Software programs for individuals. Oh, maybe when you come across something you think is important while browsing the web you could highlight it and these things would be presented to you occasionally sort of like a “drill” to make sure you don’t forget it, or prime association formation at a later time.
Congratulations, you’ve nearly reinvented spaced repetition! There is a great deal of writing on spaced repetition flashcard systems, so I won’t inflict upon you my own writings; but the Wikipedia article will link you to the main programs (Anki, Mnemosyne, and SuperMemo) and some writeups of the topic. SR is a great technique; I love it dearly.
Or some short-term memory aid that works better than scratch paper.
Well, you could just improve your working memory. Unusually, working memory is plastic enough to be trainable by WM tasks. The WM exercise I’m most familiar with is Dual n-back. I practice it, but while I have noticed improvements, I’m unsure whether they repay the time I’ve put into it; SR systems have proven themselves as far as I’m concerned, but the jury is still out on dual n-back.
Or taking a cutting-edge knowledge representation framework like Novamente’s PLN and trying to enter stuff into it as an “active” note-taking system.
Now that sounds interesting. But looking at this OpenCog link doesn’t give me a good idea as to what PLN might do for note-taking (or really, in general); did you have any use-cases or examples?
No specific use cases or examples, just throwing out ideas. On the one hand it would be cool if the notes one jots down could self-organize somehow, even a little bit. Now OpenCog is supposed by its creators to be a fully general knowledge representation system so maybe it’s possible to use it as a sort of notation (like a probabilistic-logic version of mathematica? or maybe with a natural language front end of some kind? i think Ben Goertzel likes lojban so maybe an intermediate language like that)
Anyway, it’s not really a product spec just one possible sort of way someday to use machines to make people smarter.
(but that was before I realized we were talking about pills to make people stop liking their favorite tv shows, heh)
On the one hand it would be cool if the notes one jots down could self-organize somehow, even a little bit.
While I agree that it it would be cool, anything that doesn’t keep your notes exactly like you left them is likely to be more annoying than productive unless it is very cleverly done. (Remember Microsoft Clippy?) You’d probably need to tag at least some things, like persons and places.
Congratulations, you’ve nearly reinvented spaced repetition! There is a great deal of writing on spaced repetition flashcard systems, so I won’t inflict upon you my own writings; but the Wikipedia article will link you to the main programs (Anki, Mnemosyne, and SuperMemo) and some writeups of the topic. SR is a great technique; I love it dearly.
Well, you could just improve your working memory. Unusually, working memory is plastic enough to be trainable by WM tasks. The WM exercise I’m most familiar with is Dual n-back. I practice it, but while I have noticed improvements, I’m unsure whether they repay the time I’ve put into it; SR systems have proven themselves as far as I’m concerned, but the jury is still out on dual n-back.
Now that sounds interesting. But looking at this OpenCog link doesn’t give me a good idea as to what PLN might do for note-taking (or really, in general); did you have any use-cases or examples?
No specific use cases or examples, just throwing out ideas. On the one hand it would be cool if the notes one jots down could self-organize somehow, even a little bit. Now OpenCog is supposed by its creators to be a fully general knowledge representation system so maybe it’s possible to use it as a sort of notation (like a probabilistic-logic version of mathematica? or maybe with a natural language front end of some kind? i think Ben Goertzel likes lojban so maybe an intermediate language like that)
Anyway, it’s not really a product spec just one possible sort of way someday to use machines to make people smarter.
(but that was before I realized we were talking about pills to make people stop liking their favorite tv shows, heh)
While I agree that it it would be cool, anything that doesn’t keep your notes exactly like you left them is likely to be more annoying than productive unless it is very cleverly done. (Remember Microsoft Clippy?) You’d probably need to tag at least some things, like persons and places.