Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For many years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar,'' this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. -The [Atlantic Monthly] Editor, July 1945This article is reprinted in its entirety, with permission, from The Atlantic Monthly, July, 1945. A condensation was printed by Life Magazine in 1945 illustrations. The article has been reprinted variously since then; it can be found at The Atlantic's own site, at http://www2.theAtlantic.com/ atlantic/atlweb/flashbks/computer/ tech.htm and also at http://www.isg.sfu.ca/~duchier/misc/vbush/.

No abstract

No abstract

Scalable Web Page Entanglement [The human mind] operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. ABSTRACT We present a proxy-based system for augmenting the capabilities of the World Wide Web. Our system adds two-way association links and automatically removes these links when they break, while the existing web features only one-way links and lingering broken links. Several web augmentation systems have been developed in the past that add two-way links. Our key contribution is in terms of link management, which in our system is dynamic and completely automatic. Links between web pages are added and removed according to popular web traversal paths, freeing both page owners and readers from the burden of link creation and maintenance. Links can form between pages that do not link to each other at all, reflecting the fact that readers have associated these pages with each other-we described such pages as entangled. We use variations on common peer-to-peer techniques to build a scalable system out of a dynamic set of proxy peers. Proxy-to-proxy communication takes place entirely over http, ensuring compatibility with existing infrastructures. A working implementation of our system is available at

No abstract