…you start to see new titles.
My forthcoming contribution to the patahistorical corpus: The Rodale War. Look for it some months after I get my first advance check.
Cutting Through the Patent Thicket:
I say this as someone who grew up believing in the value of patents. As a teenager, I sat raptly in the U.S. Supreme Court gallery listening to attorneys argue University of Illinois Foundation v. Blonder Tongue Laboratories, a landmark patent-infringement case involving my father’s company. As an inventor, I earned some 70 patents. And as a scientist, I managed research labs generating hundreds of patents a year.
…
SCIENCE OR INVENTION? More quantitatively, I have observed firsthand how easy it is for experts to generate good, but similar, ideas. While at AT&T … in the early 1990s, I sponsored two separate ideation sessions around a potential new market, bringing in 50 experts each time to brainstorm for applications. Both groups generated ideas with real commercial value.
Both groups, however, generated more than 95% of the same ideas in common. They were “obvious” in the fullest sense of the word and would have been commercialized with or without the incentive of a patent. But the Patent Office found them “novel,” and issued AT&T claims by the basketful. I would argue that none of those ideas deserved a patent.
(Via Danny Yee.)
An interesting piece on the President’s attempts to dominate by repeated admonitions of our helplessness, at Factesque:
Only a Traitor Wouldn’t Trust Dear Leader to Keep Us Safe. You’re Not a Traitor Are You?:
Bush is a master at inducing learned helplessness in the electorate. He
uses pessimistic language that creates fear and disables people from
feeling they can solve their problems. In his September 20, 2001, speech
to Congress on the 9/11 attacks, he chose to increase people’s sense of
vulnerability: “Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy
campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen…. I ask you to live your
lives, and hug your children. I know many citizens have fears
tonight…. Be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing
threat.” (Subsequent terror alerts by the FBI, CIA and Department of
Homeland Security have maintained and expanded this fear of unknown,
sinister enemies.)
When will the word “fascism” first be used by a mainstream media outlet, in any context, let alone to describe the United States?
I haven’t heard the word, or variants thereof, for quite a while.
Must’ve fallen out of favor.
Or maybe people don’t remember what it means.
Thus do I link to something that reinforces things previously read and said. Scott Eric Kaufman on psychoanalysis.
Be especially careful to read the dynamics of the comments there. This tension, this wrestling with unresolved issues—what can it mean?
My Lords, I have submitted to you, with the freedom and truth which I think my duty, my sentiments on your present awful situation. I have laid before you the ruin of your power, the disgrace of your reputation, the pollution of your discipline, the contamination of your morals, the complication of calamities, foreign and domestic, that overwhelm your sinking country. Your dearest interests, your own liberties, the Constitution itself totters to the foundation. All this disgraceful danger, this multitude of misery, is the monstrous offspring of this unnatural war. We have been deceived and deluded too long. Let us now stop short. This is the crisis—the only crisis of time and situation, to give us a possibility of escape from the fatal effects of our delusions. But if, in an obstinate and infatuated perseverance in folly, we slavishly echo the peremptory words this day presented to us, nothing can save this devoted country from complete and final ruin. We madly rush into multiplied miseries, and “confusion worse confounded.”
One semester of graduate school is over. I am I suppose about 10% an engineer. A lower-case “p” of the Ph.D., perhaps.
The theme that has tied this first semester together, its golden thread, is experience hurts.
Not the gaining of experience—that is in fact the fun, the deepest pleasure to be gained from an education re-begun. But rather: having experience outside the track expected by one’s instructors is worse than having no experience at all.
The young green student is not expected to ask but why would anybody think to do it that way at all? for she has learned the tacit assumptions of her field in her undergraduate classes [of which I have none]. The real innocent does not rail at the systematic concealment of modern techniques for the sake of tried-and-true primitive ones, or the intentional masking of difficult problems and crucially precarious assumptions [noise? randomness? uncertainty? forget them now; they will only confuse the issue]. Nor at the paucity of crucial (even helpful) insights from other disciplines, from other silos, from far-off weirdos working in other buildings [We do not learn from data. We do not know here the revolution that has come upon statistics in the last 20 years.]. “You will all remember from your 373 classes that…” or “Create an AMPL model (you all know how to run AMPL, right?) that…” are statements of presumptive tracking [Such a shock to an instructor, to know the culture is so very local].
This is the way we do it here cannot be met successfully with This is the way we did it elsewhere. There is no facility for such a thing in higher education.
And: that is a good thing. For what better role is there for a graduate degree, than to make you want to push the System’s buttons right back? How else can it grow, than by instilling rage rather than complacency in its own constituents? Who will come to its aid, if not those who are made most intimately aware of its self-destructive shortcomings?
A professor whose class I did not take said to me the other day, “There are only two ways to learn a subject well: Take a good class in it, or teach a good class in it.”
There are at least two others he missed. One is: build a machine that does it. But that is beyond most of my peers, still, though I think I will be changing that quickly enough.
The other one he missed, well… it’s better demonstrated, I think.
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Uh-Oh:
Banks used to run on ‘bankers’ hours’; now they’re 24/7 operations. Doctors used to golf on Wendesdays; now managed care has ‘rationalized’ the profession, arrogating the resultant profits to itself. What’s so sacred about higher ed? If doctors and bankers couldn’t defend their ways of life, what makes us think professors can?
Go thou academic and read it. And think. And act.
One way or the other.
Watch now an excellent and informative videoplay yet, from What Tian Has Learned.
You should go watch and listen to these over-sub-translated and thus more-friendly-amusing-lich recitations by that unmistakable voice of the thumping, clanging music that ruined my hearing as a youf: the pre-eminent growled-voice artist, Blixa Bargeld.
“Collapsing New Buildings” (which sounds so polite and tidy compared to the actual Deutsch, dunnit?). And DIY. Fun on all levels.
Yippee ya ya. Yippee. Yippee. Yay.
[via Ernie's 3D Pancakes]
Pontification without all the gritty gravitas
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