By now we all should know to never write anything in an email we wouldn't want to read in the newspaper....because there is no eraser on the Internet.
Way back in October 1971, an engineer (who I went to high school with in Upstate New York during the late 1950s) named Ray Tomlinson chose the '@' symbol for email addresses and wrote software to send the first network email. Ray Tomlinson has been called the father of email because he invented the software that allowed messages to be sent between computers. Ray made it possible to swap messages between machines in different locations; between universities, across continents, and oceans. At the time, he was working for Boston-based Bolt, Beranek and Newman, which was helping to develop the forerunner of the modern Internet.
Now, over 40 years later, email messages are a large part of our lives in today's network society. Most of us accumulate huge amounts of data in our lives — including emails, telephone calls and spikes of online writing activity, as measured by daily keystrokes.
Stephen Wolfram, a scientist and entrepreneur, wondered: Could all of that information be compiled into a personal database, then analyzed to tell us something meaningful about our lives? Maybe it could suggest when we tended to be the most creative or productive, along with the circumstances that led up to those moments. Dr. Wolfram runs Wolfram Research, which is deeply steeped in data analysis, along with Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine that provides many answers for Siri, the personal assistant for Apple’s iPhone 4S.
Wolfram wanted to use this analysis to discover, among other trends, patterns in his personal activity that might be linked to bursts of creativity. Yes, he had memories of times when he had been creative, but the details and circumstances were not always crystal clear. He hoped Wolfram Alpha Pro could act as an adjunct to his personal recollections.
The system may someday end up serving as a kind of personal historian, as well as a potential coach for improving work habits and productivity. The data could also be a treasure trove for people writing their autobiographies, or for biographers entrusted with the information.
Source: The New York Times, April 8, 2012
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