The Maddness of Intellectual Property

This is madness. Ideas aren’t things. They’re much more valuable than that. Intellectual property – treating some ideas as if they were in some circumstances things that can be owned and traded – is itself no more than an idea that can be copied, modified and improved. It is this process of freely copying them and changing them that has given us the world of material abundance in which we live. If our ideas of intellectual property are wrong, we must change them, improve them and return them to their original purpose. When intellectual property rules diminish the supply of new ideas, they steal from all of us.

Thanks to Slash.dot I came across this Guardian article on intellectual property, Owning ideas (Andrew Brown, Nov. 19, 2005). The article provides different examples from software to genomics. One of the examples the article provides is Microsoft patenting XML related technology for packaging objects into XML, see Microsoft slammed over XML patent – ZDNet UK News.

Can we patent the idea of intellectual property? Or the process of frivolous patenting of business practices?
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“Shake ‘n Bake” blogging

The recent news from Iraq about the possible misuse of white phosphorus by US troops in Falluja has an interesting bloggin angle. The BBC News story by Paul Reynolds, White phosphorus: weapon on the edge (16 Nov. 2005) mentions how bloggers forced the Pentagon to admit they had used white phosphorus, despite denying it before when RAI first broke the story. Here is a quote:

This line however crumbled when bloggers (whose influence must not be under-estimated these days) ferreted out an article published by the US Army’s Field Artillery Magazine in its issue of March/April this year.

Setting aside the serious issues raised by this revelation, it is interesting how bloggers are taking on the role of public researchers – chasing down contradictions that the media don’t have the time to. Blogs are often presented as opinion, but in this case it was the research that made a difference.

Latent Semantic Analysis

LSA @ CU Boulder is a site at the University of Colorado at Boulder on Latent Semantic Analysis for education. The neat thing is they provide a web interface to different LSA tools. Could these techniques be used in research text analysis? Could we create them as web services?

A site they point to with a list of links to readings, projects and people is Readings in Latent Semantic Analysis, maintained by Lemaire and Dessus.

They also link to a Wired News article on LSA in education that explains how LSA can be used for automatic marking of essays, see Teachers of Tomorrow?.
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ACAATO Report: Student Mobility within Ontario’s Postsecondary Sector

COU – CUCC (College University Consortium Council) has an interesting report dated September 2005 on “Student Mobility within Ontario’s Postsecondary Sector” which looks at students going from university to the colleges and the other way. It seems the number of college students planning to go on to university is going up. “College studentsí goals increasingly include both a diploma and a degree.” (p. 17) Also, the largest percentage of university graduates going to college are in teh social sciences and humanities.

Seven percent of each of social science and humanities graduates was attending college at six months
and just fewer than 5% were attending college two years after graduation. Graduates from the social science or humanities areas made up the majority of those going on to college. Although these areas made up only 36% of surveyed graduates they are responsible for 60% of the graduates who attended college at six months and 50% at two years. (p. 14)

I’m guessing that a number of humanities students go to college to get a job specific diploma once they have a sense of their career goals.

Glion Colloquium

Thanks to the Tomorrow’s Professor Listserv at Stanford I cam across the
” href=”http://www.glion.org/?a=6202&p=1512″>Glion Declaration on “The University at the Millenium”. The declaration of the identified IT and alliances as two opportunities:

Two opportunities ó new alliances and the use of information technology ó now offer the possibility of expanding the range and usefulness of scholarship and providing unprecedented benefits to society.

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Holy Mackarel Smackarel: when multimedia was black and white

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The founders of Mackarel, David Groff and Kevin Steele, have created A Biased History of Interactive Media which has a great chapter on When multimedia was black and white which reminds me (an old HyperCard programmer) of the “good old days.” The chapter is a great little intro to early multimedia on the Mac. They mention a number of then new HyperCard stacks like Robert Winter’s CD Companion to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony leading up to their Mackarel Stack, which I remember. The interface to the chapter is deliberately HyperCard-like.

Chapter 2 is about “When bevelled edges were cool” … remember those days? Shudder?