Appliances, mobility, nomadic software, and the people that use these capabilities will not come together spontaneously and wondrously in the new terrain to create an era of human-centric computing. Nor is it enough to say that “convergence” of all media to digital form will achieve this goal. That’s already here. What we need is a model of an underlying computer and communications infrastructure that will tie the elements together at a higher level, closer to what we want to do. Today’s Web and Internet are not yet there. Stripped of cosmetic adjectives, they are basically used for voyeurism and exhibitionism. And I don’t mean sex! I am talking about the millions of people and organizations showing off their wares for money, pride, or sharing, and the many millions who click away, peeking at these exhibitions. Much more than that lies ahead. The model toward which we are headed, which I have been forecasting for 20 years, is finally emerging: the Information Marketplace.
By 2010, over a billion people and their computers, along with some 100 billion appliances, will be interconnected. What will they all do? They will buy, sell, and freely exchange information and information services.
Make no mistake: The sharing of information and e-commerce over today’s Internet is only the tip of the Information Marketplace iceberg. Take, for example, the “content” that the press and Wall Street were hyperventilating about throughout the late 1990s, in the wake of proposed megamergers like that between America Online and Time Warner. All the content you can imagine – TV, movies, theater, radio, newspapers, magazines, books – accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s industrial economy. On the other hand, a whopping 50 percent of that economy – some $10 trillion –is office work, or, as it used to be called, white-collar work. This includes buy and sell transactions, reviewing mortgage applications, processing insurance forms, dealing with medical information, filling and reviewing millions of government forms, teaching and learning, selling customer services, and a myriad of business-to-business services. That’s information work – the processing of information by skilled humans, and secondarily by machines, and the delivery of that work where and when it is needed. This is barely happening over the Internet today, so no one talks about it. But it will be everywhere on tomorrow’s Information Marketplace. Human-centric computing must make it easy for people to offer their work across space and time if the Information Marketplace is to reach its full potential.
By 2020, and by my reckoning, some $4 trillion of this information work will flow over the Information Marketplace, shaking up the distribution of labor. Just imagine what 50 million Indians could do to the English-speaking industrial world using their ability to read and write English and offer their office skills, at a distance, for about one-third of what the West pays today. Such a move would have colossal economic consequences, in the distribution of work, internationally. It would also mark a poetic comeback for India, which may then be in a position to exert economic power on a nation like England that taught the Indians English to dominate them. As much as information work will flow from poor to rich, even more will flow from rich to rich – services that will be increasingly delivered via the Net because of speed and convenience. By the time this activity and the electronic commerce in goods level out, the “buy-and-sell” part of the Information Marketplace will grow from some $200 billion in 2000 to some $5 trillion annually, roughly one-fourth of the world industrial economy.
The “free exchange” part of the Information Marketplace will be just as important, because people have as much free time as work time, and they value what they do with it just as much. Already, the lives of many people are affected through family e-mail; collaboration, playing, and dating; entertainment through listening to music and viewing images and videos; accessing information of personal interest; engaging in discussions about literature, hobbies, and social issues; publishing their views, and much more. These uses will grow; when I speak publicly, I always ask those people in the audience who use e-mail to communicate with family members to raise their hand. The ratio, largely invisible in 1995, was consistently over 90 percent in 2000. Many new activities will arise as well that we can’t predict today.
Taken together, the monetary and non-monetary activities of the Information Marketplace, driven by the onrush of faster computers and communications, computerized appliances, mobile gadgets, and portable software, will propel us toward a world overflowing with information and information-related activities. The question is, “How can we build this world so we are ensured of doing more by doing less?” rather than drowning in information overload and computer complexity. Only by throwing out last century’s model for computing and adopting – indeed, demanding – a new computing philosophy, a new master plan, that lets people interact naturally, easily, and purposefully with each other and the surrounding physical world.
Human-centric computing will transform today’s individual computers, the Internet, and the Web into a true Information Marketplace, where we’ll buy, sell, and freely exchange information and information services using systems that will talk with us, do things for us, get information we want, help us work with other people, and adapt to our individual needs. Indeed, it is these five basic capabilities of computer and communications systems that are the pivotal forces of human-centric computing.
As builders of computer systems start turning these forces into useful technologies, the rest of us who are collectively frustrated by today’s computers can accelerate the process by tirelessly repeating the rallying cry of human-centric computing: “Information technology should help people do more by doing less!” If we shout loud enough, entrepreneurial companies will make this request their goal. They will recognize the huge, pent-up demand for human-centric systems, and will build them, upstaging the massive computer-communications establishment and shifting the market in their direction.
………in the 1990s, when networking advances seemed to be leveling out, and it looked like nothing big could possibly happen, the biggest change of all took place – the World Wide Web arrived as a software application for Internetted computers. It hit the steadily growing community of interconnected users with a quantitative and qualitative jolt. Creating and browsing Web sites captivated the world so much that the number of interconnected users shot up to 300 million by the end of the 20th century, as they and the rest of the world began experiencing the awesome socioeconomic potential of the Information Marketplace.
Unlike the Industrial Revolution, which has run its course, the Information Revolution is still growing. All we have today is several practical activities, an abundance of exciting promises, and a gigantic tangle of complexities, confusions, and fads – to be sure, a revolution in the making, but one that is unfinished. The missing ingredient is human-centric computing. To put it into action requires three big steps: changing the mind-set of users and designers; ensuring that our machines are easier to use and make us more productive; and insisting that new technology reach many more people.
Excerpt from "The Unfinished Revolution" by Michael L. Dertouzos
30 September 2007
29 September 2007
Human-Centric System Design
I have a personal "human-centric" story to share.
When I went to the M1 Service Center at Tampines Mall, Singapore to pay my phone bill today, I realised that I had forgotten to bring along my bill and did not know the amount to pay.
The M1 Customer Service Officer told me that she was unable to check the outstanding balance from the computer terminal at the payment counter. Billing enquiries could only be made at other counters at the service center and there was a long queue.
I was in a hurry to attend to other errands on my Saturday off and it would be a waste of time to join the queue.
She then suggested that I send a text message with just the word "Balenq" (Balance Enquiry in short) and send it to 1627, the M1 telco service number.
In under 3 seconds, I received a reply via SMS indicating my phone account number and amount due. The information was collated and linked to the M1 database of my phone bill account.
In 10 minutes flat, the whole transaction was completed. If I had to join the queue, I would have to wait for at least an hour or so.
This is the type of integrated "human-centric" system design which Michael Dertouzos wrote about in his book "The Unfinished Revolution."
Michael's theory on "how to make technology work for us - instead of the other way around" must have influenced and inspired the system designers at M1 to build a "human-centric" system to provide better service to its customers.
When I went to the M1 Service Center at Tampines Mall, Singapore to pay my phone bill today, I realised that I had forgotten to bring along my bill and did not know the amount to pay.
The M1 Customer Service Officer told me that she was unable to check the outstanding balance from the computer terminal at the payment counter. Billing enquiries could only be made at other counters at the service center and there was a long queue.
I was in a hurry to attend to other errands on my Saturday off and it would be a waste of time to join the queue.
She then suggested that I send a text message with just the word "Balenq" (Balance Enquiry in short) and send it to 1627, the M1 telco service number.
In under 3 seconds, I received a reply via SMS indicating my phone account number and amount due. The information was collated and linked to the M1 database of my phone bill account.
In 10 minutes flat, the whole transaction was completed. If I had to join the queue, I would have to wait for at least an hour or so.
This is the type of integrated "human-centric" system design which Michael Dertouzos wrote about in his book "The Unfinished Revolution."
Michael's theory on "how to make technology work for us - instead of the other way around" must have influenced and inspired the system designers at M1 to build a "human-centric" system to provide better service to its customers.
Charting New Terrain
If the quirky machines that surround you are causing you grief, imagine the mess you'll be in when there are 10 times as many of these creatures biting at you in the next few years. That's where we are headed with the huge variety of new devices coming our way. Let's not be passive victims. Let's grab "progress" by the throat and redirect it so it serves us. If we don't deliberately do so, starting now, tomorrow's much larger menagerie of hardware and software systems will make our lives even more servile and complicated.
To achieve human-centric computing, we must pay attention to both the human and the computer side of the relationship. We begin with the raw material we have to work with - the computing terrain. We must understand how it is shaped and think ahead about how it will change, because technology constantly evolves.
By 2015, single-processor PCs will level out at around 50 times the speed of Year 2000 machines, because of fundamental limits on the smallest circuits that can be "printed" on a chip. To get greater performance, designers will harness microprocessors together, like horses on a cart, up to a thousand or so, before the tiny machines get in each other's way. These combined moves will make future machines tens of thousands of times faster. During the same period, the average communication speed between machines on the Internet will increase a few hundred times, using today's pipes - mostly telephone lines and television's co-axial cable. The number of people who use wireless communications will grow dramatically, but communication speed will remain well below that of future wire line phones and coax cables. The speed of communication among stationary machines will get another thousandfold boost when sometime in the next two decades the trillion-dollar plunge is taken, as it inevitably will be, by telephone, cable TV, and other companies to thread every home and office in the industrial world with glass fiber lines. Ultimately, these high-speed terrestrial links will interconnect a huge number of antennas that will define increasingly smaller wireless communication speeds over the Internet will eventually become ten thousand times faster than what they are today. Storage capacity on computers will keep up with this maniacal pace and costs will continue to drop from the Year 2000 level of $15 for a gigabyte (the equivalent of 500 paperbacks) to well below $1.
"Who needs all these gigas of power, speed, and storage?" you may ask. You do! But you don't know it, because the numbers measure what machines do, rather than what people care about. You want to know: "How quickly can tomorrow's system locate and ship to me a replacement part for my bathroom fixture? How well can I collaborate on producing a manual for my company's new product with a coworker who lives eight time zones away? Can I tell the computer to book me a flight to Israel, and have it carry out all the negotiations?"
A human-centric computer that can perform these functions quickly and effectively with minimal instruction from you will have to be simpler to use on the outside, which means it will have to become more complex on the inside - hence the need for all the gigas. But like a car, even though its inner workings will be complicated and powerful, all you should need to use it fully is the equivalent of a simple gas pedal, brake, and steering wheel. This ascent toward true human utiltiy will take time, but we can accelerate the process if we are not lulled by the siren song of the gigas. Starting now, we must judge computers' performance by how well they satisfy our needs, not by how fast they spin their wheels.
While the "horsepower" of computers and communications will increase remarkably, three shifts in the new terrain will drive even greater change: interconnection of a growing number of appliances and physical devices to our computers; an increasing use of mobile computers connected through wireless communications; and a new breed of highly mobile software.
For the half century of their existence, essentially all the machines we have used have been operated by us. This is about to change in a big way. Run-of-the-mill appliances will become first-class computers citizens. Microprocessors with the ability to communicate with our computers throughout a house, an office building, or across the Internet will be embedded in lots of physical objects we care about. These interconnected appliances will weigh us as we stand in the bathroom in the morning, prepare most of our breakfast and have it ready just as we enter the kitchen (while also ordering foodstuffs that are depleted); deliver, as we eat, an urgent memo we have been anxiously awaiting and return our spoken reply; open the garage and lower the house temperature as we leave for the office; and announce, as we exit the driveway, a special morning program we were expecting and can now listen to while commuting directions are displayed on our windshield for avoiding the latest traffic jams. The processors will control the physical appliances tirelessly, 24 hours a day, while giving us instant access to them and the information on all our personal systems, and on the Web, when we want it, wherever we are, and on whatever device happens to be handy.
Putting microcomputers in physical devices isn't new. What's new is the promise that these physical appliances will be harnessed by tomorrow's computers to serve your needs. Many languages and systems are already being developed to help appliances communicate with computers. Unfortunately, they are following the patterns of today's computer and communication systems: They work, but they are complex and hard to use.
Interconnecting appliances to our computers is driven by a fundamental, natural force: Every day you interact with all sorts of physical things to achiever your purposes. Computerizing some of these exchanges so they become easier, faster, mre reliable, and automatic will greatly enhance your ability to do more by doing less. This means that the number of these computerized appliances will far exceed the number of PCs. It also means that we we'll computerize only those appliances whose utility justifies their interconnection "cost" - not everything in sight, as the hype suggests. If your main goal is to feed your family, you won't buy shoes with embedded chips. And even if you are rich, you may elect to sink your hands in your garden dirt, rather than use your computerized soil sensor.
The second big change in the new terrain is growth of wireless mobility. Tomorrow's computers, phones, and many other devices will be able to communicate easily without wires - be it across the room to control your entertainment center, across town to check on your house's security, or across a continent to help you reach an associate. By 2003 cellular phones, many with Internet access capability, will exceed in number of PCs. The desire for wireless mobility is huge, for it stems from a powerful, natural force: People move. If machines can help us reach the humans and things we care about, wherever we and they may be, we can do even more by doing less. This change has already begun with laptops, PDAs, and cellular phones. But the rapidly advancing wireless terrain will extend it further, with the result that roving humans will get incresingly closer to the computer and communication power they now have at their desk.
.....
The third big change in the computing terrain will be in software. The devices we'll carry as we move will require software that can provide us with a "continuity" of services, regardless of which device we use. This will cause the software to become detached from specific devices and flow among them, carrying the functions we need, where and when we need them. For example, information about your health diet, and caloric intake isn't nearly as useful on your office PC as it would be on your kitchen table's info outlet, or on your PDA when you're in a restaurant 5000 miles from home and the creme brulee appears on the dessert trolley. And when your daughter, sitting next to you in the kitchen, is dying to find out if she has an e-mail message from her boyfriend, she should be able to do so on the same device you used a second earlier to consult your diet plan.
This notion of dressing different machines with the information you want, where and when you want it, will be a widespread feature of tomorrow's human-centric systems and will result in a lot of software transfers among them. Think of the software as capturing your information personality and becoming nomadic, so it can roam onto whatever device you want to use.
Applications software - from word-processors to Web browsers - and the way it is distributed will also change, due to economic reasons, but not the ones we have been hearing about. For years, people have been saying that the low marginal cost of copying software would drive itsprice to zero. This hasn't happened because software makers have been changing their products annually, mostly to keep making money through new features. This trend, and the growing ease with which nomadic software will move over the Net, will cause us to gradually stop buying the familiar shrink-wrapped software packages. Instead, we will "rent" the programs we need by having them periodically downloaded from the Net for a fee. The result of these trends is inevitable: The entire software enterprise will evolve from a product business to a service business. You'll pay a monthly fee to your software service provider, who will ensure that your software needs will be met, often automatically without your being aware of the upgrade .... as long as you keep up with the payments. And software revenues, instead of going down, will become steady and even rise.
The ease of moving software through networks, by the way, has motivated some manufacturers to hail the arrival of so-called network computers, anew breed of inexpensive boxes largely devoid of programs and bells and whistles that are targeted to replace PCs. You will fill them with software retrieved on the fly from the Net. This is a laudable dream that appeals to organizations that like to manage their software centrally. But in practice, tomorrow's machines will be neither pure network machines that acquire their functions online, nor pure PCs stuffed with software from the factory. They will use a mix of local and distant resources through flowing, nomadic software, because that will best serve people's needs.
Excerpt from "The Unfinished Revolution" by Michael L. Dertouzos
To achieve human-centric computing, we must pay attention to both the human and the computer side of the relationship. We begin with the raw material we have to work with - the computing terrain. We must understand how it is shaped and think ahead about how it will change, because technology constantly evolves.
By 2015, single-processor PCs will level out at around 50 times the speed of Year 2000 machines, because of fundamental limits on the smallest circuits that can be "printed" on a chip. To get greater performance, designers will harness microprocessors together, like horses on a cart, up to a thousand or so, before the tiny machines get in each other's way. These combined moves will make future machines tens of thousands of times faster. During the same period, the average communication speed between machines on the Internet will increase a few hundred times, using today's pipes - mostly telephone lines and television's co-axial cable. The number of people who use wireless communications will grow dramatically, but communication speed will remain well below that of future wire line phones and coax cables. The speed of communication among stationary machines will get another thousandfold boost when sometime in the next two decades the trillion-dollar plunge is taken, as it inevitably will be, by telephone, cable TV, and other companies to thread every home and office in the industrial world with glass fiber lines. Ultimately, these high-speed terrestrial links will interconnect a huge number of antennas that will define increasingly smaller wireless communication speeds over the Internet will eventually become ten thousand times faster than what they are today. Storage capacity on computers will keep up with this maniacal pace and costs will continue to drop from the Year 2000 level of $15 for a gigabyte (the equivalent of 500 paperbacks) to well below $1.
"Who needs all these gigas of power, speed, and storage?" you may ask. You do! But you don't know it, because the numbers measure what machines do, rather than what people care about. You want to know: "How quickly can tomorrow's system locate and ship to me a replacement part for my bathroom fixture? How well can I collaborate on producing a manual for my company's new product with a coworker who lives eight time zones away? Can I tell the computer to book me a flight to Israel, and have it carry out all the negotiations?"
A human-centric computer that can perform these functions quickly and effectively with minimal instruction from you will have to be simpler to use on the outside, which means it will have to become more complex on the inside - hence the need for all the gigas. But like a car, even though its inner workings will be complicated and powerful, all you should need to use it fully is the equivalent of a simple gas pedal, brake, and steering wheel. This ascent toward true human utiltiy will take time, but we can accelerate the process if we are not lulled by the siren song of the gigas. Starting now, we must judge computers' performance by how well they satisfy our needs, not by how fast they spin their wheels.
While the "horsepower" of computers and communications will increase remarkably, three shifts in the new terrain will drive even greater change: interconnection of a growing number of appliances and physical devices to our computers; an increasing use of mobile computers connected through wireless communications; and a new breed of highly mobile software.
For the half century of their existence, essentially all the machines we have used have been operated by us. This is about to change in a big way. Run-of-the-mill appliances will become first-class computers citizens. Microprocessors with the ability to communicate with our computers throughout a house, an office building, or across the Internet will be embedded in lots of physical objects we care about. These interconnected appliances will weigh us as we stand in the bathroom in the morning, prepare most of our breakfast and have it ready just as we enter the kitchen (while also ordering foodstuffs that are depleted); deliver, as we eat, an urgent memo we have been anxiously awaiting and return our spoken reply; open the garage and lower the house temperature as we leave for the office; and announce, as we exit the driveway, a special morning program we were expecting and can now listen to while commuting directions are displayed on our windshield for avoiding the latest traffic jams. The processors will control the physical appliances tirelessly, 24 hours a day, while giving us instant access to them and the information on all our personal systems, and on the Web, when we want it, wherever we are, and on whatever device happens to be handy.
Putting microcomputers in physical devices isn't new. What's new is the promise that these physical appliances will be harnessed by tomorrow's computers to serve your needs. Many languages and systems are already being developed to help appliances communicate with computers. Unfortunately, they are following the patterns of today's computer and communication systems: They work, but they are complex and hard to use.
Interconnecting appliances to our computers is driven by a fundamental, natural force: Every day you interact with all sorts of physical things to achiever your purposes. Computerizing some of these exchanges so they become easier, faster, mre reliable, and automatic will greatly enhance your ability to do more by doing less. This means that the number of these computerized appliances will far exceed the number of PCs. It also means that we we'll computerize only those appliances whose utility justifies their interconnection "cost" - not everything in sight, as the hype suggests. If your main goal is to feed your family, you won't buy shoes with embedded chips. And even if you are rich, you may elect to sink your hands in your garden dirt, rather than use your computerized soil sensor.
The second big change in the new terrain is growth of wireless mobility. Tomorrow's computers, phones, and many other devices will be able to communicate easily without wires - be it across the room to control your entertainment center, across town to check on your house's security, or across a continent to help you reach an associate. By 2003 cellular phones, many with Internet access capability, will exceed in number of PCs. The desire for wireless mobility is huge, for it stems from a powerful, natural force: People move. If machines can help us reach the humans and things we care about, wherever we and they may be, we can do even more by doing less. This change has already begun with laptops, PDAs, and cellular phones. But the rapidly advancing wireless terrain will extend it further, with the result that roving humans will get incresingly closer to the computer and communication power they now have at their desk.
.....
The third big change in the computing terrain will be in software. The devices we'll carry as we move will require software that can provide us with a "continuity" of services, regardless of which device we use. This will cause the software to become detached from specific devices and flow among them, carrying the functions we need, where and when we need them. For example, information about your health diet, and caloric intake isn't nearly as useful on your office PC as it would be on your kitchen table's info outlet, or on your PDA when you're in a restaurant 5000 miles from home and the creme brulee appears on the dessert trolley. And when your daughter, sitting next to you in the kitchen, is dying to find out if she has an e-mail message from her boyfriend, she should be able to do so on the same device you used a second earlier to consult your diet plan.
This notion of dressing different machines with the information you want, where and when you want it, will be a widespread feature of tomorrow's human-centric systems and will result in a lot of software transfers among them. Think of the software as capturing your information personality and becoming nomadic, so it can roam onto whatever device you want to use.
Applications software - from word-processors to Web browsers - and the way it is distributed will also change, due to economic reasons, but not the ones we have been hearing about. For years, people have been saying that the low marginal cost of copying software would drive itsprice to zero. This hasn't happened because software makers have been changing their products annually, mostly to keep making money through new features. This trend, and the growing ease with which nomadic software will move over the Net, will cause us to gradually stop buying the familiar shrink-wrapped software packages. Instead, we will "rent" the programs we need by having them periodically downloaded from the Net for a fee. The result of these trends is inevitable: The entire software enterprise will evolve from a product business to a service business. You'll pay a monthly fee to your software service provider, who will ensure that your software needs will be met, often automatically without your being aware of the upgrade .... as long as you keep up with the payments. And software revenues, instead of going down, will become steady and even rise.
The ease of moving software through networks, by the way, has motivated some manufacturers to hail the arrival of so-called network computers, anew breed of inexpensive boxes largely devoid of programs and bells and whistles that are targeted to replace PCs. You will fill them with software retrieved on the fly from the Net. This is a laudable dream that appeals to organizations that like to manage their software centrally. But in practice, tomorrow's machines will be neither pure network machines that acquire their functions online, nor pure PCs stuffed with software from the factory. They will use a mix of local and distant resources through flowing, nomadic software, because that will best serve people's needs.
Excerpt from "The Unfinished Revolution" by Michael L. Dertouzos
28 September 2007
Why Change
Weird animals surround me in my home, at work, everywhere I go. Every day I must spend hours feeding them, healing them, waiting for them. And the fighting! They hold each other hostage in asphyxiating head-locks. I scream at them, but they just grunt or stare back stupidly. When we do get along, and I’m feeling affection for them, they suddenly turn around and bite a chunk off my hide.
You are surrounded by these creatures, too – the personal computers, laptops, handheld assistants, printers, Internet-savvy phones, music storage drives, and other digital wonders. They are everywhere and multiplying fast. Yet instead of serving us, we are serving them. We wait endlessly for our computers to boot up, and for bulky Web pages to paint themselves on our screens. We stand perplexed in front of incomprehensible system messages, and wait in frustration on the phone for computerized assistance. We constantly add software upgrades, enter odd instructions, fix glitches, only to sit in maddening silence when our machines crash, forcing us to start all over again, hoping against hope that they didn’t take a piece of our intellectual hide with them. We’d never live in a house, work in an office, or ride in a car where we had to put up with a menageries of such beasts. Yet we do it every day with our computer menagerie.
We shouldn’t have to.
We have already gone so far down the road of serving computers that we’ve come to accept our servitude as necessary. It isn’t. It is time for us to rise up with a profound demand: “Make our computers simpler to use!” Make them talk with us, do things for us, get the information we want, help us work with other people, and adapt to our individual needs. Only then will computers make us productive and truly serve us, instead of the other way around.
Is this possible? Certainly.
Before I reveal an entirely new approach to computer systems and their uses – a new plan for human-centric computing – let me assure you that in our new century, we have every right to expect fundamental reform. For 40 years computers have been shrines to which we pay dutiful homage. When something goes wrong, the “user” – you and I – feel that if we somehow had behaved better the trouble would not have arisen. But we are not at fault. The trouble lies in the current approach to computing.
If computers are to live up to the promise of serving us, they have to change drastically and never again subject us to the frustrating experiences we have all shared.
Several colleagues from the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and I are flying to Taiwan. I have been trying for three hours to make my new laptop work with one of these “smart cards” that plug into the machine and download my personal calendar. When the card software is happy, the operating system complains, and vice versa. Irritated, I turn to Tim Bernes-Lee, sitting to me, who graciously offers to assist. After an hour the inventor of the Web admits that the task is beyond his capabilities. I turn to Ron Rivest, inventor of RSA public key cryptography, and ask him to help. He declines, exhibiting his wisdom. A young faculty member behind us speaks up:
“You guys are too old. Let me do it.” He gives up after an hour and a half. So I go back to my “expert” approach of typing random entries into the various wizards and lizards that keeping popping up on the screen. After two more hours, and two batteries, I make it work, by sheer accident and without remembering how.
My friends on this flight were hardly incompetent. The problem was what I call the “unintegrated systems fault.” Technologists design today’s hardware and software systems without worrying enough about how these different pieces will work together. If the slightest conflict arises among an operating system, a communication network, a digital camera, a printer, or any other device, the modules become deadlocked, as do their makers, who point to one another, leaving you to resolve these differences. I received scores of letters from people who said, “I know exactly what you are talking about. Please fix it.” The problem is not simply a “bug” to be worked out in existing system, but rather an endemic mind-set that has characterized computer design for decades. Only a radical change can fix it.
It’s 11 PM and I check my e-mail. Ninety-eight new messages have arrived since yesterday. At 2 to 3 minutes per message, my average response time, I’ll need 4 hours to handle them I’d like to grant them my highest security classification, DBR – “destroy before reading.”
How do we handle this “overload fault?” We don’t. Mostly, we feel guilty if we cannot respond to all the messages that come our way. Better e-mail software can relieve a lot of this burden. Better human behavior can go further. Human-centric computing means more than changing the hardware and software of computer systems. We must also improve the ways we use technology.
My son is searching the Web for information on Vespas, the Italian scooters that conquered Europe in the 1950s, which he loves to restore. The search engine has given him 2,545 hits and he is busy checking them out. His eyes squint and his brain labors to minimize the time he needs to decide whether he should keep or toss each entry. I imagine him in a ancient badlands, nugget of hidden treasure. His shovel is diamond studded and it is stamped “high tech,” so he is duly modern. Yet he is still shoveling!
There are two problems here. First, the “manual labor fault,” which reflects the lack of automation on today’s Web and in all of today’s computer systems. We do not yet off-load human brain work and eyeball work onto our machines. We shovel and shovel, doing by ourselves mental labor we shouldn’t have to do. The second problem is the “information access fault,” which reflects our inability to get at the information we need when we need it. Both faults can be repaired.
The automatic answering system greets you with its murderous “You have reached the Tough Luck Corporation. If you want Marketing, press 1. If you want Engineering, press 2. If you want a company directory, press 3, then enter the letters of the last name of the person you wish to speak to.....”
Here we have a human being, on whose head a price cannot be set, obediently executing instructions dispensed by a $100 computer. Welcome to the “human servitude fault.” You are serving the inhuman machine, and its inhuman owners who got away saving a few dollars of operator time by squandering valuable pieces of your life and that of millions of other people. What glory: The highest technology artifacts in the world have become our masters, reintroducing us to human slavery more than a century after its abolition. Our docility in putting up with this abuse is reprehensible.
Then there is the famous “crash fault.” You are working along nicely and something untoward happens in the bowels of the machine, causing it to crash. If you haven’t done your “duty” of saving your work every few minutes, you are in for some grief.
And when you reboot the system, you are rewarded for your tolerance of the crash by a reprimand implying that you turned off your machine improperly! Things don’t have to be that way. Telephone switching systems hardly ever crash, yet they use software in their computers that is just as complex as the software in your PC.
Most faults like these abound: the “excessive learning fault,” where a word processing program, which does what a pencil used to do, only somewhat differently, comes with a 600-page manual. The “feature overload fault,” where megabytes of software features you’ll never use are stuffed into your machine, making the features you do want to use hard to find, slow, and prone to crashes. The “fake intelligence fault,” where the machine purports to be intelligent but is not, getting in your way instead of helping you. The “waiting fault,” where layers and layers of software piled up on top of each other through the ages create a spaghetti-like mess that even its maker can’t untangle.
It gets worse. Trendy handheld PDAs (personal digital assistants) demand that you learn entire new sets of commands, and go back to first grade to relearn how your fingers should pen letters of the alphabet, when you write on their little screens, so their programs can understand you. These quirky devices overlap each other’s functions and pose more demands on our attention. “Where should I put my calendar – in my PC, my PDA, or my brand new cell phone?” “Ah!” bellows the voice of an all-knowing friend! “Get a synchronizer to keep them all in step.” And so it is that yet another piece of software enters your life, with its thick manual, new commands, and many versions yet to come.
Periodically, on top of all these insults, the dreaded time arrives when you must change computers. Suddenly, all your work is hanging by a thread. You will squander entire days trying to reinject your old programs and files onto the new machine. And once you have ensured their survival, a whole bunch of new software conflicts will rear their ugly heads.
So total is our brainwashing and habitual acceptance of these indignities that even as they are happening, we brag that we have the latest breed of this or that machine that runs 30 percent faster than our neighbor’s computer and has this new set of great features!
We need a radical change.
It may sound harsh, but even though they have helped us do amazing things we never could have done without them, computers have increased hype more than productivity. The markets call them user-friendly, knowing they are difficult to use.
And despite the chest beating about the Internet giving a voice to people throughout the world, the new technology is only used by a tiny fraction of the human population.
The real utility of computers, and the true value of the Information Revolution, still lie ahead. And I’m not talking about a few improvements. The Web and the Internet of today, compared to where we are headed, are like steam engines compared to the modern industrial world. By the time information systems reach jet-plane status, well into this century, we will focus on utility over fads, triple our productivity, use our computers as naturally and easily and with as much pleasure as we now use our cars and refrigerators, and hear the voices of hundreds of millions more people – if we abandon our self-defeating path towards unbridled and growing machine complexity.
We must set a new goal which is as obvious and simple as it is powerful: Information technology should help people do more by doing less. Human-centric computing is the approach that leads to that goal. It is what will finish the Unfinished Revolution.
Excerpt from: The Unfinished Revolution by Michael L. Dertouzos
You are surrounded by these creatures, too – the personal computers, laptops, handheld assistants, printers, Internet-savvy phones, music storage drives, and other digital wonders. They are everywhere and multiplying fast. Yet instead of serving us, we are serving them. We wait endlessly for our computers to boot up, and for bulky Web pages to paint themselves on our screens. We stand perplexed in front of incomprehensible system messages, and wait in frustration on the phone for computerized assistance. We constantly add software upgrades, enter odd instructions, fix glitches, only to sit in maddening silence when our machines crash, forcing us to start all over again, hoping against hope that they didn’t take a piece of our intellectual hide with them. We’d never live in a house, work in an office, or ride in a car where we had to put up with a menageries of such beasts. Yet we do it every day with our computer menagerie.
We shouldn’t have to.
We have already gone so far down the road of serving computers that we’ve come to accept our servitude as necessary. It isn’t. It is time for us to rise up with a profound demand: “Make our computers simpler to use!” Make them talk with us, do things for us, get the information we want, help us work with other people, and adapt to our individual needs. Only then will computers make us productive and truly serve us, instead of the other way around.
Is this possible? Certainly.
Before I reveal an entirely new approach to computer systems and their uses – a new plan for human-centric computing – let me assure you that in our new century, we have every right to expect fundamental reform. For 40 years computers have been shrines to which we pay dutiful homage. When something goes wrong, the “user” – you and I – feel that if we somehow had behaved better the trouble would not have arisen. But we are not at fault. The trouble lies in the current approach to computing.
If computers are to live up to the promise of serving us, they have to change drastically and never again subject us to the frustrating experiences we have all shared.
Several colleagues from the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and I are flying to Taiwan. I have been trying for three hours to make my new laptop work with one of these “smart cards” that plug into the machine and download my personal calendar. When the card software is happy, the operating system complains, and vice versa. Irritated, I turn to Tim Bernes-Lee, sitting to me, who graciously offers to assist. After an hour the inventor of the Web admits that the task is beyond his capabilities. I turn to Ron Rivest, inventor of RSA public key cryptography, and ask him to help. He declines, exhibiting his wisdom. A young faculty member behind us speaks up:
“You guys are too old. Let me do it.” He gives up after an hour and a half. So I go back to my “expert” approach of typing random entries into the various wizards and lizards that keeping popping up on the screen. After two more hours, and two batteries, I make it work, by sheer accident and without remembering how.
My friends on this flight were hardly incompetent. The problem was what I call the “unintegrated systems fault.” Technologists design today’s hardware and software systems without worrying enough about how these different pieces will work together. If the slightest conflict arises among an operating system, a communication network, a digital camera, a printer, or any other device, the modules become deadlocked, as do their makers, who point to one another, leaving you to resolve these differences. I received scores of letters from people who said, “I know exactly what you are talking about. Please fix it.” The problem is not simply a “bug” to be worked out in existing system, but rather an endemic mind-set that has characterized computer design for decades. Only a radical change can fix it.
It’s 11 PM and I check my e-mail. Ninety-eight new messages have arrived since yesterday. At 2 to 3 minutes per message, my average response time, I’ll need 4 hours to handle them I’d like to grant them my highest security classification, DBR – “destroy before reading.”
How do we handle this “overload fault?” We don’t. Mostly, we feel guilty if we cannot respond to all the messages that come our way. Better e-mail software can relieve a lot of this burden. Better human behavior can go further. Human-centric computing means more than changing the hardware and software of computer systems. We must also improve the ways we use technology.
My son is searching the Web for information on Vespas, the Italian scooters that conquered Europe in the 1950s, which he loves to restore. The search engine has given him 2,545 hits and he is busy checking them out. His eyes squint and his brain labors to minimize the time he needs to decide whether he should keep or toss each entry. I imagine him in a ancient badlands, nugget of hidden treasure. His shovel is diamond studded and it is stamped “high tech,” so he is duly modern. Yet he is still shoveling!
There are two problems here. First, the “manual labor fault,” which reflects the lack of automation on today’s Web and in all of today’s computer systems. We do not yet off-load human brain work and eyeball work onto our machines. We shovel and shovel, doing by ourselves mental labor we shouldn’t have to do. The second problem is the “information access fault,” which reflects our inability to get at the information we need when we need it. Both faults can be repaired.
The automatic answering system greets you with its murderous “You have reached the Tough Luck Corporation. If you want Marketing, press 1. If you want Engineering, press 2. If you want a company directory, press 3, then enter the letters of the last name of the person you wish to speak to.....”
Here we have a human being, on whose head a price cannot be set, obediently executing instructions dispensed by a $100 computer. Welcome to the “human servitude fault.” You are serving the inhuman machine, and its inhuman owners who got away saving a few dollars of operator time by squandering valuable pieces of your life and that of millions of other people. What glory: The highest technology artifacts in the world have become our masters, reintroducing us to human slavery more than a century after its abolition. Our docility in putting up with this abuse is reprehensible.
Then there is the famous “crash fault.” You are working along nicely and something untoward happens in the bowels of the machine, causing it to crash. If you haven’t done your “duty” of saving your work every few minutes, you are in for some grief.
And when you reboot the system, you are rewarded for your tolerance of the crash by a reprimand implying that you turned off your machine improperly! Things don’t have to be that way. Telephone switching systems hardly ever crash, yet they use software in their computers that is just as complex as the software in your PC.
Most faults like these abound: the “excessive learning fault,” where a word processing program, which does what a pencil used to do, only somewhat differently, comes with a 600-page manual. The “feature overload fault,” where megabytes of software features you’ll never use are stuffed into your machine, making the features you do want to use hard to find, slow, and prone to crashes. The “fake intelligence fault,” where the machine purports to be intelligent but is not, getting in your way instead of helping you. The “waiting fault,” where layers and layers of software piled up on top of each other through the ages create a spaghetti-like mess that even its maker can’t untangle.
It gets worse. Trendy handheld PDAs (personal digital assistants) demand that you learn entire new sets of commands, and go back to first grade to relearn how your fingers should pen letters of the alphabet, when you write on their little screens, so their programs can understand you. These quirky devices overlap each other’s functions and pose more demands on our attention. “Where should I put my calendar – in my PC, my PDA, or my brand new cell phone?” “Ah!” bellows the voice of an all-knowing friend! “Get a synchronizer to keep them all in step.” And so it is that yet another piece of software enters your life, with its thick manual, new commands, and many versions yet to come.
Periodically, on top of all these insults, the dreaded time arrives when you must change computers. Suddenly, all your work is hanging by a thread. You will squander entire days trying to reinject your old programs and files onto the new machine. And once you have ensured their survival, a whole bunch of new software conflicts will rear their ugly heads.
So total is our brainwashing and habitual acceptance of these indignities that even as they are happening, we brag that we have the latest breed of this or that machine that runs 30 percent faster than our neighbor’s computer and has this new set of great features!
We need a radical change.
It may sound harsh, but even though they have helped us do amazing things we never could have done without them, computers have increased hype more than productivity. The markets call them user-friendly, knowing they are difficult to use.
And despite the chest beating about the Internet giving a voice to people throughout the world, the new technology is only used by a tiny fraction of the human population.
The real utility of computers, and the true value of the Information Revolution, still lie ahead. And I’m not talking about a few improvements. The Web and the Internet of today, compared to where we are headed, are like steam engines compared to the modern industrial world. By the time information systems reach jet-plane status, well into this century, we will focus on utility over fads, triple our productivity, use our computers as naturally and easily and with as much pleasure as we now use our cars and refrigerators, and hear the voices of hundreds of millions more people – if we abandon our self-defeating path towards unbridled and growing machine complexity.
We must set a new goal which is as obvious and simple as it is powerful: Information technology should help people do more by doing less. Human-centric computing is the approach that leads to that goal. It is what will finish the Unfinished Revolution.
Excerpt from: The Unfinished Revolution by Michael L. Dertouzos
27 September 2007
The Rich People's Computer
Technology Review
January 1999
The Rich People's Computer?
Computers threaten to widen the gap between the rich and poor. It's in everyone's interest to narrow it.
By Michael Dertouzos
The information gap between rich and poor in the world is difficult to assess. For example, it took me three months to find out from a perplexed Bangladeshi embassy official in Washington, D.C., what fraction of their economy is devoted to hardware and software products and related services. He finally calculated the fraction at one-tenth of 1 percent. In the United States, the corresponding figure is 100 times larger-fully 10 percent of our economy goes to information technology. Since the average Bangladeshi is 30 times poorer than the average American, the disparity, per person, between our annual expenditure on information technology and theirs is even more staggering-on average, $3,000 for each American, versus $1 for each Bangladeshi!
I suspect that if I could locate an "embassy" representing poor Americans, I would find an equally screeching dissonance between information technology expenditures in the inner city and the suburbs. It stands to reason that people struggling to get their daily bites of food have nothing left for the more ethereal bytes of information. Take this disparity to its logical next step: The rich, who can afford to buy the new technologies, use them to become increasingly productive and therefore even richer while the poor stand still.
The conclusion is as logical as it is inescapable: Left to its own devices the information revolution will increase the gap between rich and poor nations and between rich and poor people within nations.
Some experts, including Bill Gates, argue that the new technologies will help the poor become literate, learn how to plant new crops, take care of their health and sell their services over an expanding information marketplace. His view is consistent with my own, subject to one big "if": The poor could have a chance of reaping these benefits, if they were somehow provided with the communications systems, hardware, software and training needed to join the club. Absent such help, they can't even get started.
It's time we begin providing this help, not just to be compassionate but also to avoid the bloodshed that, historically, follows a widening rich-poor gap.
Fortunately, there are things we can do to help: Communications could be provided by low earth orbiting satellites (LEOS) that whip around the earth: When these birds are over the wealthy industrial nations they are very busy, but when they are over the developing world, they are doing nothing. Let's pay the low marginal cost to leave them on.
Manufacturers of hardware and software systems and providers of training, terrestrial communications and other such services could offer their goods to the poor at very deep discounts. If we, the citizens of the rich industrial nations, truly want to help, we can pay the cost by instructing our governments to offer attractive tax breaks to these suppliers. The suppliers, too, could share the costs, since an expanding information marketplace will mean more business for them.
Individuals could help with donations of funds and of their time. And organizations such as the World Bank, which spends more than $15 billion annually in structural loans to the developing world, could make a big difference by putting some of these funds into bytes-to-bites projects.
Stimulated by these exciting prospects, a few of us techies got together with a colleague from Nepal, fully expecting to boost his nation's economy by 20 percent through clever use of the information marketplace. Unfortunately, we quickly found out that even if we got the communications, hardware, software and training for free, we would still fall short of our goal: Only 27 percent of the Nepalese are literate. And of these, only a small fraction speak English. When we asked what services that smaller group could offer, we hit a brick wall. Many are not skilled, and those who are are already busy running their nation's businesses.
Maybe we were too ambitious when we envisioned a future workforce in Nepal selling office services to New York and London via the Web. What if we focused instead on selling Nepal's famous crafts, like custom-made rugs, on the Web? That got us into all sorts of other concerns about establishing trust among distant buyers and distributing the goods. The potential of the modern information age seemed overshadowed at every turn by the ancient forces that separate the rich from the poor.
Are such difficulties reason to give up and leave the information revolution to its own devices? No! We should persist, because the information marketplace is huge and largely unexplored. If even a small number of Nepalese or a few inner-city people found a way to become productively interconnected, they would serve as role models to their peers. Readers are invited to suggest creative ways in which the poor could become productively engaged in the information marketplace.
We have overcome great challenges to construct the modern computer. Yet this marvel interconnects only 1 percent of the world's 6 billion people. It is, in effect, the rich people's computer. For our own and our fellow human beings' welfare, we should now go after the tougher challenge of turning our proud achievement into the people's computer!
Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=11809&ch=biotech
January 1999
The Rich People's Computer?
Computers threaten to widen the gap between the rich and poor. It's in everyone's interest to narrow it.
By Michael Dertouzos
The information gap between rich and poor in the world is difficult to assess. For example, it took me three months to find out from a perplexed Bangladeshi embassy official in Washington, D.C., what fraction of their economy is devoted to hardware and software products and related services. He finally calculated the fraction at one-tenth of 1 percent. In the United States, the corresponding figure is 100 times larger-fully 10 percent of our economy goes to information technology. Since the average Bangladeshi is 30 times poorer than the average American, the disparity, per person, between our annual expenditure on information technology and theirs is even more staggering-on average, $3,000 for each American, versus $1 for each Bangladeshi!
I suspect that if I could locate an "embassy" representing poor Americans, I would find an equally screeching dissonance between information technology expenditures in the inner city and the suburbs. It stands to reason that people struggling to get their daily bites of food have nothing left for the more ethereal bytes of information. Take this disparity to its logical next step: The rich, who can afford to buy the new technologies, use them to become increasingly productive and therefore even richer while the poor stand still.
The conclusion is as logical as it is inescapable: Left to its own devices the information revolution will increase the gap between rich and poor nations and between rich and poor people within nations.
Some experts, including Bill Gates, argue that the new technologies will help the poor become literate, learn how to plant new crops, take care of their health and sell their services over an expanding information marketplace. His view is consistent with my own, subject to one big "if": The poor could have a chance of reaping these benefits, if they were somehow provided with the communications systems, hardware, software and training needed to join the club. Absent such help, they can't even get started.
It's time we begin providing this help, not just to be compassionate but also to avoid the bloodshed that, historically, follows a widening rich-poor gap.
Fortunately, there are things we can do to help: Communications could be provided by low earth orbiting satellites (LEOS) that whip around the earth: When these birds are over the wealthy industrial nations they are very busy, but when they are over the developing world, they are doing nothing. Let's pay the low marginal cost to leave them on.
Manufacturers of hardware and software systems and providers of training, terrestrial communications and other such services could offer their goods to the poor at very deep discounts. If we, the citizens of the rich industrial nations, truly want to help, we can pay the cost by instructing our governments to offer attractive tax breaks to these suppliers. The suppliers, too, could share the costs, since an expanding information marketplace will mean more business for them.
Individuals could help with donations of funds and of their time. And organizations such as the World Bank, which spends more than $15 billion annually in structural loans to the developing world, could make a big difference by putting some of these funds into bytes-to-bites projects.
Stimulated by these exciting prospects, a few of us techies got together with a colleague from Nepal, fully expecting to boost his nation's economy by 20 percent through clever use of the information marketplace. Unfortunately, we quickly found out that even if we got the communications, hardware, software and training for free, we would still fall short of our goal: Only 27 percent of the Nepalese are literate. And of these, only a small fraction speak English. When we asked what services that smaller group could offer, we hit a brick wall. Many are not skilled, and those who are are already busy running their nation's businesses.
Maybe we were too ambitious when we envisioned a future workforce in Nepal selling office services to New York and London via the Web. What if we focused instead on selling Nepal's famous crafts, like custom-made rugs, on the Web? That got us into all sorts of other concerns about establishing trust among distant buyers and distributing the goods. The potential of the modern information age seemed overshadowed at every turn by the ancient forces that separate the rich from the poor.
Are such difficulties reason to give up and leave the information revolution to its own devices? No! We should persist, because the information marketplace is huge and largely unexplored. If even a small number of Nepalese or a few inner-city people found a way to become productively interconnected, they would serve as role models to their peers. Readers are invited to suggest creative ways in which the poor could become productively engaged in the information marketplace.
We have overcome great challenges to construct the modern computer. Yet this marvel interconnects only 1 percent of the world's 6 billion people. It is, in effect, the rich people's computer. For our own and our fellow human beings' welfare, we should now go after the tougher challenge of turning our proud achievement into the people's computer!
Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=11809&ch=biotech
Michael L. Dertouzos
Dertouzos, who had a rare gift for putting complicated technology into human terms and making it accessible to non-technical audiences, died on August 27, 2001 at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was 64.
Dertouzos was buried next to his parents at First Cemetery in Athens, where he was born and raised. Personal letters from MIT President Charles M. Vest and Microsoft founder Bill Gates were read at a dinner in Dertouzos's honor Tuesday night, sponsored by Athens College.
The MIT delegation included MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) Associate Director Victor W. Zue, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Director Rodney A. Brooks, and Vice President for Resource Development Barbara W. Stowe, who represented President Charles M. Vest. The group also included LCS research scientists and staff members Timothy J. Berners-Lee, Jean-Francois Abramatic, Lissa Natkin, Stephanie Seneff and Anne Wailes. They were joined by retired LCS Associate Director Albert Vezza and senior research scientist David Tennenhouse.
Dertouzos joined the MIT faculty in 1964 and became director of LCS in 1974. Under his leadership, LCS became one of the largest research labs at MIT with 400 faculty members, graduate students, and research staff. LCS dedicated itself to the invention, development and understanding of information technologies, always within the context of their human utility.
"We made a big mistake 300 years ago when we separated technology and humanism," Dertouzos said in an interview in Scientific American. "It's time to put the two back together."
President Vest said, "Michael was larger than life. He was at once a leader, builder, visionary and caring human being. Few individuals have so personally and profoundly shaped their institutions and professional fields. Yet he did so in a manner that respected and involved all of his colleagues. I will miss his personal friendship and counsel very much."
"Michael was a leader in every sense of the word. He knew how to motivate people; he was passionate about his work and passionate about the people he worked with. For many of us, this is more like losing a family member than losing a colleague," said John V. Guttag, head of the department of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.
LCS members and alumni have been instrumental in the development of numerous innovations, among them time-shared computers, RSA encryption, the X Window system, the ArpaNet and the Internet. Most recently, LCS spearheaded the $50 million Oxygen project in 1999 in conjunction with MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab. Oxygen is intended to make computers easier to use, "as natural a part of our environment as the air we breathe."
Zue commented, "Michael fervently believed that developing technology is not enough by itself. One must also strive to demonstrate that it is good for something. Under his stewardship, LCS has been mindful of balancing technical excellence with social relevance."
The Lab is currently the North American home of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an open forum of companies and organizations that helps promote the Web's evolution and ensure its interoperability. Dertouzos was instrumental in bringing the W3C and its director, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, to LCS.
Berners-Lee said, "If it hadn't been for Michael, there would not probably have been a World Wide Web Consortium. He was a spring of enthusiasm, capability, insight, and experience which drove a half-formed idea of W3C into an international reality. Ever since, Michael's strength of leadership, clarity of thought and warmth of heart have been a constant support and nourishment and inspiration. He will be dearly missed."
In the LCS director's statement, Dertouzos wrote with characteristic enthusiasm for human progress through technology: "We feel extraordinarily privileged to have a hand in shaping the Information Revolution -- the third major socioeconomic movement of our world.
"But our quest goes beyond utilitarian increases in human productivity to the broader ways in which information can help people. We find ourselves in the junction of two interrelated challenges: Going after the best, most exciting forefront technology; and ensuring that it truly serves human needs. It is this mixture of forefront technology and human utility that is the hallmark of LCS research."
Professor Harold Abelson of electrical engineering and computer science, who co-authored a paper with Dertouzos, said: "Michael was a leader of mythic proportions, both at MIT and worldwide. Much of what we take for granted in computing at MIT -- including Project Athena and the World Wide Web Consortium -- is a direct result of his leadership, his vision, and his entrepreneurial skill." Dertouzos played a key role in creating Project Athena, which he suggested be named after the Greek goddess of wisdom.
Stephen A. Ward, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at LCS and a former doctoral student of Dertouzos, said, "Michael Dertouzos brought a unique combination of intuition, humanity, and style to our faculty. Michael's impact on MIT and his mentorship of students and colleagues stand as an indelible monument to his leadership, vision and personality. He will be remembered as one of the greats of MIT and computer technology."
Dertouzos, whose father was an admiral in the Greek navy and whose mother was a concert pianist, was raised in Greece. His earliest memories were of war-torn Athens and of people starving in the streets, an experience that deeply affected him for the rest of his life.
As a teenager, Dertouzos dreamed of going to MIT, but when he won a Fulbright scholarship it was to the University of Arkansas, where he earned the BS and MS degrees. After selling soft drinks and working with shaft-angle encoders at Baldwin Piano, he applied to the MIT doctorate program. Upon receiving the Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1964, he joined the faculty as an assistant professor and became a full professor in 1973.
True to the MIT spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship, Dertouzos holds patents on a graphical display system, an incremental photoelectric encoder, a graphic tablet, and on a parallel thermal printer.
A PROLIFIC AUTHOR ON HUMANS AND COMPUTERS
Dertouzos is the author of eight books. His latest, "The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do for Us" (HarperCollins), published this year, introduced the concept of "human centered computing." Computers, he wrote, should serve people, not the other way around. Today's machines are overloaded with excessive features, inadequately address our needs, and demand too much of our attention, he declared.
"Michael argued eloquently for human-centered computing. He thought deeply about how information technology could help everyone, not just the technical elite," said Guttag.
In the best-selling "What Will Be" (HarperCollins), published in 1997 when the Internet was first beginning to take hold, he wrote about the many ways in which information technology would transform our lives.
In 1986, Dertouzos was asked to chair the MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity, to examine why US firms were losing competitiveness to their overseas industrial rivals. The result was "Made in America," co-authored by Richard K. Lester and Robert M. Solow (MIT Press), which became one of the most influential business books of the 1980s, with over 300,000 copies in print.
"Michael's books were one example of his educational skills. He was fearless in entering the arena of other pundits attempting to forecast the future of computers and their application. Among his colleagues he was known for his concern for the big picture," said Fernando J. Corbató, professor of electrical engineering, emeritus, at MIT, and the inventor of time-shared computing.
AN EYE TO THE FUTURE
An avid sailor and woodworker, Dertouzos spent much of the past quarter century studying and forecasting future technological shifts -- in describing, for experts and ordinary citizens alike, what could be. In 1976, he predicted the emergence of a PC in every 3-4 homes by the mid-1990s. In 1980, he first wrote about the Information Marketplace, a vision of networked computers that has transformed the world economy.
An eloquent speaker, who was admired for his integrity and his disdain for hype, Dertouzos was frequently sought out by the media, industry and government agencies for his expertise and insight on the relationship between computers and their human users.
During the Carter Administration, Professor Dertouzos chaired a White House advisory group that redesigned the White House information systems. In 1995, he represented the US in a delegation to the G7 Conference on the Information society. In 1998, he was co-chairman of the World Economic Forum on the Network Society in Davos, Switzerland.
"Michael had a broad understanding of technology and a teacher's knack for explaining ideas. One direction in which this shone was his skill in interfacing with government sponsors of research. He was skillful in evoking the best research ideas from within the laboratory; he could educate without being condescending," Corbató said.
In his final interview, printed in the August 22 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dertouzos spoke about the qualities that he most valued in teachers, qualities which were a fundamental part of his own approach to his interactions with the MIT community:
"Don't forget the impact that love has on education," Dertouzos said in explaining his skepticism of computer-based distance education. "If you are loved by your teacher -- and I mean this in the most innocent and Platonic sense -- if your teacher really cares for your well-being -- and you know that because your teacher will ask about you, will scold you for not doing the right thing, and will give you stories about why you should do this or do that -- the learning can be unbelievably different."
Dertouzos, a resident of Weston, married Hadwig Gofferje in 1961. They divorced in 1993. In 1998 he married Catherine Liddell, who survives him along with his two children, Alexandra Dertouzos Rowe and Leonidas M. Dertouzos of Boston, and a granddaughter, Kiera Ann Rowe.
Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/dertouzos.html
Foreword to the Paperback Edition
By Tim Berners-Lee
As a visionary and leader, Michael Dertouzos took as his job not only to lead in the right direction but also to make sure that everyone understood that direction. This included everyone, expert or not. He was a teacher as well as a technologist. His vision was not just one for technology, but for humanity. And he addressed, most importantly, the relationship between the two.
Though, alas, we must speak of Michael in the past tense, his death last summer, while natural, was early and a surprise. This book, which he had just finished, is not of the past. The revolution described in these pages is something in full swing. The urgencies that Michael saw as he wrote apply absolutely to us all now. We don’t have him with us to drive home the points personally, so we will just have to imagine him, as we turn these pages, perhaps on stage at the World Economic Forum gently teasing Bill Gates, or perhaps in jovial but earnest conversation over lunch with his pen and little notepad ready next to his plate.
Everyone who met Michael knows that as a person he connected very directly with others at a raw, visceral level. I first met him in a café in Zurich, Switzerland, at a time when I was looking at possibilities about the future of the World Wide Web. Michael’s approach of putting the good intentions face up on the table firmly and with unilateral commitment was disarming, delightful, and a rock-solid foundation for what became the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), based initially at the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at MIT. In Michael, I found someone committed to computer and communications in service to humanity. I met someone committed to and appreciative of the cultural diversity which makes our world so rich. I found someone who exuded the spirit and confidence to enable those around him to recognize and do what they dreamed of.
This book helps us step back. It is so easy to get caught up in the excitement of the latest technological development, a fantastic Web site or a more dazzling computer display. These things are inherently appealing to the tool-building urge that evolution has given us. We are entranced by the exciting possibilities of the new building blocks. Sometimes, though, it is wise to pause in this headlong creative rush to wonder whether all the things we are weaving together are making any sense in the long term and on a larger scale. Michael was constantly doing this, demanding to know what passion lay behind the surface excitement, and where was the real benefit to humanity. He would keep discussions at LCS focused on the principle that it is not technology, but technology for humanity.
You can read the book to get the full picture from Michael, but I will mention some ways in which this message, that the revolution of the World Wide Web, for example.
The bane of my life is the implication that it broke upon the public consciousness in the mid-1990s and indeed, like a breaking wave lifted us all up, and then dropped us (at least the .com speculators) on the sand again. Before the wave, it was so difficult to explain to people what the Web was all about, during it there was a huge “ah-ha!” and, after it, the thought that it is over, understood. Many people assumed that the Web was, in its plan and in its entirety, whatever particular facet of it they first met. But this is far from true.
I look at computers as improving in three ways – by helping us to communicate better with each other, by helping with the actual processing of date, and by being less of a pain in the process. In none of these areas are we anywhere near the level we can imagine.
As a communication medium, computers provide a mixture of different media. The Web was supposed to have been a collaborative medium, but most of the way it is now used is as a one-way publication medium. The plan was to get to the point in which a group of people could collaborate on a project across the Web, like a family sitting around a table making a photograph album. E-mail coexists with the Web in a friendly but arm’s length existence. (Haven’t you ever wanted to link to an email or reply to a Web page?) Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and the other forms of instant messaging fill the void of instantness, but are poor from multimedia point of view.
At the other end of the scale, we have very patchy results in the area of getting machines to do our “heavy lifting” for us. In general, we are hampered in the world of data by the fact that the data in calendars, address books, and financial accounts and other databases are isolated – each application is an island, unable to benefit from the knowledge held by others. When you manually copy information about a meeting from a Web page into your appointment diary, you are the human servicing the computer just as Michael describes.
We make progress, step by step.
Nowadays, when I have meetings with colleagues at the W3C, we talk on a telephone conference bridge named after the local Zakim bridge. The people on the phone bridge can attend at the same time in a chat room, which parallels the spoken meeting. Zakim, the phone bridge, with bit of hacking by Ralph Swick at LCS, appears as a robot presence in the chat room. Zakim knows who is on the call, and can also help mute noisy lines and dial people into the call. At the same time, he keeps a list of people wanting to speak, and tracks the agenda for the meeting, taking on some of the role of meeting recorder. Zakim also keeps a list of the current conferences and who is on which conference on a virtual Web page. That Web page is in the Semantic Web “RDF” language, designed to be read by other agents.
In the daily life of the Consortium, the domains of different agents are beginning to overlap enough to be useful. The organization chart connects to the list of working groups. The list of working groups connect to the mailing list system, and to the list of documents. The list of documents connects to the access control system, which has lists of groups, which connect to the mailing list system again. Link by link the Semantic Web of data is beginning to form in our organization. We are starting to build agents that will exchange data and be aware of security and privacy. We have such a long way to go but the area is full of tantalizing possibilities. Every few days a new link is put in; a bright idea combines information from here and from there, and provides new insight, new help in some way. The last thing to do is imagine that the information revolution is over.
We have, in computers, a white, infinite canvas….we can make computers do anything we can imagine. That is a mathematical face. Any aspect of the way we use computers, the way computers present themselves to us, is the result of our programming. There are some interesting fundamental constraints on what is possible, which mathematicians make it their job to explore, but within those bounds, we are totally in control. We have no one else to blame. There is no reason that computers have qwerty keyboards, or keyboards at all, except that someone thought they were a good idea. The same goes for window systems, menus and “Save As” dialog boxes. Many other domains of human endeavor may be limited by the total amount of land on the planet’s surface, and harsh realities of human life. But the computing space is one that is ours for the creating. In computer science, inactive whining is not in order. One person can build a complete computer system out of software whose kit of parts - the source code of all the constituent programs – is available on the Internet. So any person on the ‘Net’ is in a position to fix what they don’t like. And we as a race are free to make the Web the place we really want it to be. Those are the challenges that this remarkable art has thrown to us. Humanity’s response to them will define its destiny in the next millennium. It is wise to think about where we would really like to be and how to get there. That is what Michael Dertouzos does in this book.
As a visionary and leader, Michael Dertouzos took as his job not only to lead in the right direction but also to make sure that everyone understood that direction. This included everyone, expert or not. He was a teacher as well as a technologist. His vision was not just one for technology, but for humanity. And he addressed, most importantly, the relationship between the two.
Though, alas, we must speak of Michael in the past tense, his death last summer, while natural, was early and a surprise. This book, which he had just finished, is not of the past. The revolution described in these pages is something in full swing. The urgencies that Michael saw as he wrote apply absolutely to us all now. We don’t have him with us to drive home the points personally, so we will just have to imagine him, as we turn these pages, perhaps on stage at the World Economic Forum gently teasing Bill Gates, or perhaps in jovial but earnest conversation over lunch with his pen and little notepad ready next to his plate.
Everyone who met Michael knows that as a person he connected very directly with others at a raw, visceral level. I first met him in a café in Zurich, Switzerland, at a time when I was looking at possibilities about the future of the World Wide Web. Michael’s approach of putting the good intentions face up on the table firmly and with unilateral commitment was disarming, delightful, and a rock-solid foundation for what became the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), based initially at the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at MIT. In Michael, I found someone committed to computer and communications in service to humanity. I met someone committed to and appreciative of the cultural diversity which makes our world so rich. I found someone who exuded the spirit and confidence to enable those around him to recognize and do what they dreamed of.
This book helps us step back. It is so easy to get caught up in the excitement of the latest technological development, a fantastic Web site or a more dazzling computer display. These things are inherently appealing to the tool-building urge that evolution has given us. We are entranced by the exciting possibilities of the new building blocks. Sometimes, though, it is wise to pause in this headlong creative rush to wonder whether all the things we are weaving together are making any sense in the long term and on a larger scale. Michael was constantly doing this, demanding to know what passion lay behind the surface excitement, and where was the real benefit to humanity. He would keep discussions at LCS focused on the principle that it is not technology, but technology for humanity.
You can read the book to get the full picture from Michael, but I will mention some ways in which this message, that the revolution of the World Wide Web, for example.
The bane of my life is the implication that it broke upon the public consciousness in the mid-1990s and indeed, like a breaking wave lifted us all up, and then dropped us (at least the .com speculators) on the sand again. Before the wave, it was so difficult to explain to people what the Web was all about, during it there was a huge “ah-ha!” and, after it, the thought that it is over, understood. Many people assumed that the Web was, in its plan and in its entirety, whatever particular facet of it they first met. But this is far from true.
I look at computers as improving in three ways – by helping us to communicate better with each other, by helping with the actual processing of date, and by being less of a pain in the process. In none of these areas are we anywhere near the level we can imagine.
As a communication medium, computers provide a mixture of different media. The Web was supposed to have been a collaborative medium, but most of the way it is now used is as a one-way publication medium. The plan was to get to the point in which a group of people could collaborate on a project across the Web, like a family sitting around a table making a photograph album. E-mail coexists with the Web in a friendly but arm’s length existence. (Haven’t you ever wanted to link to an email or reply to a Web page?) Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and the other forms of instant messaging fill the void of instantness, but are poor from multimedia point of view.
At the other end of the scale, we have very patchy results in the area of getting machines to do our “heavy lifting” for us. In general, we are hampered in the world of data by the fact that the data in calendars, address books, and financial accounts and other databases are isolated – each application is an island, unable to benefit from the knowledge held by others. When you manually copy information about a meeting from a Web page into your appointment diary, you are the human servicing the computer just as Michael describes.
We make progress, step by step.
Nowadays, when I have meetings with colleagues at the W3C, we talk on a telephone conference bridge named after the local Zakim bridge. The people on the phone bridge can attend at the same time in a chat room, which parallels the spoken meeting. Zakim, the phone bridge, with bit of hacking by Ralph Swick at LCS, appears as a robot presence in the chat room. Zakim knows who is on the call, and can also help mute noisy lines and dial people into the call. At the same time, he keeps a list of people wanting to speak, and tracks the agenda for the meeting, taking on some of the role of meeting recorder. Zakim also keeps a list of the current conferences and who is on which conference on a virtual Web page. That Web page is in the Semantic Web “RDF” language, designed to be read by other agents.
In the daily life of the Consortium, the domains of different agents are beginning to overlap enough to be useful. The organization chart connects to the list of working groups. The list of working groups connect to the mailing list system, and to the list of documents. The list of documents connects to the access control system, which has lists of groups, which connect to the mailing list system again. Link by link the Semantic Web of data is beginning to form in our organization. We are starting to build agents that will exchange data and be aware of security and privacy. We have such a long way to go but the area is full of tantalizing possibilities. Every few days a new link is put in; a bright idea combines information from here and from there, and provides new insight, new help in some way. The last thing to do is imagine that the information revolution is over.
We have, in computers, a white, infinite canvas….we can make computers do anything we can imagine. That is a mathematical face. Any aspect of the way we use computers, the way computers present themselves to us, is the result of our programming. There are some interesting fundamental constraints on what is possible, which mathematicians make it their job to explore, but within those bounds, we are totally in control. We have no one else to blame. There is no reason that computers have qwerty keyboards, or keyboards at all, except that someone thought they were a good idea. The same goes for window systems, menus and “Save As” dialog boxes. Many other domains of human endeavor may be limited by the total amount of land on the planet’s surface, and harsh realities of human life. But the computing space is one that is ours for the creating. In computer science, inactive whining is not in order. One person can build a complete computer system out of software whose kit of parts - the source code of all the constituent programs – is available on the Internet. So any person on the ‘Net’ is in a position to fix what they don’t like. And we as a race are free to make the Web the place we really want it to be. Those are the challenges that this remarkable art has thrown to us. Humanity’s response to them will define its destiny in the next millennium. It is wise to think about where we would really like to be and how to get there. That is what Michael Dertouzos does in this book.
23 September 2007
"The Unfinished Revolution"
Title: "The Unfinished Revolution"
Author: Michael L. Dertouzos
How to make technology work for us - instead of the other way around
Using a computer should be as easy and productive as driving your car. But today's systems are oblivious to our needs and demand even more attention and work from us as they swell in numbers, complexity, and features.
Michael Dertouzos argues that we must shift the focus of information technology away from machines and back to people. In The Unfinished Revolution, he outlines five key technologies that will help us to do this and offers an exciting vision of how human-centric computers could alter the way we live and work in the Information
Century.
Preface
The Unfinished Revolution sets forth a radically new direction for information technology, and the way it could be used to make computer systems serve people...rather than the other way around.
Fundamental change is overdue. As individuals and organizations everywhere scramble to take advantage of the Web, the Internet, and a myriad of new gadgets, they want to know what they should do. The media, vendors, and pundits respond with advice, trends, possibilities, and opinions in the thousands. Yet the overwhelming outcome of this frenzy is a feeling of profound confusion by ordinary users and specialists alike.
The confusion is justified. Does all this new and exciting technology make us "better off"? Or are we headed toward greater complexity, increased frustration, and a human burden that will grow in proportion to the gadgets and programs that surround us? We certainly can be better off with information technology. But not the way we are headed. Without a fundamentally new approach to computing, the confusion will get worse and the Information Revolution will remain unfinished.
The new approach has been taking shape in my head for more than a decade, although it didn't gel with a name and an action plan until recently. It started with the frustration that I and others felt as we repeatedly tried to harness computers to our purposes, only to discover that we were the ones who ended up under the yoke. The idea became stronger as the complexities of computers increased, as the feature of programs that no one needed multiplied, and as people became increasingly trapped in the use of systems that pretended to change while remaining stagnant and distant from human purposes.
I have called the new approach human-centric computing, and the machines human-centered, to emphasize that from now on, computer systems should focus on our needs and capabilities, instead of forcing us to bow down to their complex, incomprehensible, and mechanistic details. Human-centered computers are not a fantasy. They can be built, right now, with current and emerging technologies. We can even begin with the computers we already have, merely by changing the way we use them. This book lays out the human-centric approach by explaining in everyday language the five basic forces that define it, the ways people will use it, and the impact it could have upon our lives.
What the book does not do is assemble a collage of futuristic vignettes designed to impress through shock. Such scenarios, easy to concoct, are less exciting than what is really likely to happen. Neither do I rehash the faddish mantras to make computers more "intelligent," or more "user-friendly." These are mere restatements of our wish to get out of the mess we are in. They do not show the way! Predicting the future is difficult, but the odds get better when you are trying to build it, rather than guess it. This is the approach that served me well 20 years ago in forecasting the Information Marketplace that is rising fast among us. And it is the approach I am taking now, together with my colleagues at MIT, as we engage in the ambitious pursuit of human-centric systems. It is also the approach increasingly taken by other cutting-edge research institutions and companies around the world as they explore and craft their own visions of the future.
The contributions of many people have influenced my thinking. I am grateful to them and especially to my colleagues at MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. But I do not speak for them and they should not be held responsible for what I say here. The Unfinished Revolution is a declaration of my personal ideas, passions and beliefs about human-centered systems.
I wrote this book for people who use computers, and for the technologies who build them, to offer a new insight about where we should steer the computing juggernaut. I hope the book sets forth a new philosophy for information technology, and provides a manifesto for turning it into reality. I hope it inspires computer users and builders to fuel the torch of human-centric computing with their creative ideas. And I hope it sparks a revolution within the computer revolution.
It's high time we did so!
Michael L. Dertouzos
Weston, Massachusetts
Author: Michael L. Dertouzos
How to make technology work for us - instead of the other way around
Using a computer should be as easy and productive as driving your car. But today's systems are oblivious to our needs and demand even more attention and work from us as they swell in numbers, complexity, and features.
Michael Dertouzos argues that we must shift the focus of information technology away from machines and back to people. In The Unfinished Revolution, he outlines five key technologies that will help us to do this and offers an exciting vision of how human-centric computers could alter the way we live and work in the Information
Century.
Preface
The Unfinished Revolution sets forth a radically new direction for information technology, and the way it could be used to make computer systems serve people...rather than the other way around.
Fundamental change is overdue. As individuals and organizations everywhere scramble to take advantage of the Web, the Internet, and a myriad of new gadgets, they want to know what they should do. The media, vendors, and pundits respond with advice, trends, possibilities, and opinions in the thousands. Yet the overwhelming outcome of this frenzy is a feeling of profound confusion by ordinary users and specialists alike.
The confusion is justified. Does all this new and exciting technology make us "better off"? Or are we headed toward greater complexity, increased frustration, and a human burden that will grow in proportion to the gadgets and programs that surround us? We certainly can be better off with information technology. But not the way we are headed. Without a fundamentally new approach to computing, the confusion will get worse and the Information Revolution will remain unfinished.
The new approach has been taking shape in my head for more than a decade, although it didn't gel with a name and an action plan until recently. It started with the frustration that I and others felt as we repeatedly tried to harness computers to our purposes, only to discover that we were the ones who ended up under the yoke. The idea became stronger as the complexities of computers increased, as the feature of programs that no one needed multiplied, and as people became increasingly trapped in the use of systems that pretended to change while remaining stagnant and distant from human purposes.
I have called the new approach human-centric computing, and the machines human-centered, to emphasize that from now on, computer systems should focus on our needs and capabilities, instead of forcing us to bow down to their complex, incomprehensible, and mechanistic details. Human-centered computers are not a fantasy. They can be built, right now, with current and emerging technologies. We can even begin with the computers we already have, merely by changing the way we use them. This book lays out the human-centric approach by explaining in everyday language the five basic forces that define it, the ways people will use it, and the impact it could have upon our lives.
What the book does not do is assemble a collage of futuristic vignettes designed to impress through shock. Such scenarios, easy to concoct, are less exciting than what is really likely to happen. Neither do I rehash the faddish mantras to make computers more "intelligent," or more "user-friendly." These are mere restatements of our wish to get out of the mess we are in. They do not show the way! Predicting the future is difficult, but the odds get better when you are trying to build it, rather than guess it. This is the approach that served me well 20 years ago in forecasting the Information Marketplace that is rising fast among us. And it is the approach I am taking now, together with my colleagues at MIT, as we engage in the ambitious pursuit of human-centric systems. It is also the approach increasingly taken by other cutting-edge research institutions and companies around the world as they explore and craft their own visions of the future.
The contributions of many people have influenced my thinking. I am grateful to them and especially to my colleagues at MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. But I do not speak for them and they should not be held responsible for what I say here. The Unfinished Revolution is a declaration of my personal ideas, passions and beliefs about human-centered systems.
I wrote this book for people who use computers, and for the technologies who build them, to offer a new insight about where we should steer the computing juggernaut. I hope the book sets forth a new philosophy for information technology, and provides a manifesto for turning it into reality. I hope it inspires computer users and builders to fuel the torch of human-centric computing with their creative ideas. And I hope it sparks a revolution within the computer revolution.
It's high time we did so!
Michael L. Dertouzos
Weston, Massachusetts
What is this blog all about?
Ever since I learnt how to read as a child, reading has been my favorite pastime throughout my adult life.
I read mostly to acquire knowledge, to learn the many things that I do not understand about the world.
There are so many wise people from whom I can learn: in persons, from books and elsewhere.
Now there is the Internet.
"Information overload" is the buzzword these days...and seiving through the piles of information derived from various sources; to keep the useful knowledge and throw away the junk stuff, is time-consuming, tedious and sometimes confusing.
Taking note of important outlines and key points of the things I read has become second nature, a habit I developed since my young days.
How much of the content in a book is relevant and useful? How much of the stuff we have noted down could we remember for instant recall?
If it is only 10% of the content and information from the book which we need, how do we condense the relevant sections of the book for reference purposes?
In a nutshell, this blog is the extended memory storage for excerpts, keypoints and condensed book content which I could update conveniently without the use of pen and paper in the conventional way.
Only a small section of the book in its original context which I find useful will be reproduced on this blog. To read the whole book, please buy it or loan it from the library.
I read mostly to acquire knowledge, to learn the many things that I do not understand about the world.
There are so many wise people from whom I can learn: in persons, from books and elsewhere.
Now there is the Internet.
"Information overload" is the buzzword these days...and seiving through the piles of information derived from various sources; to keep the useful knowledge and throw away the junk stuff, is time-consuming, tedious and sometimes confusing.
Taking note of important outlines and key points of the things I read has become second nature, a habit I developed since my young days.
How much of the content in a book is relevant and useful? How much of the stuff we have noted down could we remember for instant recall?
If it is only 10% of the content and information from the book which we need, how do we condense the relevant sections of the book for reference purposes?
In a nutshell, this blog is the extended memory storage for excerpts, keypoints and condensed book content which I could update conveniently without the use of pen and paper in the conventional way.
Only a small section of the book in its original context which I find useful will be reproduced on this blog. To read the whole book, please buy it or loan it from the library.
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