James attends the daily brief on Confusnia. Rather than take notes in the ordinary way, he writes down the questions that are answered by the briefer in the course of his talk. Now, HAWK attaches those questions, as annotations, to the corresponding electronic foils and to a pointer into a video covering the time the foil was in view. Thus, the foils are used to roughly segment the video; HAWK tries to refine the rough segmentation by looking for pauses near the foil changes.
James Smart is working on an assessment of likely reactions to a cruise missile attack on the Air Ministry Headquarters located in Drazni. The Confusnians have cleverly built a new place of worship on adjacent ground, thought to have been the site of the twelfth century conversion to collectivism of their profit, Minilus the Great. James knows the job will be complicated, so he sketches an approach, in the form of a flow chart, on a whiteboard in the intelligent room. HAWK interprets the flow chart by analyzing the drawing and processing the mutually understandable English inside the boxes. Then, using ``consistency promoting technology'' HAWK notes the similarity to a procedure recorded by HAWK during a previous crisis. HAWK volunteers the existence of the previous procedure, and calls attention to what appear to be minor differences in vocabulary and proposes an extra step, wondering if the differing terms are synonyms and asking if James overlooked the need for that step in the current situation. In the course of its work HAWK makes several seamless appeals to special-purpose reasoning engines by way of mechanisms derived from ``protocol of inference technology.''