Dr. Puline Chen discusses this important issue.

Needless to say our position is clear.

On July 12, 2010 Ellen Lupton wrote about the conflict of legacy artifacts:

"An “heirloom” is an object steeped in family history, handed down from generation to generation: your mother’s wedding dress, your grandma’s espresso cups, your great uncle’s underwear. You can’t buy an heirloom at Pottery Barn or Ikea. It comes via gift, bequest or a heated sibling brawl. But who’s to say you actually want this stale old stuff?

The desire to pass objects on to one’s offspring is part of our longing for immortality. Even folks in the “die broke” crowd, determined to enjoy their remaining assets rather than leave them to the ungrateful grandkids, may secretly hope the family will love and honor their dearest possessions. In a culture of scarcity, useful things are rarely discarded, but in a land of superabundance and incessant newness, inheriting a household packed to the windowsills with books, furniture and memories of drunken holiday infighting can be more burden than blessing."

Total Recall covers this conflict.  Jim and I wrote about the other side--too many have a claim to a single artifact.  To us the issue is clear--get rid of physical stuff and replace it with more accessible and reproducible bits hat you can enjoy more often through a screen saver or videos.  Pass on the artifact while you have control and insure that it goes to someone who will appreciate it. Capture the precious artifact or whatever in gory detail including video, audio recordings, photos or 3 D photos and then share these bits widely with all of those who would have otherwise "fought" over it, or who would have discarded it.

Most players would have been back out on the ice, but Sam had taken the Impact test a couple of years earlier to establish a baseline of normal brain function. Taking the test again revealed evidence of a concussion. “My reaction time is way down”, Sam noted with real surprise and concern. So were a number of other measures.  Instead of getting right back in the game, Sam spent more than a week resting and avoiding stimulation.

The Impact test is a great example of quantitative health, a concept we explore in our chapter on health. A wave is coming of cheaper lab tests, wearable devices, and even in-body devices that will serve up hard data about our bodies.

If Amazon hoped for honest feedback when it started testing the Kindle DX on college campuses last fall, it certainly got its wish; students pulled no punches telling the Seattle Internet giant what they thought of its $489 e-reader. But if Amazon also hoped the Kindle DX would become the next iPhone or iPod on campuses, it failed its first test.

Complaints included slow page flipping, lack of color, and bugs in the bookmarking functions.

Full article

"SAANEN, Switzerland (Reuters Life!) - In a secret bunker deep in the Swiss Alps, European researchers have deposited a "digital genome" that will provide the blueprint for future generations to read data stored using defunct technology.
...scientists carried a time capsule through a labyrinth of tunnels and five security zones to a vault near the slopes of chic ski resort Gstaad.
The sealed box containing the key to unpick defunct digital formats will be locked away for the next quarter of a century behind a 3-1/2 tonne door strong enough to resist nuclear attack at the data storage facility, known as the Swiss Fort Knox.  
"Einstein's notebooks you can take down off the shelf and read them today. Roll forward 50 years and most of Stephen Hawking's notes will likely only be stored digitally and we might not be able to access them all," said the British Library's Adam Farquhar, one of two computer scientists and archivists entrusted with transferring the capsule.
The capsule is the culmination of the four-year "Planets" project, which draws on the expertise of 16 European libraries, archives and research institutions, to preserve the world's digital assets as hardware and software is superseded at a blistering pace. 
 "The time capsule being deposited inside Swiss Fort Knox contains the digital equivalent of the genetic code of different data formats, a 'digital genome'," said the grey-bearded Farquhar, coordinator of the 15 million-euro ($18.49 million) project."

 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64H4GE20100519 for the full story.

Eternos supports backup of Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Picasa Web Albums, Blogs, and RSS feeds. You can see your posts in attractive timelines. One interesting twist they have is dealing with your data when you die: they let you designate trustees that will gain access to your account "upon confirmation you have passed on."

The iPad and the Kindle seem like attractive platforms for e-textbooks. Over time, as the e-textbook evolves into the student memex, look for features like pen input.

Sinykon markets their camera as a "spy pen camera" so I want to make clear that we do NOT advocate spy recording. I'd like to wear a camera like this to capture, say, a walk around Fisherman's wharf in San Francisco. Mike Bukhin has a neat idea for warning people that he is taking pictures (he has his cell phone programmed to regularly snap pictures and upload them to a server). Mike has a pocket sewn into his hoodie with a hole for the camera, but, far from being a surreptitious, he puts a picture of a Camera on it to draw attention to what he is doing.