Strong patent law does not foster innovation, according to a dissertation by Petra Moser, an assistant professor at MIT's Sloan School, as reported in the NY Times. She studied 19th century innovations and patents, and concludes that countries, particularly developing countries, may be better off without strong patent laws. [www.gulker.com – words and pictures from […]

Yesterday MIT reached the first goal of its OpenCo …. Yesterday MIT reached the first goal of its OpenCourseWare project by offering open access to all the materials for 500 MIT courses. This milestone was reached one year after the project launched. (Thanks to New.com.) [Open Access News]

******************************************************************* 1st Int. Workshop on Practical and Scalable Semantic Systems (PSSS) Collocated with 2nd Int. Conf. on the Semantic Web (ISWC) Sanibel Island, Florida, October 20, 2003 [http://psss.semanticweb.org/] ******************************************************************* Below is a list of the research papers that have been accepted for the PSSS workshop. The program committee selected 6 papers as full papers and […]

OECD Global Forum on Information Systems and Network Security. The OECD Global Forum on Information Systems and Network Security: Towards a Global Culture of Security will be held on 13-14 October 2003 in Oslo, Norway. “A large number of non-member economies will be invited.  To reinforce the agreement made in Honolulu to increase co-operation between the […]

A Stroll Through Patent History. Petra Moser, an M.I.T. assitant professor, has examined the historical relationship between patents and innovations and come to some surprising conclusions. By Teresa Riordan. [New York Times: Business] [A blog doesn't need a clever name] —— to me this speaks to issues of the transformation of patents from spurs to […]

obstacle 1. this is what happens when lizzy gets bored: smiley.mov. [a jeweled platypus] —– interesting bit of production

we want your soul. Freeland's We Want Your Soul video is a cynical look at the american dream and keeping up with the joneses. Whether you agree with the point of view, it's still a pretty cool and amusing use of camera effects. (note: large quicktime on that page) [via randomfoo] [MetaFilter] —— this is […]

yeah that seems like the perfect market system to me, sarcasm….. who is taking the profit from these, we need to strip this bare and do a nice supply analysis to see where the money goes.

BlurBuilding. The Blur Building. Now you can spend your day in a literal fog. [MetaFilter]

some of the papers for the recent ICS program at OII have been put up on the web, you have to get the pdf though. I thought that Christine Hine's paper looked very interesting, as did Alesia Montgomery's paper.