January 07, 2009
links for 2009-01-07
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Suw has just launched "Ada Lovlace Day" - a movement to celebrate and promote women in technology. I've signed up to the pledge, and you should too.
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One of the dilemmas of modern technology: the cost of storage makes it easier for more and more data to be collected and kept, and remembering things for us is a useful feature of computers - but should they remember everything for ever?
I think more people should be worrying about the answer to that. This paper proposes a good solution, where all data is given an expiry date and is deleted at that point.
I think there's scope for a more nuanced solution though, where data gets fuzzier over time. For a while it could be useful to know that I made a phonecall at 10:34am this morning, but in 10 years if I need to know at all then surely something like "early Jan 2009" would be close enough?
Tricky to implement, because remembering is such a hard task that deliberately forgetting feels very wrong, but I think we should be exploring what we do and don't want to keep for ever.
This blog post is on the personal blog of Adrian McEwen. If you want to explore the site a bit further, it might be worth having a look at the most recent entries or look through the archives or categories over on the left.
If you want to hire my company to help you with the Internet of Things then get in touch. If you want to learn more about the Internet of Things, then buy my book Designing the Internet of Things (amazon.co.uk amazon.com).