are in relation to where they imagined that they might be.

[JLJ - As a side effect of "planning", we construct a better model of our environment and learn from any discoveries (perhaps even imagined) of un/expected interactions of the actors/forces in it. An initial plan might be scrapped because of an unexpected discovery we made when investigating sidelines and allocating people and resources to contingencies. The "plan" emerges from the cauldron of practice (think of a football team preparing for an upcoming game) and becomes "approved" because it has "proven" itself within the practice of forethought, "It is because events press so hard on us that we must think and think again before we act. We cannot afford many false moves - perhaps we cannot afford any." - John Carpenter/pen name of Samuel Youd. A plan is a fragile, temporary thing, because it makes assumptions which are only "typically" true in the life-world. As plans execute and "typical" interactions emerge to become real, plans must pivot from an inner resilience to handle the unforeseen. A plan - whatever it is - is a temporary thing and which is always being replanned due to the realities of the predicament - contingencies eventually become primaries. The initial replan is usually similar, but with subtle changes. A plan in time only vaguely resembles its former versions. Resources held in reserve are allocated, and new resources emerge. A plan is what animates a living thing to take "other-than-reflex" actions, a practical crystallization of present thought, a pre-formed and intelligently crafted answer to the unasked social questions, "what are you doing?" "how do you expect to get there?" "where are you going to be in 2/5/10 years?" Plans themselves are not substitutes for foresight, for a mind that perceives, challenges - coercing when necessary, and inquires - "nothing mattered, nothing was of value, without a mind that challenged and inquired." - John Carpenter. The plan is the practical way forward, but the contingent plans, the near misses, the 2nd place and 3rd place runners-up, remain important and just might become "the plan" when changes are necessary. A "plan" is truly a tree of options, selectable, resourceful out of necessity, with "triggers" and cues which direct even replanning efforts themselves. A plan is grasped not only because an analysis shows it "should work," but also because it was intelligently constructed using knowledge of typical interactions in the environment, tricks, and models of changing forces causing (hidden) interactions to emerge in certain ways. A bear catching fish in a stream does not know exactly where the fish is, up till the moment it jumps and his position is nearby. The "plan" is to locate himself near the expected actions, and to act out of necessity when opportunities necessarily and practically, emerge. "Plans" work practically, because they are intelligently and insightfully constructed, are well resourced, and are practically changeable - this means they can and should be re-worked on the fly or even tossed out completely. Without a mind and foresight, a plan is merely code to be executed by a machine, a mindless thing that seeks to do only what it is told to do, by someone with a mind who can plan. The question is not what "plans" are or whether or not we should "plan" - we got to where we are now by following "plans" of some sort, we are likely underway within a "plan" in our current predicament - the question is how and to what extent we should replan, based on what we now know, based on our new perceptions, some of which we anticipated, and some of which we did not.]

p.14 [Phil] Agre... his conception of a "critical technical practice," ...explains:

Instead of seeking foundations it would embrace the impossibility of foundations, guiding itself by a continually unfolding awareness of its own workings as a historically specific practice. It would make further inquiry into the practice of AI an integral part of the practice itself. It would accept that this reflexive inquiry places all of its concepts and methods at risk. And it would regard this risk positively, not as a threat to rationality but as the promise of better ways of doing things. (1997: 23)

p.15 Brooks in particular embraces an idea of situated action... within a broader argument for an evolutionarily inspired model of intelligence. For Brooks, situated means that creatures reflect in their design an adaptation to particular environments... The creature's "interactions" with the environment... comprise variations of conditioned responses, however tightly coupled the mechanisms or emergent the effects... my use of situated does not mean acting in the absence of culturally and historically constituted resources for meaning making... I have reiterated... situatedness is presupposed by such practices and the condition of possibility for their realization. Behavior is not simply "reactive and contingent on the external world"... but rather is reflexively constitutive of the world's significance, which in turn gives behavior its sense.

p.18-19 Vera and Simon... the question of just how plans relate to the actions they formulate does constitute our common interest, as well as the real point of debate... the interesting question is just how the activity of projecting a course has its effects in the subsequent activity of finding one in situ. It is those effects, understood as a situated achievement of the very same course of action that the plan projects, that constitute the plan's practical adequacy as an ordering device for action.

[JLJ - Perhaps plans are the creative conclusions of practice-based experiments undertaken to understand situations, and ultimately end up as branched options - one of which we select as the way to "go on", primarily because the mind recognizes the value of the invested deliberation. Missing in all this is that "planning" involves interacting with others who are also "planning" - one must now be strategic, and this involves selecting a posture that "holds up to" the maneuvers and competing plans of others. One must plan by investigating the consequences of expected or likely actions and the unfolding of the driving forces - using practical scenarios where the future is and remains uncertain. One 'planned' in order to get wherever it is they are now, and it is no surprise that the 'plans' they are executing - right now - are ones they believe will best position them now, as a springboard and entry point for the 'future' that will arrive, in arguably the most practical and effective way.]

p.19 no organism, natural or artificial, ever deals with the real-world situation in its full complexity

[JLJ - Perhaps the first step in planning is a systematic, intelligent reduction of the complexity of the real world of our predicament to a model we can play with. Then we intelligently 'play' with pratical actions on our part, the anticipated actions of the actors and the effects of the driving forces, and ultimately out of necessity or need taking an action or position which will serve us now and in the future.]

p.19 behavior can only be understood in its relations with real-world situations... In my view the complexity or simplicity of situations is a distinction that inheres not in situations but in our characterizations of them; that is, all situations are complex under some views and simple under others.

p.20 actions are structured in relation to specific circumstances and need to be understood in those terms... plans are conceptual and rhetorical devices... that are deeply consequential for the lived activities of those of us who organize our actions in their terms.

[JLJ - A lesson of life is that the predicament we face each day is best met with a reasonable amount of intelligent planning and scheming, including the planning of fallback positions. We plan, so that our investments continue to pay off and that we do not fall victim to the schemes and plans of others, and so that we make good and practical use of the fleeting opportunities and resources available to us. Ultimately, practical wisdom must call for a certain degree of planning - planning does not exist in a vacuum or in isolation from the individual/organization or the predicament he/she/it is in.]

p.31 Stated in advance plans are necessarily vague, insofar as they are designed to accommodate the unforeseeable contingencies of actual situations of action.

p.37 The view that intelligence is the manipulation of symbols finds practical implementation both in so-called expert systems, which structure and process large amounts of of well-formulated data, and industrial robots that perform routine, repetitive assembly and control tasks.

[JLJ - Intelligence is perhaps practically the useful ability to operate with intentioned effect in a complex environment, which often requires the use of symbols in heuristics to simplfy complex objects and interactions. Intelligence determines 'what is,' but more importantly, what we do about 'what is.']

p.57 [Allen, 1984]

Although we have knowledge about how the action can be performed, this does not define what the action is. The key defining characteristic of turning on the light seems to be that the agent is performing some activity which will cause the light, which was off when the action started, to become on when the action ends. An important side effect of this definition is that we could recognize an observed pattern of activity as "turning on the light" even is we had never seen or thought about that pattern previously.

[JLJ - We recognize that others possess a repertoire of 'tricks that work' like ours when trying to make the light come on, which can be as simple as flipping a switch on a wall, to flipping an on/off switch on a lamp cord, or tightening/replacing a bulb, or checking the circuit breaker in the basement to see if it has been tripped. My mother, upset at trying all these tricks to get an old lamp to work, once bought the internal replacement part known as a 'lamp socket' from a source on the Internet and wired it together, and it worked. The next step would be to buy another lamp. As humans we are experts at back-deriving simple intentions from the observed actions of others, and which likely have no other useful purpose, especially simple ones aiming to produce light in an area where one will be sitting or working.]

p.60 It is precisely because our plans are inherently vague - because we can state our intentions without having to describe the actual course that our actions will take - that an intentional vocabulary is so useful for our everday affairs.

p.61 [footnote] I take planning itself to be a form of situated action.

p.62 [Cohen and Perrault 1979:179]

We hypothesize that people maintain, as part of their models of the world, symbolic descriptions of the world models of other people. Our plan-based approach will regard speech acts as operators whose effects are primarily on the models that speakers and hearers maintain of each other.

p.64 For cognitive science the background of action is not the world as such, but knowledge about the world. Researchers agree that representation of knowledge about the world is a principal limiting factor on progress in machine intelligence.

[JLJ - I would assume that such knowledge would out of necessity require us to consider fallback position(s) - who is sure of everything?, and would be proven to some degree in the world of experienced trial and error. It is high time that we stopped referring to knowledge when we want to be precise and when we want to analyze - we should say instead that we are prepared to act, because one believes in such and such. Humans and animals are experts at extracting the necessary information from their sensory data to construct realistic models of the world, perhaps involving only placing things into action categories - things to eat, things to freeze in the hope they don't see you, things to run from. One only considers the likely consequences of these actions, and selects from the available options.]

p.64-65 One approach to bounding commonsense knowledge, exemplified by the work of Schank and Abelson (1977), is to classify the everyday world as types of situations and assign to each its own body of specialized knowledge. The claim is that our knowledge of the everyday world is organized by a "predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions that define a well-known situation" or script... Every situation, in other words, has its plan made up of ordered action sequences, each action producing the conditions that enable the next action to occur... Not only does the typical script proceed according to a normal sequence of action, in other words, but each script has its typical obstacles and errors that, like the script itself, are stored in memory along with their remedies and retrieved and applied as needed.

[JLJ - This sounds like my concept of the central role of cognition being the observing, acquiring, categorizing, evaluating, maintaining, refining, selecting and executing at the appropriate time, the trick that works which is most likely to work, given the predicament and the special circumstances of the predicament, and being able to 'do it again and again.' You can speak of commonsense knowledge, but what is commonsense knowledge, given that we are in a predicament of interacting objects and forces, which in combination, make constant and complex demands on us, and that a clock is ticking, and opportunities are arising and disappearing? It seems, given this interpretation, there are merely tricks - some of which work or are likely to work, and all other things.]

p.70 I have introduced the term situated action. That term underscores the view that every course of action depends in essential ways on its material and social circumstances... the approach is to study how people use their circumstances to achieve intelligent action... the aim is to investigate how people produce and find evidence for plans in the course of situated action... rather than subsume the details of action under the study of plans, plans are subsumed by the larger problem of situated action.

[JLJ - Yes, all situated action happens within the cognitive dilemma of the predicament. One purpose of cognition is to examine reality - the stark existence of things and forces in which we find ourselves embedded, and to generate from this world, an 'arrow' of direction, of directed action. Generally, this directed action aims as an end result to satisfy a want or a need, or to continue the satisfaction of the same, as things and forces continue to move and change in our predicament.]

p.72 A great deal of deliberation, discussion, simulation, and reconstruction may go into such a plan. But however detailed, the plan stops short of the actual business of getting your canoe through the falls. When it really comes down to the details of responding to currents and handling a canoe, you effectively abandon the plan and fall back on whatever embodied skills are available to you*. The purpose of the plan in this case is not to get your canoe through the rapids, but rather to orient you in such a way that you can obtain the best possible position from which to use those embodied skills on which, in the final analysis, your success depends.

*This phrasing is unfortunate, in suggesting that the plan is somehow jettisoned... It would be better to say that your ability to act according to the plan ultimately turns on the embodied skills available to you in situ, which are themselves presupposed, rather than specified, by the plan.

p.72-73 It is frequently only on acting in a present situation that its possibilities become clear, and we often do not know ahead of time, or at least not with any specificity, what future state we desire to bring about. Garfinkel points out that in many cases it is only after we encounter some state of affairs that we find to be desirable that we identify that state as the goal toward which our previous actions, in retrospect, were directed "all along" or "after all" (1967: 98). The fact that we can always perform a post hoc analysis of situated action that will make it appear to have followed a rational plan says more about the nature of our analyses than it does about our situated actions. To return to Mead's point, rather than direct situated action rationality anticipates action before the fact and reconstructs it afterwards.

p.75 Blumer argues that the social world is constituted by the local production of meaningful action and that as such the social world has never been taken seriously by social scientists. Instead, Blumer says, investigations by social scientists have looked at meaningful action as the playing out of various determining factors, all antecedent and external to the action itself. Whether those factors are brought to the occasion in the form of individual predispositions, or are present in the situation as preexisting environmental conditions or received social norms, the action itself is treated as epiphenomenal [JLJ - being of secondary consequence to a causal chain of processes, but playing no causal role in the process of interest]. As a consequence, Blumer argues, we have a social science that is about meaningful human action but not a science of it.

p.84 Structure... is an emergent product of situated action, rather than its foundation.

p.85 we never definitively determine the intent behind action

p.125 [Turner]

Interaction is always a tentative process, a process of continuously testing the conception one has of... the other.

[JLJ - Perhaps, but not always - when I 'interact' with my neighbors, I am not 'continuously testing' them, I am listening to their stories, listening to them speak of things important to them, and offer to share what I know about those issues, if asked. There is no need to 'continuously test' the role of a neighbor. I am a neighbor and will remain a (hopefully civil) neighbor, unless one of us moves. Perhaps in a classroom setting, students are notorious for 'testing' the relationship with their instructor. Drivers on their morning commute often continuously test the role of authority in enforcing the speed limit, until they get a speeding ticket. A human interacting with a machine will often 'test' the user interface in order to find the limits of what the machine is capable of doing, but not necessarily 'continuously'. The machine will not have hurt feelings if we pound on the keys or enter text different from what was expected. One gambling game I played years ago, I entered my wager as -200 dollars and lost on purpose, just to see what would happen. The machine blindly subtracted -200 dollars from my balance, and in this way I was able to win money, by losing.]

p.162 I noted earlier that purposeful action is characterized by the fact that projected outcomes of action are a resource for producing the action's course.

p.176 an obvious proposition, that insofar as actions are always situated in particular social and material circumstances, the situation is crucial to action's interpretation. The very obviousness of this fact about action contributes to the ways in which it has been overlooked.

p.176-177 The specification of procedures for action, in turn, has presupposed enumeration of the conditions under which a given action is appropriate. These stipulated conditions, ready made and coupled to their associated actions, take the place of a lively, moment-by-moment assessment of the significance of particular circumstances... I have proposed an alternative approach... The aim of [JLJ - purposive action] research, according to this [JLJ - proposed] approach, is to explore the relation of knowledge and action to the particular circumstances in which knowing and acting invariably occur... the coherence of action is not adequately explained by either preconceived cognitive schema or institutionalized social norms. Rather, the organization of situated action is an emergent* property of moment-by-moment interactions between actors and between actors and the environments of their action.

*The sense of "emergent" here is... simply a sense of something arising out of ongoing activity, enacted rather than predetermined.

p.178 As Heritage has recently stated the problem: "The 'boundaries' of specific, located ordinary actions... the determination of adequacy... these questions and many more pose problems which cannot be resolved 'in principle' but which require solution in the context of practical engagement with descriptive tasks" (1984: 302).

p.178 In this study I have attempted to begin constructing a descriptive foundation for the analysis of human-machine communication.

[JLJ - Obviously Suchman is not a computer programmer. A computer programmer would see the interaction as a dialog between the programmer and the user, to the extent that the programmer is able to understand the user's problem, and to the extent that the use and operation of the software product has had sufficient time to be field-tested to uncover any dialog issues that prevent the user from cleanly and effectively communicating his needs, using widgets and text boxes on the computer's user interface. The machine is simply the automated resource used to execute code and operates with/as the proxy of the programmer. Not only does the machine not know what it does, it does not know what what it does, does. For example, a machine prompting a user to enter certain critical information in order to estimate the costs of replacing a roof does not know it is constructing a roof replacement cost estimate, it does not know that a business will use this information to present such an estimate to a customer, nor does it know that an actual roof will be replaced based on the result of the critical information entered and the calculations performed. It simply executes a set of instructions, which someone - an intelligent programmer - has cleverly crafted to operate for the benefit or amusement of another. When we see a yellow 'stickie' on our desk with a note on it, we quickly accept the message as being from an individual, and that the yellow stickie and ink are merely the media (plural of medium...?) for the message. Suchman needs to consider that a computer and a display are the media for the message sent by the programmer, by way of or by means of, the automated script being executed by the machine.]

p.184 The natives of the Caroline Islands routinely embark on ocean-going canoe voyages that take them several days out of the sight of land... To maintain their orientation... requires that they consult not only the stars, but also a rich set of changing environmental circumstances... which through experience become interpretable for information about the relative position of the canoe... nowhere is a preconceived plan in evidence. The basis for navigation seems to be, instead, local interactions with the environment.

[JLJ - I would bet that they use a GPS navigation system of some kind...]

p.185 the nature of an activity can be missed unless one views purposeful action as an interaction between a representation and the particular, contingent details of the environment. With respect to plans and actions, Feitelson and Stefik (1977) found this same relation present in the work of geneticists planning scientific experiments. Specifically, they found that geneticists elaborated their plans only far enough to act as a framework in which to organize the constraints of the laboratory. Rather than planning the experiment through an a priori analysis, the experimenters decided what to do next by relating each current observation to their research goals. The experimenters' expertise lay not in completing the plan but in the ability to generate hypotheses continually and to exploit serendipity in the course of the experiment. The experimental process, being what Feitelson and Stefik call "event driven," allowed the experimenter to "fish for interesting possibilities"; that is, to follow up on unanticipated observations and opportunities provided by a particular experimental setup.

[JLJ - The question we face at every moment in our predicament is, "What do I do now, considering that I am alive and in my current situation, having already made certain investments and commitments, and with certain relationships existing, with certain opportunities being available and certain others no longer being available, and with certain uncontrollable yet manageable forces such as the weather and the economy present, as well as the inevitable passage of time, requiring that I take or postpone actions now, the effects of which can only faintly be "seen," and with certain abilities present or capable of being developed, and with there being a real risk that - otherwise - a future might arrive which is not in my best interests, or that other useful opportunities might otherwise be forever missed...?" Given this condition, planning is a practical behavior producing solutions to the questions we face in our predicament, a behavior (planning) from which emerges a "thing" (a plan) that guides our answers to the questions of what to do now, and which helps us avoid landing in positions or situations that initially looked promising, but did not eventually turn out that way.]

p.185 From these and other examples, we can begin to draw an alternative account of the relation of plans to situated actions. The foundation of actions by this account is not plans but local interactions with our environment, more and less informed by reference to abstract representations of situations and of actions and more and less available to representation themselves. The function of abstract representations is not to serve as specifications for the local interactions but rather to orient or position us in a way that will allow us, through local interactions, to exploit some contingencies of our environment and to avoid others. Although plans can be elaborated indefinitely, they elaborate actions just to the extent that elaboration is useful; they are vague with respect to the details of action precisely at the level at which it makes sense to forego abstract representation and rely on the availability of a particular, embodied response.

[JLJ - Plans emerge from the situation as we consider what we want, what is real, what might be, what can be, what we can manufacture or acquire or borrow, what ought to happen next, and what we can accomplish with reasonable action over time on our part or working with others.]

p.185-186 The interesting problem for an account of action, finally, is to describe how it is that we are able to bring efficient descriptions (such as plans) and particular circumstances into productive interaction. The assumption in planning research in cognitive science has been that this process consists in filling in the details of the plan to some operational level. But when we look at actual studies of situated action, it seems that situated action turns on local interactions between the actor and contingencies that, although they are made accountable to a plan, remain essentially outside of the plan's scope.

[JLJ - One way to handle contingencies in situated action is to have and manage 'potentials' for action - the situation will determine whether a potential for action will be actualized. We develop experience and plan for both likely and unlikely scenarios, and otherwise develop 'tricks that work' by watching others who face the same or similar situations. There is always the predicament of living, we cannot escape it, we choose how to confront this predicament and out of wisdom make plans, in order to avoid unintentionally being part of the plans of others, who are less likely to look out for our interests. We are always in the middle of things, and in the middle of executing a plan of some sort.]

p.186 Just as it would seem absurd to claim that a map in some strong sense controlled the traveler's movements through the world, it is wrong to imagine plans as controlling actions.

[JLJ - Perhaps a plan is 1. an intelligently constructed artifact of foresight, which we 2. elevate to importance in an attempt to maneuver in our predicament - reasoning that 'it' represents to us practical and useful insight and direction in an otherwise directionless world, and which 3. We choose willingly to follow out of wise necessity in our predicament, because we have to decide at every moment what to do now. It is a something we can construct, and then go off and do something else, perhaps reminding ourselves, 'I am prepared because, going forward, I have a plan for handling that situation.' The absence of a plan can rise in importance until we take the time to form a plan. We can return to a plan a day or so later, with a fresh perspective, and make slight but effective changes. A plan can be reworked if the results are not what we would expect. We can point to certain cues in the environment and say, 'See that? That means our plan is working...' - or not working, or likely to fail. To analyze a plan - in isolation - and to focus only on a plan is to ignore, at least to some degree, the predicament we are in that requires us to plan in the first place. In sum, we intelligently plan, then grasp at the plan for direction, due to the predicament we are in and the general effectiveness of intelligently-performed past planning efforts, in managing and maneuvering in that predicament.]

p.193 In "On Formal Structures of Practical Action," Garfinkel and Sacks (1970) develop the argument that lived practice inevitably exceeds the enframing moves of its own procedures of order production. That this is the case, they observe, is not first and foremost a theoretical problem for sociology but rather a practical problem for everyday life, solved pragmatically by members of the society in ways good enough for their purposes at hand.

[JLJ - We can develop procedures for managing the predicament, but there will always be the unanticipated situation, or a practical decision point where information is not clear enough to proceed, either way. Now what? Maybe we must operate our lives with values and understandings firmly defined, and when the situation demands we improvise, we must do so with our defined values and understandings firmly in mind.]

p.221 The migration of computing into the built environment is an area where life perhaps most clearly seeks to imitate art.

[JLJ - Yes, the computer will disappear into the environment. But more worrisome are the various comparies who want your personal information and who will go to great lengths to get it. This 'personal assistant' - or even your 'smart' TV - will fetch whatever data you wish, and will also pass the results on to Google and Apple and Microsoft and Facebook, who will now serve you custom ads, or on to 'survey' or 'polling' companies who will use this data to try to sell you additional things you don't need, or market political candidates who want your vote. My landline phone rings all day, displaying random phone numbers from all over the US, in a vain attempt to get me to pick up my phone, a call from no one specific to no one they know, an unknown anonymous 'someone' forever trying to sell me something forever unknown.]

p.222 Personalization is a central preoccupation in smart device projects... as technologies that recognize thir users and shape themselves accordingly.

[JLJ - ...or shape their sales pitch accordingly.]

p.255 The question "Do you think that robots should have emotions?" again explores the bounds of the Head's [JLJ - Stelarc's Prosthetic Head was an art exhibit in Toronto in 2003 which featured a 3D computer-rendered face/head which moved its mouth and displayed emotion, and which allowed a user - such as the author - to interact] self-reflective and humanlike capacities.

[JLJ - The answer might be as simple as yes and no. If you are interacting with a robot, the default operating state might be selected by the programmer to have emotions. If the user gets annoyed with this, he/she can select a checkbox of some kind, or even say the words, "emotions off." Suchman misses the infamous Microsoft Windows "Office Assistant" [Wikipedia] The Office Assistant is a discontinued intelligent user interface for Microsoft Office that assisted users by way of an interactive animated character which interfaced with the Office help content. It was included in Microsoft Office for Windows (versions 97 to 2003), which was given the boot when users complained that it annoyed them when unsummoned it popped up and asked, "It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help?". Hospitals might query their patients on their opinions concerning robotic nurses that periodically visit them, and we will be stuck with the conditions most preferred by user surveys. The short answer is that the person with money who paid for the software development effort for the robot will get to decide that question.]

p.285 The question, following Barad, is how to configure assemblages in such a way that we can inter-act responsibly and generatively with and through them.

[JLJ - Certain user-interface devices in our social world have become standardized in appearance, so we do not have to ponder how to operate a light switch or a door knob. Heat activated sensors in restrooms are sometimes a puzzle, but few have been inconvenienced to the point that they could not (ultimately) flush a toilet or wash and dry their hands. Computer user-interface devices are likewise becoming standardized. This is the world of the computer programmer. Someone has carefully designed your cell phone and your computer screen so you can do everything you need to do - it should be intuitive, or you can select the help option, or have someone show you, or ask the question in the Google search engine. Suchman may one day come to understand that "users" with money hire programmers to construct devices of all kinds requiring user interfaces of all kinds, and the technology from these one-of-a-kind custom efforts trickles down eventually to the everyday user of a simple cell phone. Just wait, Ms. Suchman, for a programmer to continue to develop and refine a standard toolbox of widgets and database interfaces, and the problem(s) you fret about in these 300 pages will appear to solve themselves.]