My Advice to Students: Education Counts

By Bill Gates

Hundreds of students send me e-mail each year asking for advice about education. They want to know what to study, or whether it's OK to drop out of college since that's what I did.

A smaller number of parents send messages, often poi­gnant, seeking guidance for their son or daughter. "How can we steer our child toward success?" they ask.

My basic advice is simple and heartfelt: Get the best edu­cation you can. Take advantage of high school and college. Learn how to learn.

It's true that 1 dropped out of college to start Microsoft, but I was at Harvard for three years before dropping out — and I'd love to have the time to go back. As I've said before, nobody should drop out of college unless they believe they face the opportunity of a lifetime. And even then they should reconsider.

Kathy Cridland, a sixth-grade teacher in Ohio, wrote to say, "Several of my students claim that you never finished high school. Since you are a success, my students perceive that as a reason not to care much about getting a good education."

I finished high school!

The computer industry has lots of people who didn't fin­ish college, but I'm not aware of any success stones that be­gan with somebody dropping out of high school. I actually don't know any high school dropouts, let alone any success­ful ones.

In my company's early years we had a bright part-time programmer who threatened to drop out of high school to work full-time. We told him no.

Quite a few of our people didn't finish college, but we discourage dropping out. Having a diploma certainly helps somebody who is looking to us for a job.

College isn't the only place where information exists. You can learn in a library. But somebody handing you a book doesn't automatically foster learning. You want to learn with other people, ask questions, try out ideas and have a way to test your ability. It usually takes more than just a book.

Education should be broad, although it's fine to have deep interests, too.

In high school there were periods when I was highly fo­cused on writing software, but for most of my high school years I had wide-ranging academic interests. My parents en­couraged this, and I'm grateful that they did.

Although I attended a lot of different kinds of classes in college, I signed up for only one computer class the whole time. I read about all kinds of things.

One parent wrote me that her 15-year-old son "lost him­self in the hole of the computer." He got an A in Web site design, but other grades were sinking, she said.

This boy is making a mistake. High school and college offer you the best chance to learn broadly — math, history, various sciences — and to do projects with other kids that teach you first-hand about group dynamics. It's fine to take a deep interest in computers, dance, language or any other dis­cipline, but not if it jeopardizes breadth.

I think kids sometimes trap themselves into a narrow iden­tity. I wonder if they've just decided, "OK, I'm the person who's good at accounting."

A friend asks, "Hey, what have you been reading?" "Well, I'm reading about accounting."

It's just their sort of self-definition, and it's probably com­fortable for them. But it's unfortunate if it comes at the sacri­fice of learning about the broader world, or learning to work cooperatively.

I'm as impressed as the next person is when an 11-year-old can do calculus. He or she is learning to think logically. But a kid who is reading about Robinson Crusoe is thinking logically, too. It's not completely different.

If you fall into an obsessive pattern in high school, you've got two problems. One is that you're unlikely to change when you go to college. The other is that if you don't get reasonably good grades, it's hard to go to a college that has the highly motivated, capable students who can really help you learn about the world.

In college it's appropriate to think about specialization. Getting real expertise in an area of interest can lead to suc­cess — unless the specialty ends up being a dead end or you're not good at it. Graduate school is one way to get specialized knowledge, although extended college education isn't always a good investment from a purely economic standpoint.

Choosing a specialty isn't something high school students should worry about. They should worry about getting a strong academic start. There's not a perfect correlation between atti­tudes in high school and success in later life, of course.

But it's a real mistake not to take the opportunity to learn a huge range of subjects, to learn to work with people in high school, and to get the grades that will help you get into a good college.

Text 4

British Quality

The British Council held an exhibition and a conference in Moscow on the Best Private Schools of Britain. MN wrote in detail about the activity of the British Council.

It was no accident that the British Council decided to introduce the Rus­sians to Britain's private education sys­tem. An expensive commodity needs world-wide advertising. And education at British public schools (some of them have been rearing the country's elite since the 16^lh century) is traditionally expen­sive. One year at a public school costs a British family $25,000 to $30,000. To compare: In the United States, this sum is enough to cover a year at a prestigious medical school. A year at an Oxford col­lege in Britain costs slightly less than that. A good private school in the New World can set a child's parents back $7,000 a year; in Russia, $12,000.

The British education system is multi­stage. At age five to seven, children re­ceive a primary education; a secondary education, at age seven through 13, and a complete secondary education, leading to GCSE, at 13 to 16. If a teenager wants to go on to a university, they need to re­ceive an advanced secondary education — the so-called A-level education. Schools offering A-level education have career counseling departments where an aspir­ant can apply for a university of their choice. If the university administration is satisfied with the young aspirant's per­formance at school, it can enroll him or her in the first year of university on con­dition that the student achieves a certain grade at the final examinations. Others have to take entrance examinations.

In all, there are approximately 1,300 accredited private, or independent, schools in Britain today. British parents who have decided to give their child a private education can easily get information about a particular private school in the country: tuition terms, accommoda­tion, teaching staff, and prospects for en­tering a university. Unlike Russia, where the only way to find out about educa­tion standards at private schools is from one's own (oftentimes bitter) experience, in Britain major national periodicals, such as The Times and The Daily Tele­graph, regularly publish private school ratings for parents. Eton is the most pres­tigious school in the country, famous for its broad international mix of students: It has seen children and grandchildren of many state leaders — from grandchil­dren of Queen Elizabeth to Boris Yeltsin's grandson. Eton stands apart from other public schools as having more lenient discipline.

Russian parents who imagine that big money guarantees teachers and guidance counselors will pamper their offspring are surprised to learn about the Spartan at­mosphere of these educational establish­ments. It was not until a decade ago that corporal punishment was abolished at British public schools. Not all schools provide a separate room for every student. This is a matter of principle for the Brit­ish public school: A student should get accustomed to always being in public. At the same time a teenager is supposed to be as neat and self-possessed as possible. Rules at certain schools with old traditions require teenagers to wear a fresh flower in the buttonhole every morning.

No wonder the British themselves pre­fer to send their children to private schools in other countries, which espouse milder pedagogical principles: Swiss closed private schools, which make stu­dents fluent in German and French, are especially popular with British parents. The offspring of well-to-do Britons often complete their secondary education at Swiss boarding schools, where they are treated a little more kindly than at Brit­ish public schools. Recently Russians have been taking an interest in Switzer­land, but experts warn that education standards at that country's private schools are generally lower than in Britain.

For all the difference of outlook, Russian and British parents are very similar in one respect: They are willing to pay for a prestigious education. Britain's strict public schools with high academic stan­dards are popular not only with the Rus­sian president's family but also with those parents who are ready to deny themselves some creature comforts in order to send their child to study in Brit­ain. A young Russian can cross the En­glish Channel with any command of English (although different schools set their own standards for admission). As a rule, the atmosphere of a private board­ing school, where students communicate only with each other and with their teach­ers, is conducive to rapid progress in En­glish. Private school leavers have excel­lent chances of entering the country's most prestigious universities.

True, speaking at The Best Schools of Great Britain conference, Nadezhda Frolova, an education projects expert with the British Council, noted: If parents want to see their child a physicist or mathematician, there is no point in send­ing them to Britain. The Russian school of exact sciences does a better job teach­ing kids than its British counterpart. As for humanities, British universities are traditionally renowned for their excel­lence in the history of arts and classical languages — Latin and Ancient Greek. Fu­ture economists will find it especially ex­citing to study in Britain. Local schools strike the right balance between theory and practice while Russian schools of economics tend to err on the side of the­oretical training. And of course the world's best school, the London School of Economics, is in Britain, too.

Или уметь?

Text 5

Письма с Потомака

1. То, что американские студенты на старших курсах превосходят наших – бред. Половина нашего физтеховского курса уже сидит в США. Они говорят обратное. Да и американ­цев-то с каждым годом все меньше и меньше становится в их лабораториях, все больше китайцев, индусов, русских. А школьное образование у них нулевое.

2. Просто смешно читать про качество нашего (особенно школьного) образования. Органическая химия, атом­ная физика, общая биология... А вы задумывались над тем, какую долю программы среднестатистический школьник действительно пони­мает? Что до советского образова­ния, то о его характере красноречиво говорит хотя бы количество безыни­циативных, совершенно не приспо­собленных к жизни сограждан. И это повод для гордости?

3. Не надо думать, что средний советско-российский школьник – дурень. Нормально все они вос­принимают. Думаю, что мнение Дж. Сороса о том, что советская систе­ма образования является одной из лучших в мире, является для Вас значимым. Я уверен, что если ини­циативных и продвинутых амери­канцев поместить в условия совре­менной российской провинции, с то­тальным разрушением всего и вся, они бы протянули ноги через неде­лю-другую.

Text 6

Знать или уметь?

Мне не раз приходилось участвовать в дискуссиях о качестве образования в Америке и в России. После десяти лет работы в МГУ я затем столько же преподавал в университетах США. При этом я окончил обычную московскую школу, а моя жена –обычную американскую, в такой же школе учатся и наши дети. Меня постоянно удивляет, как они (кстати сказать, круглые отличники) готовят домашнее задание. Полчаса с учебниками, а все остальное вре­мя они работают над своими творческими проектами. Темы – самые не­вероятные: от доклада о быте узников Бухенвальда или кухне египетских фараонов до написания юмористического рассказа из жизни овощей в холодильнике или строительства миниатюрных садов Семирамиды. Про­екты задаются по разным предметам, и на их подготовку дается от не­скольких дней до двух-трех месяцев. Поэтому, как правило, американ­ский школьник работает над несколькими проектами сразу и учится, та­ким образом, определять приоритеты и распределять свое время.

Когда я пишу эти заметки, моя 14-летняя дочь с двумя подружками готовит доклад-представление об истории итальянской мафии. Ее следу­ющее домашнее задание – сделать серию черно-белых фотографий, где была бы видна «игра теней», и произвести расчеты оптимальных траек­торий прыжка с трамплина для прыгунов разного веса и роста. А 10-лет­няя последние дни активно изучает историю мировой цензуры и судьбу запрещенных книг. Она только что закончила монтировать свой первый выпуск телевизионных новостей, где исполняла все роли – диктора, про­дюсера, журналиста, художника, оператора, автора текстов. На следую­щей неделе у нее доклад о различных способах измерения времени, и она целыми днями конструирует то водяные, то солнечные, то песочные часы.

Поскольку все в классе получают (обычно придумывают сами, но из области, предложенной учителем) разные темы для проектов, то уроки проходят нескучно. Школьник должен, как правило, самостоятельно оп­ределить источники информации. Найти и взять, если надо, интервью у экспертов. Собрать базу данных. Решить «материально-технические про­блемы», например, обеспечить фотоаппарат, видеокамеру, костюмы, не­обходимые детали. Конечно, это оборачивается головной болью для ро­дителей – постоянно надо что-то покупать, возить детей в библиотеку, в музеи, театры или в парк для фотосъемок и т.д. Однако и польза от тако­го рода «проектов» для ребенка очевидна.

Вырабатывается самостоятельность мышления и его комплексность, индивидуальная ответственность, умение отделять главное от второсте­пенного, находить и осмысливать информацию и т.д. Во главе всего – свобода творчества. Никакого заучивания «от сих до сих» нет и в поми­не. К тому же в большинстве случаев все это делается с увлечением и похоже на игру.

Минусы есть, конечно, и другие. Гораздо меньше, чем в России, вни­мания и сил уделяется так называемым базовым предметам. Не остается времени на зубрежку, без которой в учебе не обойтись, например, при изучении иностранного языка или истории. «Зачем мне это знать на па­мять, если за несколько секунд я могу легко найти эту информацию», – скажет типичный школьник США. Поэтому объем знаний, с которыми американец выходит после 11-го класса своей школы, заметно меньше, чем у его российского одногодка. Тот запросто назовет вам кучу истори­ческих дат, рек в Африке, элементов таблицы Менделеева и спутников Марса.

Я давно обратил внимание, что если в одну группу на первых курсах университетов попадают вместе американские и российские студенты, то выпускники школ США выглядят крайне бледно на нашем фоне. При ус­ловии, конечно, что мы способны выразить свои мысли на понимаемом английском. Притихшие американцы с завистью наблюдают за москвича­ми или петербуржцами, которые легко цитируют Достоевского и Сартра, сразу показывают на карте Новую Каледонию, без запинки называют столицы Ботсваны или Габона и легко делят в уме.

Так продолжается примерно до третьего курса, потом ситуация начи­нает меняться. По мере того как от студента все больше требуется не за­помнить и повторить, а дать критический анализ, сделать вывод, найти выход, предложить альтернативу и т.д., американцы, как правило, начи­нают стремительно обгонять россиян. Это особенно заметно на старших курсах или в аспирантуре. Конечно, существует множество исключений из этого правила, да и проявляется оно неравномерно в разных областях знаний. Но в целом я убедился, что 25-28-летний американец превосхо­дит своего российского сверстника по умению мыслить нестандартно, ду­мать не только творчески и критически, но также самостоятельно и прак­тически. Нехватка знаний у него компенсируется умением их находить, недостаточность зубрежки – раскрепощенностью мысли. Редкий амери­канец скажет то, что можно услышать от почти любого из нас: «И зачем я только убил столько времени и нервов на заучивание физики (химии, ис­тории, ботаники и т.д.), ведь ни разу в жизни мне не пришлось применить эти знания!» По его мнению, это просто не практично. Он образован, ес­ли хотите, «вглубь», а не «вширь».

Российская система направлена на воспитание интеллигентного чело­века, американская – на подготовку высококлассного специалиста. Рос­сийская школа упирает на важность знаний, американская – на важность их поиска. Российское образование, как правило, кончается выдачей ди­плома, американское с этого только начинается.

Американцы считают русских очень умной нацией, но не могут по­нять, почему мы не применим наш ум для обустройства собственной жизни и страны. Как это может быть – «Горе от ума?» Почему у нас ин­женеры получают меньше официантов, а люди с нестандартным мышле­нием вызывают отторжение? Мы же считаем американцев, мягко говоря, не самыми умными, но не можем объяснить, почему именно они изобре­тают телефоны и компьютеры, получают самое большое число Нобелев­ских премий, совершают революции то в одной, то в другой области зна­ний.

А также причину того, почему именно в США ежегодно приезжают сотни тысяч студентов со всего мира, чтобы за большие деньги получить здесь образование.

Дискуссии о том, где образование лучше, непродуктивны. Надо взять самое ценное из американского опыта, сохранив при этом главное из своего. В общем-то именно в этом и есть смысл образования.

UNIT 6
PEOPLE AND PROGRESS

Text 1

A High-Tech Home Front

At the airports, the much-maligned minimum-wage screeners confiscated nail clippers and corkscrews while cops and soldiers patrolled the corridors. Lines formed at the borders, traffic slowed on the highways, and bridges and tunnel approaches were jammed as agents searched trucks for possible explosives. Even sporting events were transformed. At the Boston College-Naval Academy football game the 12 metal detectors acted as bottlenecks: despite requests to appear two hours before game time, only a third of the 30,064 fans were seated by kickoff. And a tradition of smuggling in noisemakers ended at Mississippi State University when Davis Wade Stadium was declared a strict no-cowbell zone.

Thus began the epic attempt to establish a homeland defense. Mostly people reacted to delays and inconveniences with patience, or even gratitude. But how long before the grumbling begins – or people stay at home to avoid the hassles? That is only one of the many challenges for new homeland security czar Tom Ridge.

Inevitably, in its efforts to stave off terror, America will turn to a familiar friend, one it has long regarded as a panacea: technology. A host of sophisticated devices and software programs are being enlisted in the nation's defense. Some of them will be quite visible, and presumably reassuring to a jittery population. Others will grind away in stealth, at least until someone is pulled into an interrogation room on the basis of an obscure database link. Though adopting many of these schemes will be costly – in cash and, in some cases, privacy – they offer the irresistible promise of higher security without oppressive inconvenience. The most pressing problem is aviation, as President George W. Bush implicitly acknowledged when he introduced new security measures last Thursday while standing on the tarmac at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. They centered on government supervision of checkers and a range of other schemes, including armed marshals on planes and toughened cockpit doors. But new, more sensitive gizmos can also speed and improve the security process. In the foreseeable future, carry-on baggage will be checked with dedicated bomb-detection devices or 3-D scanners. Passengers may also be virtually frisked with is “almost like Superman’s X-ray vision, where you can look through the person’s clothes and see what they’re carrying,” says Harry Martz, of the Lawrence Liver-more Laboratory. Airports have been reluctant to adopt the system because of a sensitive issue: as Martz puts it, "it is anatomically correct, and pretty revealing." But after the tragedy, Ralph Sheridan, CEO of the company that makes the Backscatter-based BodySearch ma-chine, found himself speaking to a newly receptive government audience in Washington.

New machines will also be sniffing our highways and borders. Ancore, a Santa Clara, Calif., company, uses a technology called Pulsed Fast Neutron Analysis to enable handlers to inspect marine cargo containers, trucks, freight trains and autos. Vehicles pass through the inspection device as if they were going through a carwash and are scanned for all known commercial and military explosives. Cost? Up to $1.5 million a pop.

On streets and throughout indoor public spaces, expect even more ubiquitous security cameras. Techno-optimists believe they can merge these with face-recognition technology that was used in the 2001 Super Bowl to scan fans for the kissers of known disrupters – and was also used by Tampa, Fla., police to see whether they could cut the crime rate in the city's entertainment district by spotting known criminals among pedestrians. "It scans 10 to 15 faces a second and matches them against a database of a million people in less than a second," boasts Dr. Joseph Atick of his Visi­onics system, which he calls "human ID at a distance." But some scientists think the technology is overhyped. "It’s easily fooled," says Steven Block, a Stanford professor who consults with the Defense Department. "Faces change all the time."

More reliable biometric indications include retina scans, DNA and good old fingerprints. These markers will be essential in preventing identity fraud by terrorists. They will commonly be implemented on smart cards, plastic badges with chips and hard-to-forge information that authenticates the holder. Before the attack, the smart-card movement "was already on fast-forward," says Paul Beverly, VP of smart cards at SchlumbergerSema. Now smart-card systems arc in demand to make sure airline employees and skyscraper workers are who they say they are.

The ultimate smart card would be a mandatory national ID, a long-debated concept that popped back into the news last week when Oracle CEO Larry Ellison offered to provide free software for such a system. What would be on it? At a minimum, a photo of the hearer (digitally "signed" so it could not be replaced) and a biometric identifier like a fingerprint. An onboard chip would carry information about the cardholder, a concept that disturbs privacy advocates, who fear that the cards would feed massive databases that could be used to track any transaction that involved a swipe of the card.

In any case, computer databases are destined to become a prime component of homeland defense. Some longtime advocates of pooling information residing in various government computers – another concept agita to privacy minders – see the hijackings as the trigger for such action. "Ideally we can combine the information of the INS, CIA, FBI and other agencies and get answers in real time,” says Mark Hurd, president of NCR.

Once databases merge, the really interesting software kicks in: "data-mining" programs that can dig up needles in gargantuan data haystacks. The same technology now used commercially to spot credit-card fraud has already been converted to locate money launderers and, one hopes, will unearth the digital tracks of terrorists. If Attorney General John Ashcroft gets his way and is permitted to perform warrantless scans of e-mail headers and other evidence of peoples Internet activities, such information may be mined as well. Companies like HNC – which makes software that "learns" how to spot money launderers and bioterror microbes – have shifted into overdrive since the terrorist attack. HNC's programs are an example of "neural nets," an emergent learning technique that operates like an organic brain; through the use of feedback, the software makes connections that enable it to discover otherwise imperceptible patterns. "We hope we will be able to save lives with this," says HNC exec Joseph Sirosh.

Finally, some in the tech community are suggesting that the best homeland defense of all would involve decentralizing population centers in order to deny terrorists "soft targets" where massive casualties can come from a single strike. Though digital teleconferencing rose dramatically after the Twin Towers fell, the technology still can't provide the benefits of physical proximity. But some believe that eventually we'll have the tools to replace not only long trips but the experience of working together in a central location. "Before this event we were already moving toward full emergent virtual reality," says author and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil. "Images will be sent directly to our glasses or contact lenses, straight to our retinas. Well be online all the time." Kurzweil believes that as this technology gets even better, mapping fake reality directly onto our neurons so our brains can't tell the difference, we'll be able to get all the benefits of living in dense population centers from our nests in exburbs or beyond. "The need for cities will dissipate," he says.

Even that will not assure total safety. If we've learned anything from the horrible events of Sept.11, it's that we are facing an enemy that compensates for its relative lack of power by identifying our vulnerabilities – and adjusting for them. Well-prepared evil-doers will take the measure of our most sophisticated technologies and try to route their attacks around them. "Yes, we've sent a man to the moon," says Edward Tenner, author of "Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences." "But the moon did not take evasive action."

Text 2

The Next WEB

Whatever else 1955 is remembered for, it boasts two notable birthdays. That June, Timothy J. Berners-Lee popped into the world in London, and a few months later, William H. Gates III opened his eyes in Seattle. Gates went on to become the richest person on earth as head of Microsoft Corp. Tim Berners-Lee might be giving Gates a run for the money, but he passed up his shot at fabulous wealth-intentionally – in 1990. That's when he decided not to patent the technology used to create the most important software innovation in the final decade of the 20th century: the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee wanted to make the world a richer place, not amass personal wealth. So he gave his brainchild to us all.

Now, the idealistic father of the Web plans an even grander gift: a next-generation Web that almost certainly will rank as the most important software of this decade. Berners-Lee regards to-day's Web as a rebellious adolescent that can never fulfill his original expectations. By 2005, he hopes to begin replacing it with the Semantic Web – a smart network that will finally understand human languages and make computers virtually as easy to work with as other humans.

This new project is a collaborative effort of hundreds of minds, with Berners-Lee as maestro. The ultimate goal: to turn the Web into a gigantic brain. Every computer connected to the Internet would have access to all the knowledge that humankind has accumulated in science, business, and the arts since we began painting the walls of caves 30,000 years ago. This racial memory would be a constant source of inspiration for dreaming sublime dreams, boosting human creativity, and solving previously intractable problems. Online commerce chores and Web services would be handled by software modules that snap together like toy Lego blocks. "We expect the Semantic Web to be as big a revolution as the original Web itself," says Richard Hayes-Roth, Hewlett-Packard Co.'s chief technology officer for software.

To get there, though, Berners-Lee must navigate some very muddy waters. Development of the Semantic Web is being funded mainly by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which he heads. Founded in 1994 and based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the W3C is the guardian of Web technology and standards. Its budget relies heavily on membership dues from more than 400 companies. And while making money may not be a primary motivator for Berners-Lee, it's what business is all about. Conflicts, in short, were inevitable – and not just centering around Berners-Lee. Indeed, mediating the inevitable clashes among W3C's hundreds of companies, each with its own agenda, will be the acid test of Berners-Lee's leadership.

A particularly thorny issue cropped up last August. A W3C committee of 13 members, including IBM and Microsoft, proposed installing tollbooths on the Information. Highway by allowing patented software to be included in W3C-approved standards. The committee reasoned that as online offerings grow more sophisticated, the developers of software for handling advanced Web services, such as supply-chain management and collaborative engineering, should be permitted to collect royalties on their investments. But Berners-Lee is philosophically opposed to standards that would impose fees, and many other W3C members, such as the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, also denounced the notion. "Things have calmed down a bit," says Robert S. Sutor, IBM'S director of e-business standards, and the committee is now rethinking its stance. Berners-Lee says the mood has now shifted "strongly toward a royalty-free position."

Meanwhile, the W3C is taking heat on other fronts. Critics say the organization is moving too slowly on developing standards to ensure that different Web-service offerings can work together. Business sees major revenue growth from better tools that can deal with complicated travel arrangements, say, or deliver new entertainment options. But companies are reluctant to invest in developing such software until big corporations are on the same page. What good would it do, for example, to create a program under Microsoft's Web-services initiative, dubbed .Net, if it couldn't link up with a related program written in Java for Sun Microsystems Inc.'s counterpart? Or if a computer-aided design program at Boeing Corp. were unable to talk to the company's engineering or manufacturing software?

A W3C draft specification aimed at harmonizing Web services vices was published in January, 2001, "but the W3C then sat on its hands for a whole year" complains Uttam M. Narsu, an analyst at Giga Information Group. Not until late January did the W3C organize several working groups to tackle standards for Web services. "My sense is that [W3C staffers] are too visionary," Narsu says. "They're devoting too much effort to the Semantic Web, believing it will change the world yet again, and not enough effort to less sexy things that are important to business in the near term."

The Semantic Web is certainly sexy. "As envisioned by Berners-Lee, it would understand not only the meaning of words and concepts but also the logical relationships among them. That has awesome potential. Most knowledge is built on two pillars: semantics and mathematics. In number-crunching, computers already outclass people. Machines that are equally adroit at dealing with language and reason won't just help people uncover new insights; they could blaze new trails on their own.

Even with a fairly crude version of this future Web, mining online repositories for nuggets of knowledge would no longer force people to wade through screen after screen of extraneous data. Instead, computers would dispatch intelligent agents, or software messengers, to explore Web sites by the thousands and logically sift out just what's relevant. That alone would provide a major boost in productivity at work and at home. But there's far more.

Software agents could also take on many routine business chores, such as helping manufacturers find and negotiate with lowest-cost parts suppliers and handling help-desk questions. The Semantic Web would also be a bottomless trove of eureka insights. Most inventions and scientific breakthroughs, including today's Web, spring from novel combinations of existing knowledge. The Semantic Web would make it possible to evaluate more combinations overnight than a person could juggle in a lifetime. "A lot of scientific research is now interdisciplinary, like global climate change, and the scientists need to talk to each other," says Chaitanya Baru, a data-mining expert at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. "But they use different jargon."

Sure, scientists and other people can post ideas on the Web today for others to read. But with machines doing the reading and translating jargon terms, related ideas from millions of Web pages could be distilled and summarized. That will lift the ability to assess and integrate information to new heights.

As a result, Berners-Lee envisions a new age of enlightenment. The Semantic Web, he predicts, "will help more people become more intuitive as well as more analytical. It will foster global collaborations among people with diverse cultural perspectives, so we have a better chance of finding the right solutions to the really big issues – like the environment and climate warming." In short, it will change the world even more than his original creation.

The capital-Q question is: Can he pull it off? There's no shortage of doubters. Still, most people who know the reclusive Berners-Lee are optimistic. "Tim has a gift for seeing the future and making it happen," says John It. Patrick, a retired IBM senior exec who helped found the W3C. Eric E. Schmidt, formerly of Sun and now chairman of search-engine innovator Google Inc., says Berners-Lee would be a shoo-in for a Nobel prize - if Nobel were given in computer science. And Larry L. Smarr, director of the California Institute of Telecommunications & Information Technology at the University of California at San Diego, predicts the Semantic Web will cast Berners-Lee as "an historic-level figure."

What impresses those elder statesmen of computing is Berners-Lee's leadership track record. For a somewhat shy software nerd, he has demonstrated a surprising flair for diplomacy, combined with bulldog tenacity. In the midst of the dot-com bust two years ago, Berners-Lee persuaded the W3C's hard-nosed denizens of commerce to begin developing the Semantic Web. And before that, in 1998, he persuaded them to approve extensible markup language (XML), an important new Web lingo. "Tim did a great job shepherding XML through the W3C," notes Smarr.

Indeed, the evolution of XML may be a useful foretaste of what's in store for the Berners-Lee's new vision. In the late 1990s, this language was constructed to help computers identify different types of data on the Web. "When we started work on XML, it was considered pretty esoteric," recalls Sutor of IBM. "But now it's the underpinnings of everything we're doing in e-business." Ditto to for hundreds of others, including the 300 companies already ready using XML software from Open Applications Group Inc. OAGI predicts that number will double this year.

Berners-Lee worked tirelessly to win support for XML because it's a quantum leap beyond today's witless hypertext markup language (HTML) – and it's the cornerstone of the Semantic Web. HTML is the language that Berners-Lee concocted while on a fellowship as a database engineer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. But the language merely specifies the appearance of a Web page: what colors go where, which type sizes to use, and where to put graphic elements. To a Web browser, or most other computer programs, these words and numbers are just squiggles of gibberish. Without some kind of clue, computers parsing a Web page can't determine if "buy" is a noun or a verb, or whether "20031" is a Zip Code, a price, or the number of orders placed last month.

In contrast, XML tags imbue the Web with meaning. Examples might be such labels as <patient ID>, <drug name> and <known interaction> for medical records. The "name" tag would have links to relevant sections of online literature, also coded with XML, and "interaction" would point to other drugs that interfere with the medication. Then, when a doctor bats out a prescription on a computer, a software agent could verify that the drug is appropriate for the diagnosis, check the patient's records to see what other medicines the person is taking, and determine whether any of them is likely to interfere with the new prescription. A group of university and industrial researchers is already working on such a scheme with the Veterans Administration and the National Library of Medicine.

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What is the Semantic WEB?

As Tim Berners-Lee is the first to acknowledge, today’s World Wide Web can be difficult place to get things done. Your search engine can’t tell the difference between a Zip Code and phone number. To a computer perusing a travel site, a departure time of “09:05A” could just as easily mean 09.05 Australian dollars. On the Semantic Web, words will be tagged in a language called XML so computers can tell what they mean. And smart software programs called “agents” will be able to grasp both the meaning context.

Jane is planning a vacation in Fiji, and – thanks to the Semantic Web – her computer will make all the necessary arrangements. Her travel agent, built entirely from software code, will explore the Web, gather all the relevant information about airline schedules, condominium prices, and the merits of the different beaches, and return with Jane's digital tickets in hand.

The agent's first stop is a virtual library, where he learns the terms and definitions used by airlines, ships, real estate agents, and car-rental services. Each industry uses its own definitions, written in a language called XML. Once he knows the "tags" for concepts such as <arrival time>, he can find the info Jane needs.

Armed with his semantic data, Jane's agent is now ready to negotiate with the software reps on various airline Web sites. In addition to learning about fares and flight schedules, he picks up tidbits about alternative travel modes, such as cruise ships.

After boning up on the various travel alternatives, the agent heads back to the library to read up on the semantics that describe condo rentals. Then he zips off to the Web sites of real estate agents handling properties on Fiji, including resort chains and time-shares. Because Jane's request included the words "house" and "condo," he knows to ignore "any hotel offerings that don't include kitchens.

What emerges are a dozen candidate flights and scores of lodging alternatives. These can be juggled to yield thousands of combinations. Jane doesn't have the patience or time to explore them all – but the agent does. In a wink, he ranks all the possibilities based on priorities, such as maximum time spent on the beach. He picks five alternatives to show Jane.