Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (16 page)

Textbooks commonly contain exercises and problem sets, of course, and e-textbooks will too. But the difference is: E-textbooks will be able to record your answers to your e-memory and check if they are right. Adding the e-memory is crucial. Think of a ninth-grade math student. Her assignments should combine older material with the latest lesson, to ensure retention of earlier skills. But which older material? Conventional textbooks make a best guess. An e-textbook with an e-memory knows what older material needs more work. It knows how long since the student last did such a problem. It can drill enough to distinguish between sloppy mistakes and true struggles. Areas of difficulty can be given more emphasis. It may be noted that while completing a certain type of math problem correctly, the student takes a long time, and the student may be referred to techniques that may help, or quizzed on more foundational skills that are suspected to be lacking. Topics that were mastered can be set aside, and only brought back after enough time has elapsed for retention to be a concern. Each assignment is completely customized to the student based on her learning record.

Like the scientists sharing their findings, students can benefit from sharing also. We all recall poorly worded questions or description in textbooks from our schooldays, and needing to pool our knowledge with other students to decipher what was meant. Students will share notes and crib sheets. Group projects will be able to build up a collaborative collection of links and notes from individual e-memories that all can tap into to produce the final result.

Additionally, a student’s memex will easily integrate his task list, tracking what assignments are completed and which are due next. It can help manage the student’s study habits, for example, pointing out that Johnny spent two hours studying for a history exam worth just 5 percent of the final grade while only spending a half hour on the geography midterm, which is worth 20 percent of the final grade.

HIGHER LEARNING

It is illuminating to contrast the scientist’s memex envisioned by Vannevar Bush with what is realized by the World Wide Web. Bush expected that

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. . . . There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.

Bush didn’t foresee the Internet, so he never would have anticipated hyperlinked encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia, Questia, or Encarta, that are used without copying their entire contents into one’s personal e-memory. Trailblazers do exist, but in the form of those who publish pages of useful links. I know trailblazing is important, because when my team at Microsoft Research was working on networking, our “trailblazer” page of links to relevant research received far more traffic than any of our other pages for a time.

On the whole, the Web seems more convenient than what Bush imagined, but we do face broken links as pages move, and we can’t create links to specific passages on a page unless an HTML “ bookmark ” is already defined there by the author. Furthermore, copyright concerns come into play if I want to show someone else’s page with my markup added. These technical and copyright issues have, so far, prevented the widespread sharing of pages marked up with highlighting and marginal notes. By creating one’s own copy, one can prevent broken links and add bookmarks as desired—and share a private copy without announcing a copyright violation to the world. Thus Bush will probably be proved right in predicting that a scientist “sets a reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to his friend for insertion in his own memex,” or, in modern parlance, he e-mails a copy to a friend. (I’ll leave it to others to argue the legality of such copies; I merely predict it will happen.)

According to Vannevar Bush, “the inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.” What he failed to see is just how elaborate this scaffolding might be.

To date, it is common for a published paper with a few tables and charts to be the only long-term survivor of a research project that once had volumes of data, “metadata” that describes how the data was gathered, copious notes, and conversations among the researchers. Vannevar Bush saw that more notes and background material might be shared. Jim Gray led the charge in proposing that
everything
could be shared. Think of the amazing detail and enormous volume of data that Deb Roy is collecting. His Speechome corpus need not be reduced to a few publications; the whole data set can be passed on.

Science began with a paradigm of observation and experimentation. Later came a paradigm of theory, and, more recently, a paradigm of computer simulation. The fourth paradigm of science, or the
Gray paradigm,
as I believe it should be called, is a paradigm of data-intensive science. Gray and his colleagues elaborate:

Traditionally scientists have had good excuses for not saving and documenting everything forever, it was uneconomic or infeasible. So, we have followed the style set by Tycho Brahe and Galileo—maintain careful notebooks and make them available; but, the source data is either not recorded at all, or is discarded after it is reduced. In some cases it is even considered private, especially when done in corporate laboratories!

It is now feasible, even economical, to store everything from most experiments. If you can afford to store some digital information for a year, you can afford to buy a digital cemetery plot that will store it forever. In the future, some fields will no doubt require public storage and access of experimental data. Astronomy is an example of a community that is in transition to this new kind of science and may no doubt be at the forefront because it is traditionally collaborative and minimally funded. Sharing observations is critical and the norm.

Researchers from all fields, not just science, will be able to preserve and share all of their material and notes to the benefit of others. There can be enormous value in a marginal entry indicating that a historical assertion is refuted elsewhere, or a note that the thermometer was slightly moved in 1978, accounting for increased temperature readings, or an explanation of why a certain approach was abandoned. Someone may want to apply a fresh approach to the old data. Shared systems will allow many researchers to pool their material together, so that for some given data, say, an economic report for 2002, you can see comments by many individuals, links to related reports, and metadata describing how the report collected its data and tabulated its results.

Historians ought to jump on the fourth paradigm, and insist on original source material being made readily available. Too many works have relied on secondary sources in the past. And the scope of original sources is about to explode as lifelogging increases. We shall have to see how society evolves to deal with the legacy of e-memories, but I presume that eventually many lifelogs will be opened to a trusted historian to excerpt, if not entirely released to the public.

Suppose someone were to release even a quarter of their lifelog posthumously: It would still confront the historians with a corpus vastly larger than they have ever experienced before. As more people lifelog, historians will also have to delve into the e-memories of other related figures as part of their study.

Earlier, I pointed out that it was a fallacy to worry about having enough time to watch your whole life. An individual would never want to watch his whole life, and knows what he may want to look for in his e-memories. But for the historian it truly is a challenge, because a historian doesn’t know what to search for or what can safely be ignored, having not lived the life in question. Thus, historians will become more and more adept at using data mining and pattern recognition, and will come to demand the latest in tools for comparing videos, performing handwriting recognition, converting speech to text, classifying background noise, and much more. They will rely on computing power to help summarize, classify, and identify anomalies, so that they can safely pass over their subject’s typical commute to work but not miss the one where she made an unusual stop. Many hours of the subject’s life may be classified as “reading,” during which time the title of what she reads should usually suffice.

However good automatic analysis may ever be, the most potent historical figures will be, as they are now, studied by many historians. Some will specialize in different periods or different aspects of the figure’s life. The subject’s e-memories, like the scientific data discussed above, will be in a common repository and the historians’ notes and links will be available to one another. Thus, they will not rely just on machine intelligence, but will look to other humans to point out events of significance, to classify material, and to identify trends.

This marked-up repository will also form a new way of delivering history to casual consumers. While only a few experts or motivated amateurs will want to delve into the full data set behind a scientific paper, the appeal of history—of historical stories—is very broad. Many people would be interested in seeing a little more context behind some point of interest, perhaps watching an entire baseball game that includes their favorite major league player as a twelve-year-old, or observing how a politician acted in a press conference early in his career, or listening to the recording of a famous concert mentioned in a musician’s biography.

I believe the electronic history exhibits will become more and more faithful to Bush’s trails. History presentations will stitch together media into a narrative, truly creating a trail from one artifact to the next, with attached comments. For instance, imagine you are following a trail that I created about the history of computer design. You might start with a chart showing the evolution of computers in the twentieth century, and hearing my voice explain them. Next in the trail is a page describing a computer architecture called SNAP, and you hear me explain Jim Gray’s contribution.

But here you grow curious—who was Jim Gray? How did Gordon Bell become involved with him? You see that this page is part of another trail, authored by a fellow named Tom Barclay, called “The Life of Jim Gray,” and divert into that trail to learn more about him. Presentations such as these bring Bush’s trails together with the World Wide Web to form trail webs, and ultimately a World Wide Web of trails.

Trail webs will have such advantages that traditional museums and science centers will have a hard time competing—what they will do is follow the trend already begun of complementing the museum with computer kiosks, handheld units, and other devices so that the real-space experience can be supplemented by the e-experience. The real-space experience will offer that “wow, I am standing in front of the real thing” feeling, but only the electronic one will let you virtually take apart the priceless artifact and inspect the inside, or see simulations of how it was created. If you have a tour guide at a physical museum you will get only their viewpoint—their trail—through the artifacts. With trail webs, you can listen to the inventor or artist who created the artifact. Many notable experts, each with his or her own unique background and point of view, can take you on a trail through the artifacts.

I have created several e-tours of the Computer Museum’s artifacts that are my own interpretation of computing history. Others use the Computer Museum’s artifacts as background for their own interpreted e-tours. If you want to see a great demonstration of a web of trails today, try out the World Wide Telescope, where you can take tours of a starry sky, zooming and panning to different areas, reading and hearing commentary at each stop, and, once again, discovering trail intersections that may entice you into entertaining side paths.

LIFELONG LEARNING

Writing this book while using MyLifeBits gives a foretaste of the future of learning. Jim Gemmell recalls reading a paper from MIT comparing lectures with experience, and searches for “MIT lecture web.” Too many results come back, so he adds the word “students.” Still too many, but now he remembers it was nicely formatted, and narrows down to just PDFs—there it is. He retrieves the paper and rereads the abstract to get his facts straight. In just a couple of minutes the information is included, complete with a full citation and the detail that grades improve by 10.8 percent. His learning about education is leveraged to understand Total Recall.

I imagine a high school senior who has a final exam in biology coming up. To prepare, she looks back to her midterm exams and finds all the problems that she got wrong. She searches her e-memory based on the text in the questions and finds the associated sections in the textbook, as well as the lectures that covered the material. Most were just things she needed to memorize better, so she adds those textbook sections to her “review for final” collection. But there is one problem that she just doesn’t understand, so she listens to the critical part of the lecture again, several times in fact, and consults the section in the text as well as looking up material on the Internet. She cuts and pastes key facts to memorize out of her “review for final” collection to create a fill-in-the-blanks study sheet, which she uses to cram for the final.

A graduate student in history has a paper to write on the French Revolution. Her grandfather is a professor of history, and when he did his Ph.D., it was a lot of work to pull together even ten citations for a midterm paper. For the student, every paper and book she has ever read on the French Revolution is instantly available in her e-memory. Besides the main text and four papers she is using in class, she pulls up another twenty-three references that she has encountered over the years. She is able to refresh her memory on a few points and use several quotes from the old papers. What would have taken her grandfather a full day at the library takes her just an hour. Not only is her paper stronger, but her memory of the subject has been reinforced, and her big-picture understanding is broader.