Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (31 page)

Field, John. 2006.
Lifelong Learning and the New Educational Order.
Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, UK: Trentham Books.

7. PERSONAL LIFE, AND AFTERLIFE

Organic light emitting polymer (OLEP) and Organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays:

Russell, Terrence. 2008. “Samsung Gearing up for OLED Push in 2009/2010.”
Wired
(April 22).

Shinar, Joseph. 2003. “Organic Light-Emitting Devices: A Survey.” New York: Springer.

TripReplay from MyLifeBits is described here:

Aris, Aleks, Jim Gemmell, and Roger Lueder. 2004. “Exploiting Location and Time for Photo Search and Storytelling in MyLifeBits.” Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2004-102 (October).

Adding summarization to visualization for geolocated photos:

Ahern, Shane, Mor Naaman, Rahul Nair, Jeannie Yang. “World Explorer: Visualizing Aggregate Data from Unstructured Text in Geo-Referenced Collections.” In
Proceedings, Seventh ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
( JCDL 07), June 2007.

The
Stuff I’ve Seen
project did some experiments that showed how displaying milestones alongside a timeline may help orient the user. Horvitz et al. used statistical models to infer the probability that users will consider events to be memory landmarks.

Ringel, M., E. Cutrell, S. T. Dumais, and E. Horvitz. 2003. “Milestones in Time: The Value of Landmarks in Retrieving Information from Personal Stores.”
Proceedings of IFIP Interact 2003.

Horvitz, Eric, Susan Dumais, and Paul Koch. “Learning Predictive Models of Memory Landmarks.” CogSci 2004: 26th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Chicago
,
August 2004.

Pondering digital immortality with Jim Gray back in 2001:

Bell, G., and J. N. Gray. 2001. “Digital Immortality.”
Communications of the ACM
44, no. 3 (March): 28-30.

MyCyberTwin:

MyCyberTwin Web site.
www.mycybertwin.com

Roush, Wade. 2007. Your Virtual Clone.
Technology Review
(April 20).

The Turing test:

Turing, A. 1950. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”
Mind
59, no. 236: 433-60.

Creating biographical and family histories:

LifeBio:
www.lifebio.com
, formed in 2000, has a process, tools, and software to enable a person, family, or groups to create stories and documents that can be printed or displayed on the Web.

8. REVOLUTION

Dear Appy:

Bell, Gordon. 2000. “Dear Appy”
ACM Ubiquity
, 1, no. 1 (February).

Bannon argues in favor of forgetting:

Bannon, Liam. 2006. “Forgetting as a Feature, Not a Bug: The Duality of Memory and Implications for Ubiquitous Computing.”
CoDesign
2, no. 1 (March): 3-15.

Management guru Drucker on managing yourself:

Drucker, Peter. 1999. “Managing Oneself.”
Harvard Business Review
(March-April): 65-74.

Google street views:

Derbyshire, David, and Arthur Martin. 2008. “Google ‘Burglar’s Charter’ Street Cameras Given the All Clear by Privacy Watchdog.”
Mail Online
(July 31).

Weeks, Carly. 2007. “Google’s Detailed Streetscapes Raise Privacy Concerns.
National Post
(September 11).

“Google Street Views, Cool or Creepy?”
New York Post (
June 7, 2007).

E-memories in court:

“Electronic storage devices function as an extension of our own memory,” Judge Pregerson wrote, in explaining why the government should not be allowed to inspect them without cause. “They are capable of storing our thoughts, ranging from the most whimsical to the most profound.” The magistrate judge, Jerome J. Niedermeier of Federal District Court in Burlington, Vt., used an analogy from Supreme Court precedent. It is one thing to require a defendant to surrender a key to a safe and another to make him reveal its combination.

Liptak, Adam. 2008. “If Your Hard Drive Could Testify.”
The New York Times
(January 7).

The idea of purposely falsifying some of your records to avoid them being used in court is examined in

Cheng, William, Leana Golubchik, and David Kay. “Total Recall: Are Privacy Changes Inevitable?: A Position Paper.”
Proceedings of the First ACM Workshop on Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences
(CARPE ’04), New York, October 15, 2004, 86-92.

An overview of Privacy, Ownership, Search, Cryptography, and many of the critical aspects of our lives in Cyberspace:

Abelson, Hal, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis. 2008.
Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion.
Boston: Addison Wesley.

We only touched on a little of what Steve Mann has done in wearable computers and mediated reality. His work runs the gamut from technical issues to legal issues to art.

Mann, S. “ ‘ Sousveillance’: Inverse Surveillance in Multimedia Imaging.”
Proceedings of ACM Multimedia 2004,
New York, October 2004, 620-27.

Mann, Steve. 2001.
Intelligent Image Processing.
New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Mann, Steve, Anurag Sehgal, and James Fung. “Continuous Lifelong Capture of Personal Experience Using Eyetap.”
Proceedings of The First ACM Workshop on Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences (CARPE ’04),
New York, October 15, 2004, 1-21.

Mann, Steve, with Hal Niedzviecki. 2001.
Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer.
New York: Random House Doubleday.

Mann’s “EyeTap” glass can record what he sees—now Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence plans to turn his prosthetic eye into a video camera.

“Anti-Surveillance Filmmaker Plans Eye-Socket Camera.” Reuters, March 5, 2009.

http://www.eyeborgblog.com

Hasan M. Elahi is an artist exploring the bounds of surveillance and sousveillance by being a more extreme and consistent life blogger. He captures nearly everything that happens in his waking life in photos with time and location. Hasan’s tracking site provides an image of exactly where Hasan is at any time.

Hasan Elahi’s Web site.
http://elahi.org

Hasan’s tracking site.
http://www.trackingtransience.net

9. GETTING STARTED

Aimee Baldridge has written a complete and excellent how-to for digitizing everything in your life. She describes how you go about estimating, planning, and digitizing your collection of documents, photos, cassettes, videotapes, vinyl records, et cetera. This two-hundred-page book makes it clear just how daunting digitizing your entire past can be. Our recommendation is to start now by accumulating everything that is born digital and go back in time based on need.

Baldridge, Aimee. 2009.
Organize Your Digital Life: How to Store Your Photographs, Music, Videos, and Personal Documents in a Digital World
. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic.

The end of paper is nowhere in sight. Copiers and computer printers continue to accelerate the growth in the use of paper and printing. The first step of going paperless is not storing or transmitting paper—the convenience of paper as a write-once, high quality, portable display will continue until display technology advances quite a bit more.

Paper digitizers, aka scanners, are used to eliminate paper storage and transmission. An ideal scanner would be small, fast, and low cost; it would be able to handle stacks of one- or two-sided items in arbitrary formats and sizes from business cards and photos to books and blueprints, and to scan black-and-white as well as color at arbitrary resolutions, would have a shredder as its last stage, and would be as easy to use as the shredder. In 2010 it takes a half-dozen scanners plus a shredder to realize the ideal. Office copiers with scanning capability are increasingly approaching the ideal because they are fast and require the high resolution for printing that is inherent with an office copier.

The following scanners are in order of my own personal preference:

•
Small units
that fit nicely at the back of a desk. Usually this will be a feed-through format to save space. The Fujitsu ScanSnap models are very nice, handling both sides of the paper in a single pass, both color and black-and-white, at five to fifteen pages per minute.

•
Digital cameras
suffice as scanner alternatives. A high-resolution digital camera can digitize almost anything. An A-size 8½” x 11” page can be resolved at 150 dpi with 2 megapixels or 300 dpi with 8 megapixels. A copy stand or tripod and proper lighting are essential.

•
All-in-one personal print-scan-copy-fax
. A single device scans and prints documents and photos. Quality, reliability, and speed are often unimpressive.

•
Personal flatbed
with document feeder. These are typically inexpensive, large, and bulky, with a relatively slow feeder (five to eight pages per minute) yet able to scan almost anything, including 3-D objects. Professional flatbed scanners operate at up to twenty-five double-sided pages per minute.

•
Business card scanner.
Special scanner of business cards. Desktop scanners usually handle this, making them redundant.

•
Photo scanner (slides, negatives, positives, and prints).
Photo scanners require the ability to handle multiple items at high resolution (>1,000 dpi), including slides. Photo scanning services are an excellent alternative to owning a photo scanner.

•
Book-specialized flatbed scanners
cost a few hundred dollars but require setup time per page scanned. At the high end of the spectrum, a fully automatic book scanner sells for tens of thousands of dollars.

•
Large format,
e.g., for blueprints. There are a variety of special scanners for scanning large items such as plans and blueprints. Most people will not have very many of these to scan, and will better off using a service to scan large items. An alternative is stitching multiple scans together using image-editing software.

Photo- and slide-scanning services
are everywhere, from drugstores to photo stores. The Web lists thousands of them.
Document scanning services
also abound. Some scanning services will also come to your facility to do the scanning. VendorSeek and RecordNation will get you several quotes from different vendors for scanning your documents.

http://vendorseek.com

http://recordnation.com

If you are handling scanned documents, PDF is likely the format you will settle on, and PDF tools for creation, OCR, and editing will be essential.

Adobe Acrobat Web site.
https://www.acrobat.com

Nuance Web site.
www.nuance.com

CutePDF Web site.
http://www.cutepdf.com

Tools for recording family and small business finances:

Microsoft Money.
http://www.microsoft.com/MONEY/default.mspx

Quicken.
http://www.quicken.com

Mind Your Own Business.
http://myob.com

Tools for music ripping and management:

Apple iTunes Web site.
http://www.itunes.com

Microsoft Zune Web site. http://
www.zune.net

WinAmp Web site.
http://www.winamp.com

Photo editing and management software:

Adobe Elements Web site.
http://www.adobelements.com

Adobe PhotoShop Web site.
http://www.photoshop.com

Apple iLife Web site.
http://www.apple.com/iLife

Picassa Web site.
http://picassa.google.com

Microsoft Live Photo Gallery.
http://download.live.com/photogallery

Video editing and management software:

Adobe Premier Web site.
http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere

Apple iMovie Web site.
http://www.apple.com/ilife/imovie

Microsoft Movie Maker Web site.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxpusing/moviemaker/default.mspx

Magix Movie Edit Web site.
http://www.magix.com/us/video

Pinnacle Studio Web site.
http://www.pinnaclesys.com

Ourpix Web site.
http://www.ourpix.com

Movie Story Web site.
http://ourpix/dvd-slid-show.html

See the Health section below for devices, especially by Philips, Bian caMed, BodyMedia, Oregon Scientific, and Omron. See that section also for health software, including Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault, and Quicken Health.

Microsoft OneNote uses a notebook metaphor for putting “everything,” e.g., handwritten notes, voice comments, e-mail messages, writing, Web pages, photos, et cetera, into a searchable hierarchy of notebooks, sections, and pages.

One Note Web page.
http://office.microsoft.com/onenote