11.24.08
Posted in Politics at 20:29 by Sam
The following is a letter I sent to the Economist via email two days ago:
While the opening statement in your November 8th issue regarding
political color blindness in America may have been a little too
optimistic, Andrew Work’s claims in his letter to the editor (Nov 22
issue) were not well-supported. To say that Britain elected a female
prime minister in 1979 is rather misleading, particularly from an
American perspective. Since Britain elected more Conservative MPs than
Labour MPs in 1979, the leader of the Conservative party, who happened
to be a woman (chosen in 1975 by members of the party, a small
minority of the population of Britain), became Prime Minister. At
least in Britain, a democratically elected woman has led the country
and the government.
This is not the case with Canada. First, the Governor General is not
elected, but appointed by the Queen on the “advice” of the Prime
Minister of Canada. Second, it seems strange to mention her at all
since she certainly isn’t in a position to exercise real power.
Instead of being evidence of color blindness, the Governor General
appears to be a symbol of the symbolic color and gender blindness in
Canada. In any case, with barely half the population of the UK and
slightly less than California, is Canada even relevant?
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06.27.07
Posted in Politics at 8:48 by Sam
Arnold Schwarzenegger recently heralded a new dawn in the American battle against climate change. Last year, the Gubenator signed a 13 page bill setting California emissions targets for 2020. Other western states, particularly Arizona have lined up behind him with equally ambitious targets. Northeastern states are also getting into the act with widespread talk of a Kyoto-style cap and trade scheme. It looks as though forces in America are at last united in this worthy cause. But wait, it’s not so. The traditional foe of change in general and climate change in particular looms on the horizon. The US auto industry, having utterly failed to learn any of the lessons made obvious by the adroit maneuvers of its more astute Japanese rivals, has geared up for the attack. Legions of seasoned attorneys have marched to California to inflict page after page of tortured legalese on the already packed dockets of the golden state’s overburdened judges. Marketing strategists and publicists have sharpened their pens and keyboards, flooding the airwaves and newspapers with horror stories of high prices and lost jobs. If the barons of Detroit could muster this level of energy to design new and better cars, Toyota would never have had a chance to overtake them. Alas, our greatest strengths appear to lie in the fields of argumentation and clever marketing and not so much in the area new and useful of automotive technology.
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05.20.07
Posted in Patent Law at 13:21 by Sam
I actually wrote this letter before the one to Google’s patent site mailbox but accidentally deleted it while upgrading to the latest version of Wordpress. Never blog when you’re tired. The site’s creator (Dr James Ryley) responded and we had a nice little email exchange. I plugged my favorite paper on patent valuation (Valuable Patents by Allison, Lemley, et al) and he mentioned the difficulty inherent in any software project of figuring out how to prioritize new features.
I recently had a chance to use Micropatent’s (now Thomson Scientific) Aureka software. The main useful thing it can do that I can’t seem to do on your site is quickly give citation statistics for a group of patents. Say I have all the patents for a particular assignee, it would be nice to know which are the most significant. One common measure is to see which one has the highest forward citation count. Aureka makes this easy.
Where Aureka falls short is in generating other statistical information. What would be really cool is if we could score a set of patents based on statistics. Better yet would be if users could assign weights to these statistics themselves. Some academic papers provide a list of statistical features of patents correlated with value. Examples are: litigation, opposition proceeding, number of family members (versions of this patent in other countries), forward citation count (number of patents citing this patent), backward citation count (number of patents this patent cites), number of claims, field of technology and number of inventors.
These are just basics though. It gets more complicated since forward citations are inflated for certain fields of technology and naturally go up during the course of a patent’s life. For example, a 15 year old software patent with 50 forward citations is probably less significant than a 3 year old medical device patent with 25. Refinements life normalized forward citation counts (there’s a paper by Hall that describes some arcane sounding statistical methods for doing this) could be added later.
There are services that provide statistical evaluations of patents but they are dreadfully expensive. There are lots of papers on this and the features correlated with value are more or less agreed upon. I’ve done some software programming and while it seems like it would be difficult to develop a product to do this analysis from scratch, it doesn’t seem like it would be tough to build one from something like what you have that’s already laid out most of the groundwork. At least, getting the basics in place (just tallying up the numbers without doing any of the funky statistical modifications) seems feasible. What do you think?
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05.17.07
Posted in Patent Law at 21:15 by Sam
I recently tripped over Google’s patent database. I sent them an email similar to one I sent to freepatentsonline.com, in the hopes of persuading somebody out there to provide some decent software for the statistical evaluation of patents. The response from Google was swift, polite and entirely non-commital.
Naturally this is a project I’d like to contribute to but I wonder how long competitors will last now that Google is in this game. These days, competing with Google is a bit like what competing with Microsoft used to be. Dr. Ryley (of freepatentsonline.com) created a very useful site and, as far as I know, used to be the only one outside a government institution (his site is certainly more useful than any of those) to make a searchable patent database available.
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12.27.06
Posted in Information at 22:17 by Sam
This was banned last year in France and Italy at the request of the Catholic church. I think it’s kinda cute myself. So… what were we saying about those Muhammad cartoons again? Those got published in France didn’t they? Why did this get banned? What was that about free speech (not really the rule in France but that’s beside the point)? Can you spell hypocrisy (in the interests of full disclosure I suppose I should mention that I needed an assist from the spell checker)?
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12.21.06
Posted in Words of Wisdom at 16:34 by Sam
As recently quoted in the Economist:
Obscure authors write only for a few initiates when it would have cost them only a month of toil to render their books clear and comprehensible to all, a month sparing a thousand able minds three arduous years of study.
Still quite relevant for those of us toiling in academic pursuits.
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08.29.06
Posted in Politics at 4:56 by Sam
Greenpeace recently did a study on the toxic waste and recycling habits of many major electronics manufacturers. If you want to buy from environmentally friendly companies, look no further than Nokia and Dell – stay away from Apple and Motorola. The Economist published a nice article on the study in their free section complete with a handy chart:
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08.28.06
Posted in Politics at 11:33 by Sam
From a group of centrist Democrats called the Hamilton Project (25 July 06 – I know, I’m a little behind on my reading):
Austan Goolsbee suggested that 40% of American taxpayers should be exempted from filling in their own tax returns because the Internal Revenue Service already knows what they earn, having demanded records from their employers and banks. This, he said, would save $44 billion in compliance costs over ten years. It would be good for family values, he argued, since people would be able to spend 225m more hours with their loved ones instead of wrestling with incomprehensible forms.
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07.29.06
Posted in Life at 17:30 by Sam
I finally sold my BMW. Before I did, I bought a little Diesel A Class Mercedes. I don’t think these things are available in the states. A very small, practical, utilitarian car. The one I ended up with looks very much like this:
Like many folks these days, I went shopping on the Internet before buying the car. At first I was just looking in my local area. I found a VW Polo that seems decent but it has had engine problems, didn’t come with a guarantee and the interior looks cheap. So I did some more hunting and found a couple cars that seem like incredible deals. The terms of these deals seemed oddly similar. Here’s a summary:
The seller was living in Germany or had a relative living in Germany but recently moved to the UK. Cars are made differently in the UK of course (they drive on the other side of the rode, blah blah blah), so he must get rid of this one fast. The terms seem unbelievably good. The car costs about half what it should and shipping is all on him. The next step is for the potential buyer (me) to put some money with western union or a shipping company just to let him know I’m serious and not wasting his time.
I’m a bit gullible most of the time but this screams scam to me. Similar hustlers are on the prowl looking for sellers. Here is a sample:
Hello,
Am interested in this car but before getting this car I will like to know
or asked some questions about this car and
these are the major thing that I will like to know,why you wish to sell this
car? The present condition of this car?
Your last price for this car? without shipping charges? Can i view any pics
of this car? These are the major questions
that I will like to know about this car before going further to purchase the
it and have a good transaction with you.
More so,I will like you to be more sincere with me and transact with
me,with UTMOST GOOD FAITH.
Hopefully to read.
Mr. Nenim
And another:
On 6/27/06, Anita Cool < kim_llcool@keromail.com> wrote:
Thanks very much for the e-mail and the picture as well as shipping you don’t have to worry because I have a shipping firm that will handle the shipping right from your location to my location, so now this is what we are going to do, as said in my previous e-mail I am ok with the price of $13,500 So I am going to send you a check of $18,000. which is going to cover the cost of the item being bought as well as the shipping cost ok so if the check clears your bank then you are going to send back the excess to my shippers in the uk so if you are very ok with this then get back to me ASAP with the following info such as:
your full name as will appear on the check.
Your contact address.
Your Phone unmber.
pls I will be looking forward to your hearings so that we could
make a deal ok, I will be waiting to hear from you soon.
Best regards.
I responded to the first one with some additional information. I did not include pictures but his follow-on email thanked me for them anyway. Generally these folks don’t speak very good English and want to pay with a cashier’s check. Something similar is outlined
here. I guess people have been doing this sort of thing, with minor variations since at least 2003. It must still be working occasionally since there are a lot of them out there.
One lesson – never publish your email address when selling a car. Deal with your buyers by phone. Most Internet con-artists won’t want to have a phone conversation. Also remember the old adage – when it seems to good to be true, it probably is.
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07.21.06
Posted in Religion at 19:45 by Sam
George Bush has finally done it. He vetoed something. He decided that extended federal funding for stem cell research "crosses a moral boundary". So… letting welfare mothers starve, depriving poor children of education, failing to feed the hungry or shelter the homeless, taking money away from various programs that were helping the poor, bombing hapless Arabs halfway around the world – all these things are A-OK. Scientific research to help save lives… whoa there! We’d better nip that one in the bud. Apparently the President takes his conscience out of whatever remote hideaway it’s usually squirreled away in only on very special and bizarrely chosen occasions.
Our dear leader has put religion back in its accustomed place – like a ton of bricks, the Berlin wall or a really big pile of dirt – thoroughly hindering the progress of science. Those guys who went after Galileo would be so impressed.
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07.14.06
Posted in Politics at 19:08 by Sam
Below is an excerpt of my review of Steven Coll’s marvelous Ghost Wars, recently published by Amazon.
Texas Congressional Representative Charlie Wilson abused his position to impress a series of beauty queens (with exciting names like Miss Sea and Ski and Miss Humble Oil) during tours of the Afghan frontier. He also became an advocate for the mujaheddin in Washington and channeled cash, mostly earmarked for fancy weapons systems, to the CIA’s Afghan budget. Coll had other interesting comments about the CIA’s relationship with Congressmen visiting Afghanistan including the rule passed on from the CIA to Mohammed Yousef – Pakistani Intelligence’s Afghan point man from 1983 to 1987 – "Never use the terms sabotage or assassination when speaking with visiting congressman". In other words, with fighting for freedom, like making laws or sausages – it’s best not to show outsiders the specifics on how things are done.
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07.03.06
Posted in Politics at 21:08 by Sam
As part of a review of Kevin Rushby’s Paradise: A History of the Idea that Rules the World, the Economist quotes Rushby as saying that in the Koran, the word huri (Persian for nymph) may be a Koranic mistranslation of the Aramaic for “white raisin”. In other words, all those fanatical martyrs expecting to spend the afterlife in the company of virgins may be in for an unpleasant surprise. Wouldn’t it be fun to see the look on Mohammed Atta’s face when he arrives in the afterlife expecting his 90 odd virgins and the Prophet Mohammed hands him a bowl of white raisins?
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06.12.06
Posted in Life at 20:52 by Sam
Today I watched the USA get spanked by a country smaller than South Carolina with fewer people than Ohio. At least I had some tasty wheat beer and good company.
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06.07.06
Posted in Politics at 10:00 by Sam
A snippet of a letter to the editor I wrote, published in today’s Stars and Stripes.
You can tell an AFN infomercial by the way it patronizes and belittles the intelligence of the viewer. I feel as though I’m a kid again, watching “GI Joe” and waiting in bored annoyance for the silly moral lesson at the end of the show to finish so I can watch the next cartoon.
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05.22.06
Posted in Politics at 20:24 by Sam
Remember the Valdez? It was the tanker that ran aground in Prince William Sound back in 1989 – spilling 11.1 million gallons of oil. The outcry was so widespread that the US Congress was moved from its usual lethargy to pass meaningful legislation, allowing only double hulled (as opposed to the single hulled type that rupture easily when they run aground) tankers to dock at US ports or travel across US waters. Recently I learned that it took another disaster off the coast of France in 1999, involving the Erika tanker and 3 million gallons of spilled residential fuel oil, to prod the EU into passing similar legislation. I mean similar since the EU only calls for "phasing out" single hulled oil tankers. Wouldn’t want to place any undue burden on those poor, beleaguered oil companies. Isn’t that incredible though? All that publicity from the Valdez prompted action from the US Congress and a republican president but wasn’t enough to wake the EU from its prolonged slumber. Who knows? If it weren’t for the Erika, maybe single-hulled tankers would still be wandering the borders of Europe.
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