It is worth your time to review "SEC. 7. PREISSUANCE SUBMISSIONS BY THIRD PARTIES" (p. 71 of http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112s23es/pdf/BILLS-112s23es.pdf). Specifically, the bill passed by the Senate permits third-party submission of prior art claims, which should help with the prior art problem. Of course, this cuts both ways in that inventors also will have to be diligent themselves.
You can fund the program by backing up your votes with cash. The more you pay, the higher up the list a nominee moves. How much would you pay to get rid of that guy who gets in front of you at the coffee shop and orders ever-so-slightly different hazelnut smackuccinos for himself and his 67 co-workers? And then pays in pennies? I swear that something like this once happened to me in Cincinnati.
At least two of the journals in which my work has been published, Journal of Animal Science (jas.fass.org) and Journal of Dairy Science (jds.fass.org) require that the authors include 100-word interpretative summaries that are peer reviewed. Those summaries are supposed to be written so that they can be read and understood by the proverbial main in the street. The value of the summaries may be related to the fact that they are published in journals dedicated to agricultural science, and that USDA and other agencies that fund much of this research are very interested in technology transfer from labs to the field. Such motivations may not exist or be as strong in, say, a more abstract mathematical discipline.
It took ten years, but I can finally post on a Slashdot story with some degree of authority. I have a PhD in animal breeding and genetics and work actively in the area. Also note that IANAL. (Disclaimer: This post represents my opinions only, not those of my employer, the US Department of Agriculture.)
As noted up-thread, this patent was filed for years ago. We discussed it quite a bit around the office. Assuming a sane world in which there is a competent patent examination process most of the claims in the patent will be thrown out on prior art, and in many cases an innovative step is lacking. Note that the patent is species-specific. What does that tell us? It tells us that Monsanto (tm) was aware of prior art in other species but believed the PTO could be convinced that moving from cows or chickens to pigs is a novel step that is non-obvious to a practitioner skilled in the art. I believe that this application has gone nowhere, and that the IP was sold off, maybe to PIC or Newsham.
This is slimy, unpleasant stuff, but I am cautiously optimistic that any patent granted will be so narrow in scope as to not affect most of us consumers. Genetic evaluation programs for dairy cattle are now using high-density SNP arrays to improve predictions, and there are a number of nasty patent applications floating around out there, and the PTO may get some of them wrong.
That sounds good on the surface, but there are plenty of good reasons to self-cite. One of the things you count on peer reviewers to do is catch frivolous self-cites.
I'm not a computer scientist, so YMMV, but I frequently act as a peer reviewer for several agricultural journals. We have no quota with respect to acceptance or rejection, and are not compensated monetarily or otherwise for our service as reviewers. I've rejected papers before, and it seems like I've rejected more as time goes on. I've even had a couple of my own papers rejected -- not every paper is a winner. One thing I have noticed is that I review for a journal with a very high impact rating, and there has been a noticeable increase in mediocre-quality papers as people chase the impact rating.
As a point of information, note that if you are employed directly by the Federal government, as I am, then copyrights cannot be assigned to the publisher. We are generally permitted to post our own version of the paper (i.e. not the journal's fancy typeset version which appears in print) to our website, and to distribute the paper freely. Once the embargo (typically one year) has expired we post the publisher's PDF version or link directly to their site.
As a multiple-times graduate of LSU I have to agree wholeheartedly. When I worked at the Southern Regional Climate Center I worked with a faculty member in Geography and Anthropology who wanted to use SuperMike to do some global-scale climate simulation. We got an incredible run-around from OCS, the upshot of which was that we could make do with the RS6000 cluster, thank you very much. I don't know if that was because the cluster didn't work correctly or if our work wasn't sexy enough. My limited experience, YMMV.
I don't have any coordinate handy, but you might try this. Enter 'Baton Rouge, LA' into the search box. Exxon (IIRC) has a very large refinery complex on the east bank of the Mississippi River north of the state capitol building (between the two bridges shown in the map view). It is easy to find on the satellite image by zooming in a couple-or-three ticks and following the river.
IIRC (too...lazy...too...Google...) an airline arrival is only late if it is more than 30 minutes off of its schedule. You can make your stats look really good by redefining commonly-used terms without telling anyone.
Quite a lot of journals provide free access to abstracts online. If publishers were willing to sell papers in electronic format for only $1.00 I think that most of us would not grumble too loudly. However, journals that sell papers out of their archive on a one-off basis commonly charge $35.00-$40.00 per paper.
This is tangential, but there you are. Papers published by U.S. government employees (there are a lot of us) as part of their official duties are in the public domain. My understanding (IANAL) is that were are, therefore, able to freely redistribute our papers. My lab provides PDFs of our papers in a public area on our website, as does the Agricultural Research Service of the Unites States Department of Agriculture.
As a scientist guilty of many offenses to good programming form and style in several languages I agree that there is a lot of truth to this. I would emphasize, though, that as a scientist I am producing code to support my research, not to sell to someone. There is a presumption on my part that anyone else using my code has either similar knowledge to my own or is willing to invest the time and energy to acquire similar skills. A good example is my pedigree analysis software, PyPedal -- I have had some enquiries from potential end-users. Some people I tell, "Go for it!", others I tell, "I do not think that this is a good tool for you." I do not do that out of arrogance, but rather in recognition of the fact that I simply cannot provide an appropriate level of support to users who are not comfortable with installing Python, writing what are simple-to-me scripts, and digging through jargon-laden output files that do not conform to a consistent style. The flaws of m program are not the fault of the user, but I certainly try and not mislead people.
Many of the applications that we use at work are home-grown or colleague-grown Fortran. We produce national genetic evaluations four times a year for lots of traits in six breeds. Like Fortran or hate it, we have not missed a release date in 25 years. As always, use the right tool for the job.
While I do not know what links might exist between mental health and diet, it is interesting to note that in "The Jungle" Upton Sinclair wrote at great length about the low-quality diet available to the poor of Chicago.
If I had mod points this would be your lucky day! I have worked in tech at a major university in the past and your post is spot-on. Ten years ago CS majors were working on terminals connected to the big IBM iron in a trailer out by the old computer center. Now they bitch about poor wireless coverage on campus because they cannot always surf/. in lectures. sigh
Sadly the overwing emergency exits will not operate if the cabin is pressurized. Perhaps we can club the idiots into submission with the in-flight telephones built into the seat-backs. It is already bad enough during the post-landing taxi: "*BEEP* HEY! NO, WE'RE STILL ON THE PLANE! I'LL BE HOME IN ABOUT TWO HOURS. I'LL CALL YOU FROM *smack* Ack! *smack* No! *smack* *BEEP*" Yeah. Airline phone beat-downs are definitely the way to go.
While I see your point, I almost feel for Microsoft on this: no matter what they do, people are going to complain. I use Linux on my boxes, but I also have to feed and care for my wife's XP Home edition system. I will install the Service Pack and I will no doubt curse at it for a bit, but I am glad that MS is taking such a hard-nosed approach to security now. Better that than the alternative.
I should know better, but I will bite anyway. On what do you base your argument that the system is wrong? I certainly agree that "the system" is not, and should not be, immutable, but you are making an assertion rather than an argument.
That said, most lawyers will tell you that (at least in the U.S.) there are rights that you cannot sign away. Just because you sign a contract with a given clause in it does NOT mean that it is valid under the laws of your state. It may be that this is only true in Louisiana becase our state laws are Napoleonic in origin rather than derived from English Common Law. The point? Just because a contract says something does not make it so. That is why lawyers make more money than I do!:-)
Your home-owners' association cannot (under most circumstances) prohibit your placement of a dish under one meter (39.37") in diameter: Over-the-Air Reception Devices Rule. I understand that you may not want to get into a confrontation with the local Neighborhood Nazis, but you do have rights that they cannot curtail even with a written neighborhood code.
As I noted on a comment somewhere towards the head of the list, recent research at The Seeing Eye, Inc. (http://www.seeingeye.org/) has shown that the measure of trainability that they use in selecting candidates for training as dog guides for blind persons has a heritability of ~20%. This means that about 20% of the observed variation can be attributed to additive genetic effects. The short version: you can design a breeding program that will shift the population mean to the right, resulting in dogs with higher trainiability scores, on average. The cognitive skills of dog guides are quite impressive, even of they do not have the object vocabulary of Rico.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't notice that I wasn't logged-in when I posted my response to you, so I'm the AC.
It is worth your time to review "SEC. 7. PREISSUANCE SUBMISSIONS BY THIRD PARTIES" (p. 71 of http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112s23es/pdf/BILLS-112s23es.pdf). Specifically, the bill passed by the Senate permits third-party submission of prior art claims, which should help with the prior art problem. Of course, this cuts both ways in that inventors also will have to be diligent themselves.
You can fund the program by backing up your votes with cash. The more you pay, the higher up the list a nominee moves. How much would you pay to get rid of that guy who gets in front of you at the coffee shop and orders ever-so-slightly different hazelnut smackuccinos for himself and his 67 co-workers? And then pays in pennies? I swear that something like this once happened to me in Cincinnati.
At least two of the journals in which my work has been published, Journal of Animal Science (jas.fass.org) and Journal of Dairy Science (jds.fass.org) require that the authors include 100-word interpretative summaries that are peer reviewed. Those summaries are supposed to be written so that they can be read and understood by the proverbial main in the street. The value of the summaries may be related to the fact that they are published in journals dedicated to agricultural science, and that USDA and other agencies that fund much of this research are very interested in technology transfer from labs to the field. Such motivations may not exist or be as strong in, say, a more abstract mathematical discipline.
It took ten years, but I can finally post on a Slashdot story with some degree of authority. I have a PhD in animal breeding and genetics and work actively in the area. Also note that IANAL. (Disclaimer: This post represents my opinions only, not those of my employer, the US Department of Agriculture.)
As noted up-thread, this patent was filed for years ago. We discussed it quite a bit around the office. Assuming a sane world in which there is a competent patent examination process most of the claims in the patent will be thrown out on prior art, and in many cases an innovative step is lacking. Note that the patent is species-specific. What does that tell us? It tells us that Monsanto (tm) was aware of prior art in other species but believed the PTO could be convinced that moving from cows or chickens to pigs is a novel step that is non-obvious to a practitioner skilled in the art. I believe that this application has gone nowhere, and that the IP was sold off, maybe to PIC or Newsham.
This is slimy, unpleasant stuff, but I am cautiously optimistic that any patent granted will be so narrow in scope as to not affect most of us consumers. Genetic evaluation programs for dairy cattle are now using high-density SNP arrays to improve predictions, and there are a number of nasty patent applications floating around out there, and the PTO may get some of them wrong.
That sounds good on the surface, but there are plenty of good reasons to self-cite. One of the things you count on peer reviewers to do is catch frivolous self-cites.
I'm not a computer scientist, so YMMV, but I frequently act as a peer reviewer for several agricultural journals. We have no quota with respect to acceptance or rejection, and are not compensated monetarily or otherwise for our service as reviewers. I've rejected papers before, and it seems like I've rejected more as time goes on. I've even had a couple of my own papers rejected -- not every paper is a winner. One thing I have noticed is that I review for a journal with a very high impact rating, and there has been a noticeable increase in mediocre-quality papers as people chase the impact rating.
As a point of information, note that if you are employed directly by the Federal government, as I am, then copyrights cannot be assigned to the publisher. We are generally permitted to post our own version of the paper (i.e. not the journal's fancy typeset version which appears in print) to our website, and to distribute the paper freely. Once the embargo (typically one year) has expired we post the publisher's PDF version or link directly to their site.
As a multiple-times graduate of LSU I have to agree wholeheartedly. When I worked at the Southern Regional Climate Center I worked with a faculty member in Geography and Anthropology who wanted to use SuperMike to do some global-scale climate simulation. We got an incredible run-around from OCS, the upshot of which was that we could make do with the RS6000 cluster, thank you very much. I don't know if that was because the cluster didn't work correctly or if our work wasn't sexy enough. My limited experience, YMMV.
Why do you hate America^H^H^H^H^H^H^HLSU?
I don't have any coordinate handy, but you might try this. Enter 'Baton Rouge, LA' into the search box. Exxon (IIRC) has a very large refinery complex on the east bank of the Mississippi River north of the state capitol building (between the two bridges shown in the map view). It is easy to find on the satellite image by zooming in a couple-or-three ticks and following the river.
IIRC (too...lazy...too...Google...) an airline arrival is only late if it is more than 30 minutes off of its schedule. You can make your stats look really good by redefining commonly-used terms without telling anyone.
Quite a lot of journals provide free access to abstracts online. If publishers were willing to sell papers in electronic format for only $1.00 I think that most of us would not grumble too loudly. However, journals that sell papers out of their archive on a one-off basis commonly charge $35.00-$40.00 per paper.
Stupid typo. It should read "...United State[s]..."
This is tangential, but there you are. Papers published by U.S. government employees (there are a lot of us) as part of their official duties are in the public domain. My understanding (IANAL) is that were are, therefore, able to freely redistribute our papers. My lab provides PDFs of our papers in a public area on our website, as does the Agricultural Research Service of the Unites States Department of Agriculture.
As a scientist guilty of many offenses to good programming form and style in several languages I agree that there is a lot of truth to this. I would emphasize, though, that as a scientist I am producing code to support my research, not to sell to someone. There is a presumption on my part that anyone else using my code has either similar knowledge to my own or is willing to invest the time and energy to acquire similar skills. A good example is my pedigree analysis software, PyPedal -- I have had some enquiries from potential end-users. Some people I tell, "Go for it!", others I tell, "I do not think that this is a good tool for you." I do not do that out of arrogance, but rather in recognition of the fact that I simply cannot provide an appropriate level of support to users who are not comfortable with installing Python, writing what are simple-to-me scripts, and digging through jargon-laden output files that do not conform to a consistent style. The flaws of m program are not the fault of the user, but I certainly try and not mislead people.
Many of the applications that we use at work are home-grown or colleague-grown Fortran. We produce national genetic evaluations four times a year for lots of traits in six breeds. Like Fortran or hate it, we have not missed a release date in 25 years. As always, use the right tool for the job.
While I do not know what links might exist between mental health and diet, it is interesting to note that in "The Jungle" Upton Sinclair wrote at great length about the low-quality diet available to the poor of Chicago.
I checked with Konqueror 3.3.2 and unixmaster is correct, Konqueror did not crash.
If I had mod points this would be your lucky day! I have worked in tech at a major university in the past and your post is spot-on. Ten years ago CS majors were working on terminals connected to the big IBM iron in a trailer out by the old computer center. Now they bitch about poor wireless coverage on campus because they cannot always surf /. in lectures. sigh
Sadly the overwing emergency exits will not operate if the cabin is pressurized. Perhaps we can club the idiots into submission with the in-flight telephones built into the seat-backs. It is already bad enough during the post-landing taxi: "*BEEP* HEY! NO, WE'RE STILL ON THE PLANE! I'LL BE HOME IN ABOUT TWO HOURS. I'LL CALL YOU FROM *smack* Ack! *smack* No! *smack* *BEEP*" Yeah. Airline phone beat-downs are definitely the way to go.
While I see your point, I almost feel for Microsoft on this: no matter what they do, people are going to complain. I use Linux on my boxes, but I also have to feed and care for my wife's XP Home edition system. I will install the Service Pack and I will no doubt curse at it for a bit, but I am glad that MS is taking such a hard-nosed approach to security now. Better that than the alternative.
I should know better, but I will bite anyway. On what do you base your argument that the system is wrong? I certainly agree that "the system" is not, and should not be, immutable, but you are making an assertion rather than an argument.
IANAL.
:-)
That said, most lawyers will tell you that (at least in the U.S.) there are rights that you cannot sign away. Just because you sign a contract with a given clause in it does NOT mean that it is valid under the laws of your state. It may be that this is only true in Louisiana becase our state laws are Napoleonic in origin rather than derived from English Common Law. The point? Just because a contract says something does not make it so. That is why lawyers make more money than I do!
Did I say that IANAL?
Your home-owners' association cannot (under most circumstances) prohibit your placement of a dish under one meter (39.37") in diameter: Over-the-Air Reception Devices Rule. I understand that you may not want to get into a confrontation with the local Neighborhood Nazis, but you do have rights that they cannot curtail even with a written neighborhood code.
As I noted on a comment somewhere towards the head of the list, recent research at The Seeing Eye, Inc. (http://www.seeingeye.org/) has shown that the measure of trainability that they use in selecting candidates for training as dog guides for blind persons has a heritability of ~20%. This means that about 20% of the observed variation can be attributed to additive genetic effects. The short version: you can design a breeding program that will shift the population mean to the right, resulting in dogs with higher trainiability scores, on average. The cognitive skills of dog guides are quite impressive, even of they do not have the object vocabulary of Rico.