Changes

The driving principle here is that of temporal granularity, derived directly from our very capacity for human memory.  Our minds, generally speaking, maintain a high level of granularity with respect to very recent events, but only a low granularity for events from several years ago.  Moreover, this granularity tends to follow a logarithmic curve, where the past few minutes remain quite clear, the past few hours more blurry, and by last month quite vague.  When we look years into the past, only specifically memorable events stand out in our minds.

The driving principle here is that of temporal granularity, derived directly from our very capacity for human memory.  Our minds, generally speaking, maintain a high level of granularity with respect to very recent events, but only a low granularity for events from several years ago.  Moreover, this granularity tends to follow a logarithmic curve, where the past few minutes remain quite clear, the past few hours more blurry, and by last month quite vague.  When we look years into the past, only specifically memorable events stand out in our minds.

On the laptops the policies are a bit more strict, but the principle remains the same.  With a finite amount of memory, some means of managing what's remembered, or kept, and what's forgotten, or erased must exist.  An intelligent algorithm will assist children in identifying "forgotten" entries.  Taking into account how old an entry is, how many times she's viewed it, how recently she's worked on it, how many hours she's worked on it, how many people she's worked on it with, its tags, and even more forms of automatically generated metadata, the Journal can suggest to her those entries which it feels can be erased.  She will then have the opportunity to review those items prior to their erasure, if she wishes, and can keep any she still feels attached to.

On the laptops the policies are a bit more strict, but the principle remains the same.  With a finite amount of memory, there must exist some means of managing what's remembered, or kept; and what's forgotten, or erased.  An intelligent algorithm will assist children in identifying "forgotten" entries.  Taking into account how old an entry is, how many times she's viewed it, how recently she's worked on it, how many hours she's worked on it, how many people she's worked on it with, its tags, and even more forms of automatically generated metadata, the Journal can suggest to her those entries which it feels can be erased.  She will then have the opportunity to review those items prior to their erasure, if she wishes, and can keep any she still feels attached to.

In a time where gigabytes have become cheap, many of us still manage to fill our hard drives.  Excepting the cases of multimedia collections of audio or video files, much of that space is consumed by files we either don't remember we ever made, or will never open again.  On the laptops, where space is precious, so too will be the objects and entries that remain in the journal years down the road.  The temporary, the experimental, the duplicate, and the unwanted files will naturally fall off the bottom, maintaining a browsable history of those that remain important to the children.

In a time where gigabytes have become cheap, many of us still manage to fill our hard drives.  Excepting the cases of multimedia collections of audio or video files, much of that space is consumed by files we either don't remember we ever made, or will never open again.  On the laptops, where space is precious, so too will be the objects and entries that remain in the journal years down the road.  The temporary, the experimental, the duplicate, and the unwanted files will naturally fall off the bottom, maintaining a browsable history of those that remain important to the children.