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You probably read the news that Amazon is introducing a "Kindle Apps for Tablet Computers" application, joining Kindle for PC, Kindle for iPhone, Kindle for Mac and of course, Kindle for Kindle. Exactly which tablet computers will be supported isn't clear, but Amazon isn't being coy about iPad support, adding "Including the iPad" after every mention of "Tablet Computers."

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So why is this a big deal? Well to some extent offering Kindle books on so many devices alleviates some of the (practical) issues of Amazon's e-book DRM. I can't be the only one who isn't thrilled with the idea of building a library of e-books that can only be read on a single hardware device. Adding Kindle to the iPhone or Windows helps with that, but you lose that nice form factor on those devices (I acknowledge that some people are perfectly content reading e-books on their iPhones, but I feel the screen is too small for real comfort).

If I'm able to read my Kindle titles either on a Kindle or on an iPad or HP Slate or one of the Android tablets; well now I feel like I have real choice. I can choose the hardware that's right for me, and bring my digital library along for the ride.

I'd still prefer no DRM but this at least feels like a step in the right direction. Maybe instead of an iPad I want to wait for the largerWePad, or the smaller, cheaper zenPad; both of these run Android and all indications are that Kindle for Android (or perhaps Kindle for Android Tablet Computers) is coming.

Of course you can turn this argument on it's side. The iPad will have books from Apple's App Store, it'll have Kindle, and it sounds like Barnes & Noble will have an iPad app for it's bookstore as well. Can Borders be far behind? Will the iPad be the ultimate e-reader?

The difference between Kindle Everywhere and the iPad Universal E-reader (as far as I know I made up both those terms; at least I don't think either of the involved companies use them) is that with Kindle Everywhere you can still invest in an actual e-ink device to read all your content on (or choose a single device with a Pixel Qi screen).

Summer is coming and you're not going to be sitting out in the sun reading e-books on an iPad or any other back-lit device (at least not comfortably).

I'd love to see Barnes & Noble and Borders follow Amazon's lead in offering reader software for their e-books on a wide variety of devices. Our content shouldn't be locked to any single device. For e-books to take off, we need content and hardware to become totally uncoupled. Amazon's Kindle Apps for Tablet Computers is, at least, a step in the right direction.

But that's my preference, what about yours? Do you prefer to have hardware that supports multiple formats, or formats that are available on many types of hardware?

Obesity is now as great a threat to quality of life as smoking and creates a similar burden of disease, researchers say.

Over the past 15 years, U.S. patients have been getting heavier and at the same time fewer have been smokers, which has contributed to the shift, Haomiao Jia, PhD, of Columbia University, and Erica I. Lubetkin, MD, MPH, of the City University of New York, reported online in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

"In 2008, the quality-adjusted life years lost due to obesity is slightly higher than the quality-adjusted life years lost due to smoking," Jia told MedPage Today.

"Smoking has a bigger impact on life expectancy," Jia said, but combined with the morbidity data, obesity and smoking "are about the same."

Jia argued that the overall health burden of obesity has increased consistently since 1993, while smoking rates have fallen. So obesity has become "an equal, if not greater, contributor to the burden of disease as smoking."

The two factors have the largest impact on morbidity and mortality in the U.S.

To assess the health burden of these two modifiable risk factors between 1993 and 2008, the researchers looked at data on quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.

QALYs are measurements of health-related quality of life, which allow a patient to respond to questions about his or her own quality of life.

The researchers found that between 1993 and 2008, the proportion of smokers among U.S. adults fell by 18.5%, from 22.7% to 18.5%. But the proportion of obese patients increased 85%, from 14.5% to 26.7%

Over that time, smoking-related QALYs were relatively stable at 0.0438 QALYs lost per population -- even though the percentage of adult smokers has been decreasing since 2002.

This may be due to the "differences in peak prevalence of smoking and differences in susceptibility to smoking-associated conditions among subgroups of the population," the researchers wrote.

In 1993, QALYs lost were much smaller for obesity compared with smoking, with obesity contributing about 0.0204 QALYs lost.

But as a result of the increasing prevalence of obesity, the contribution of obesity-related QALYs lost had increased by 127% in 2008. At that time, obesity resulted in 0.0464 QALYs lost, slightly surpassing smoking.

The researchers also found that smoking had a bigger impact on mortality than morbidity, while obesity had a bigger impact on morbidity.

For smoking, the QALYs lost due to morbidity increased 26% over the time period, but the QALYs lost due to mortality decreased a slight 8.4%.

For obesity, QALYs lost due to morbidity and mortality both increased: by 141% and 112%, respectively.

The researchers said that the increase in the contribution of mortality to QALYs lost from obesity "may result in a decline in future life expectancy."

Obesity may also contribute to rising healthcare costs.

"While smoking has bigger impact on mortality, smokers die at a much younger age," Jia said. "For an obese person, although they [are at an increased risk to] die, they die at an older age," often with high medical bills for chronic medications and expensive treatments.

The study was limited by calculations that might underestimate the total QALYs lost, and by some self-reported data.

Still, Jia said the data suggest better public health efforts are needed to curb the obesity epidemic.

"Obesity rates are getting worse, so we need more public health efforts on obesity," he said.

Just because Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell are way out there on the nerd spectrum, don't ignore what they have to say in their new book, "Total Recall."
The Microsoft researchers obsessively record e-mails, photos, videos, phone calls, health records, financial transactions, Web site visits, and everything else they can in an attempt to electronically compensate for the fallibility of their own biological memories. Before you recoil at the prospect of letting your own life become this digitally augmented, though, consider that it will be whether you want it or not.

Gordon Bell
(Credit: Gordon Bell)"Total Recall," which goes on sale Thursday, is a reasonable and general introduction to the idea that you might want to digitally record much of your life. Chiefly, the book exists to encourage people to take the plunge, but it's also got practical advice about doing so, some warnings about unpleasant possible side effects, and even 10 related start-ups Bell says he'd invest in.
The book is a useful, accessible work from people who've already examined the issue in technical detail. I believe the pair overpromise on the near-term benefits of e-memory and understate some of its difficulties, but they don't try to pretend it'll be universally beneficial.
Bell and Gemmell have real chops in the area. Bell, who started his recording effort in 1998, designed seminal computers for Digital Equipment Corp., established a supercomputing prize in his own name, co-founded the Computer History Museum, and joined Microsoft Research in 1995. Gemmell works on next-generation search and personal information storage, and with Bell and coworker Roger Leuder helped create MyLifeBits software to try to give people a handle on their electronic records. They're the kind of folks who can be found with a Microsoft SenseCam slung around their necks to capture images, sound, and other data as they live their lives.
"We regard it as a memory supplement or surrogate. We're trying to offload biomemories," Bell said. Though plenty of people like to share their lives digitally, the authors see their effort as very private.
So why should the average person listen to them? Because they're right about one thing: all this information likely will be recorded one way or the other as sensors proliferate and digital storage gets ever cheaper and more capacious. It's best to have your own copy--and it's likely it will in fact prove useful.
The authors have high hopes: "higher productivity, more vitality and longer life spans, deeper and wider knowledge of our world and ways to accomplish things in it."

Jim Gemmell
(Credit: Miriam Gemmell)Yeah, right
Still, it's a hard sell.
I doubt most people will embrace what Gemmell and Bell call e-memory with much enthusiasm. Most folks see filing as a necessary evil at best, and e-memory dramatically increases the amount necessary. What file system should you pick for your photos, GPS location logs, energy consumption measurements, and blood pressure records? What backup strategy? What privacy settings? What computer hardware, software, and online services?
I've been stewing over some of these questions for a while--my recent effort to go mostly paperless forced the issue--but my conversation with the authors still was thought-provoking.
History by some definitions began when people started recording things, and the Total Recall era of Bell and Gemmell has the potential to bring as radical a shift in human behavior as the arrival of books.
If this shift is to come to pass, a key factor will be extracting something useful out of all the data you collect. "The root of the problem is to get the computer to first record it and store it and somehow be able to act on it," Bell said.
The obvious mechanism is search, of course, but Gemmell and Bell also advocate wall-hanging screen savers that constantly replay parts of your life in the background. Another idea of theirs got me thinking about things more holistically.
Specifically, there's the idea of correlation: collecting data in one area could help you find or use data in another. For example, a log of your position kept through a GPS system in your phone could help you retrieve a message you knew you sent while on a particular trip. Or in a more sci-fi scenario, your logs of movies and books read, cross-referenced with your heart rate and blood pressure measurements, could help you decide what sorts of movie to watch.
Then there's the idea of prediction. A sufficiently smart system processing your collected data could not just remind you of simple things such as birthdays, but also anticipate more complicated advice--time to get a check-up or spend more time with friends, perhaps.

MyLifeBits can be used to catalog and search personal archives.
(Credit: Dutton Books)
Troubles ahead?
Here's where I see storm clouds on the e-memory horizon, though.
First, if it's easy for me to store everything and perform sophisticated correlation analysis, it's easy for scheming governments or profit-hungry corporations to do the same. With the arrival of online behavior monitoring and omnipresent surveillance cameras, it's harder to find a corner of the world to claim as your own.
One answer from Gemmell and Bell: "Big Brother, meet Little Brother." Your personal records can give you an alibi proving your innocence in some matter. But that's only OK as long as you happen to live someplace where the rule of law has some teeth and the authorities aren't abusing their power.
And if everybody walks around with recording devices running around the clock, the government may be the least of your concerns for privacy. Politicians today are still adapting to the YouTube era when every moment is on the record, but we're headed toward an era when it applies to us all.
Perhaps that will deter crime on the assumption that people behave better when they know they're being watched. But perhaps also some white lies and imperfect memories help us all get along. Can we really handle the unvarnished truth about our friends and coworkers, much less ourselves?
The authors believe it's time to adapt to a world in which truth and honesty are harder to overlook, and that social protocols will adapt perforce. For those moments when you want some Nixonian plausible deniability, perhaps protocols will emerge to hold a conversation that's logged only in people's neurons.
Bell and Gemmell expect new conventions for asking others' permission to record. But if data capture is as easy, ubiquitous, and unobtrusive as "Total Recall" suggests, it looks like it would be wiser to assume everything is being recorded already.
Fragmented records
From a technological standpoint, I worry about data being fragmented. When Bell started his work, he was a fan of centralized data stored on your own hard drives. But now we have the cloud, too--online sites not just for backup but increasingly the central repository of your data held in some service.
Companies such as Yahoo, Facebook, and Google have plenty of incentives to set up services that house precious data such as photos, communications with friends, and documents--but they may not want to share that openly with you or some company that offers e-memory services on your behalf. And even if they do, there are practical barriers aplenty.
Perfectly preserved ones and zeros can nevertheless decay with age, locked in obsolete formats. The researchers advocate periodic backup into "golden" formats such as PDF or JPEG whose widespread use will protect against obsolescence. Ironically, Bell himself illustrates the importance of the problem: the Microsoft Money software he touts for tracking his own financial transactions is being phased out.
Data ownership is another complicated matter. As Bell and Gemmell observe, parents today already electronically monitor their children closely and exhaustively document their lives. I wonder if or when the resulting information should become the child's property.
And in the most sci-fi section of the book, the authors ponder digital immortality, the possibility of conversing with a digital avatar representing the deceased. "How I wish I had even a tenth of my grandfather's life," Bell says--but how much of one's life should belong to one's heirs?
The authors and I aren't the only ones to have pondered the ideas of e-memory and extrapolated into the future. They cite various science fiction books that have bearing on their ideas, for example.
But it was politician and presidential progenitor Vannevar Bush whose "memex" provided a template for the e-memory work in a 1945 essay, in The Atlantic Monthly, "As We May Think." His idea: "A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory."
It's happening
Even though I'm not convinced everybody will eagerly embrace e-memory, I am convinced that it figures centrally in our lives. I have seen the power of Gmail's archive and my own digital photo archive. And as it gets easier to do record everything, we will find a way to make it useful.
Many years ago, I made T-shirt presents for my family that used the highest-resolution scans I could make of some graphics. At the time, I was astounded at how much space each image took up--20MB or more. Over years of hard drive tidying efforts, I considered deleting the files many times, but they had some sentimental value and I put off the decision each time.
Now I'm glad I hung onto them. The T-shirts have all worn out, but I still have the artwork--and 20MB is a piddling amount of storage space. For comparison, each of the thousands of photos I've taken with my present camera today is closer to 30MB.
At the same time, I find myself e-mailing myself notes, recording voice memos, keeping my GPS logs of excursions, and taking snapshots of the signs and maps at trailheads. Without even trying hard, I'm assembling my personal life's digital equivalent of everything from Library of Alexandria to the trash heaps archaeologists delight in excavating.
I'm a ways out there on the nerd spectrum, too. But with ordinary folks carrying camera-enabled smartphones, e-mailing their way through work, and socializing through status updates, brace yourself for e-memory to arrive in your life.