Another option, for similar reasons: Statistics. There's a lot of places where the two intersect, and if you've got the stomach for stats, it's a powerful combination.
Perhaps the poster (and you) could consult with Michael Phelps about the aerodynamics experiments he was working on. Something about acceleration of hot gasses through a water-air interface? The "bong effect", I think it's called. I think such experiments would be very inspiring for many undergraduates.
I suspect he's thinking of Jennifer Beals, the star of the groundbreaking motion picture, Flashdance. Written by Joe Esterhaus (before he got cancer and became religious), produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. Jennifer Beals was a "welder by day, stripper by night" who wanted to go to dance school. You can't beat that for plot. After this movie, Jennifer Beals' fine performance led many young women to prance around in ripped up sweatshirts and leg warmers. Good stuff.
A Syllabus is not enough. The teacher should make the students sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement and a Non-Compete clause. Unethical, ineffective, and inane rules need legal jargon to be effective.
I find this moral stance quite odd - it would suggest that the deliberate destruction of the only surviving tissue sample of a deceased person should be treated as a murder.
It's not all love and kisses; but I do think that if there are patents made and money to be made, that the people who invented the damn thing should get a cut. So, from the standpoint of the inventor -- it seems that B-D is not a terrible deal. In my biz, 99.999% of the work is done trying to get publications, which is its own short-sighted goal as well. I'm in basic research, not drug development, so we pretty much give everything away.
Yeah, that was a mistake. Sorry about that. I think I got confused with the whole "March in rights" which apparently looks better on paper than in practice (that's the right of the federal government to compel the university to release the IP to specific parties).
I have seen a "profit sharing" clause come in to play with private foundations (I'm pretty sure that such a clause was in the agreement for a grant I received).
It's worth adding that in the real world you don't keep your ideas. When you accept a job you are required to sign a piece of paper that assigns ALL your rights to your employer.
To put the IP rules of most universities in context: They ain't that bad. The prevalent rule (law) in place is the Bayh-Dole act that regulates patents/IP derived from projects receiving federal funds. And, since most university research labs are federally funded to some extent, it's generally the rule that applies.
In general, if you're a graduate student, researcher, or faculty working in a University research lab, you are expected to approach the University IP office if you think you have something patentable. They will review it, and if it's deemed to be valuable IP, they'll file the patent or other protection, and they will handle licensing the technology, etc. If the patent/IP ends up worth nothing, then the University eats that cost. Any profits from licensing/etc are divided among the stakeholders -- with the inventor, the inventor's department, and the university all getting substantial shares, as well as a share going back to the funding agency (or agencies). Everything I've read suggests that a similar arrangement exists for non-federally funded work (e.g. through private funds, or using University resources), though the "stakeholders" are different.
So, while the University may "take" your idea, they will do the legal work to patent it, enforce the patent, and license it. And the named inventors will get a cut, usually between 20 and 50% (depending on the number of stakeholders, and the arrangements that the University has with them).
From my discussions with people who did development work at research universities before the Bayh-Dole act, this current setup is a vast improvement. Before the B-D act, it was very hard to get University IP people to move on technology in its early stages (e.g. when it needs to be patented), so, for example, you often couldn't get them to patent drugs before they entered clinical trials. Of course, after a successful clinical trial (when the drug is worth $$$), it's too late for patent protection. And, the terms were far less favorable to the inventor than are currently seen with the B-D act (e.g. the University took all the $$ and gave you a nice "thank you" letter).
Hot damn, I've even been on Slashdot for a couple years now and I didn't see this one coming!
"So the price of your grant is we get your IP" - beautiful. I was just defending education against some standard trolling, except this is real. Yuk.
Yeah, I'm pro-exploitation. That's it. You should see my pro-child-slavery web site, too.
Seriously, though. I doubt the university IP office sneaked up behind the guy in his dorm room and said "Gee, that's a mighty nice idea! We're taking it!". He was a grad student, working on a Federally funded research project (through NASA), which supplied the tools to pursue the project, and funding for his stipend, etc. He also presumably used the University's IP office to file the patent, and they are acting as agents to pursue licensing agreements.
I'm not "pro-exploitation"; I'm a researcher, and I've got some ideas in the pipeline myself that might be worth something some day. But I use University and Federal dollars to work on them, I get paid by University and Federal dollars. If I get a patent, the legal work (filing of the patent, licensing, etc) will be presumably be handled by the University IP office. Since it's covered under the Bayh-Dole act, I'll legally be entitled to a cut of any profits. It's the law, and the contract I signed. It's not everything I'd dream of, but it's better than many people get in private industry.
If a student thinks of something in his or her role as a student, they should be free to patent that idea on their own time, with their own money, if they'd like to. But, as soon as federal dollars come into the picture, the Bayh Dole act applies. You can argue that it's unfair, or that it's the return on taxpayer dollars for the Federal investment in research. Whatever you think, it's the law.
It's unfair (or at least ironic) that the University won't license this guy his own idea for nothing. However, if they decide to license it to Nike for millions of bucks, he will get a cut. I guess that's his consolation prize.
That might be reasonable, if the Ph.D. student does not receive a stipend (paid for by Fed dollars or off of research grants), and only works in student labs (not in a grant funded research lab). If a student comes up with an idea in Physics 101, or while working out in the student gym, your idea would hold. If he or she is working in a research institute, I guarantee that those tuition and fee dollars are not funding their work.
If I go to the Honda dealer to get a part, I don't want to hear that it's the dealer's fault. If the part has a Honda label on it, it better damn well be "Honda compatible".
The "Vista Ready" sticker is not just marketing -- it's an implicit promise that the damn thing will run Vista. If MS can't work it out with the OEMs that they will only put "Vista ready" or "Win 7 ready" stickers on the boxes of computers that actually run the software, they shouldn't put the stickers on the box. Period. It's nice that after a year and a half (and a few updates including SP1) that my laptop is actually compatible with Vista. And, I'm sure it was the fault of Realtek for not producing a decent driver for the network hardware in a prompt fashion, and Gateway for choosing that chipset, etc. But, in the end, if MS is allowing vendors to fraudulently stick a label on the box that says that the computer is all set to run Vista or Win 7 when it isn't -- that's piss-poor business on MS's part.
Sure, MS may be right about driver and application incompatibilities. But, when I bought a brand new laptop, pre-loaded with Vista, that has the Vista logo on the box, I don't want to hear that it's the fault of the network chipset provider that the wireless network works marginally at best. MS and the hardware vendors need to get their shit together, so that they don't tell me that a computer is "Win 7 Compatible" or comes pre-loaded with Win 7 when it really isn't.
If you're trying to install a new OS on an old machine, that's one thing. You definitely need to do your homework to make sure that the off-brand network card you bought will work with the new OS. However, a new machine pre-loaded with the OS should run. If MS can't make sure that the OEMs have working machines before they slap a "Vista" or "Win 7" sticker on the damn thing, they should stop making software, period.
Looking at the NCBI database of DNA sequences and publications, there's a fair amount of research into the synthetic pathway that has been done. There's even a study that analyzes the DNA polymorphisms in the strains that produce THC versus the ones that don't. There might not be quite the info to produce the magic oranges, but there's more material towards that end than I would have thought.
But we have a "War on Terror", and of course, a "War on Drugs". And of course, the local car dealership has declared a "War on High Prices". I'd say that justifies just about anything.
Generally, people who can hear the high-pitched whine of a TV or the whine of transformers can also hear hard drives whine and find all the whining noise annoying. People going deaf won't know what the hell I am talking about.
Just go to a few more rock concerts. Problem solved!
If the primary device control software for the SOLiD sequencers is as reliable as their QPCR software, then you'll probably lose about 10% of your runs due to software failure. Of course, that means you get to spend 10% extra on ABI consumables, and if it was a particularly valuable sample, well, tough. It's nice that they're opening up the analysis package, but the true "mission critical" software is the control package. I've yet to find a vendor of (rather expensive) hardware that seems to think the control software is anything other than an afterthought.
That's kind of funny; I was thinking about a bug ridden piece of ABI software (the control software for their 7500 real-time PCR machines) as I was reading the original post. I've lost a whole lot of sample runs when the software craps out mid-run. Then again, it could have been the control software for the $500K confocal microscope that renders the hardware largely unusable. Or it could be any number of other software packages that run plate readers, scintillation counters, or anything else. The quality of software on the control systems for even the most expensive hardware is abysmal; they love to produce poor software that loves to crash, and writes proprietary files that can't be readily imported into more powerful software. It's gotten somewhat better over the past 5 years, but as the hardware lives for 20 years, we end users get to enjoy the crappy software long after the company has moved on. It certainly does color my decision about which hardware I will buy in the future, though.
Take MS word.. You have grammer checking, but what about background googling to do FACT checking.
Exactly. There's a million things that a "simple" program like Word could do; instead, they just add on cosmetic crap that slows the program down. I haven't seen a significant advancement -- something that made the old program obsolete -- in Word in a decade.
As one example of a pathetic feature, Word has an option to "compare two documents". In theory, this would be a useful feature when someone extensively edits a document and hands it back to you. In reality, it's completely useless. If you take a document, and swap the beginning and ending paragraphs, it tells you that the entire document was deleted and a new one inserted. How useful. We have software algorithms (freely available!) for analyzing DNA sequences that allow for automatically identifying how entire genomes have been rearranged and modified, yet Microsoft can't figure out how to identify that a single paragraph has moved.
They're lazy, unimaginative, and sloppy. There are a million tasks that could be implemented to truly revolutionize the process of writing documents (particularly long documents). They could make inserting figures into long documents less painful (delete a sentence, reformat all the pictures!). They could provide real hooks to allow EndNote or other referencing software to not be so clunky (insert a reference, wait 2 minutes for a flurry of script "search and replaces" to complete! Instead, the Word designers, in the finest MS tradition, choose to bring us "clippy" and the "ribbon bar". Gee, thanks!
Like hell Word should be single threaded. Sure, I can only type one letter at a time, but word has to repaginate, check spelling and grammar, and render the page so I can see it. Not that Word isn't usually sufficiently fast at them; at least until I turn on Endnote. Then it takes about 2 minutes to add a single reference to a 40 page proposal.
Slashdot Mirror
Another option, for similar reasons: Statistics. There's a lot of places where the two intersect, and if you've got the stomach for stats, it's a powerful combination.
Hey, someone has to release the mosquitoes. They dont get out of the jar by themselves.
Perhaps the poster (and you) could consult with Michael Phelps about the aerodynamics experiments he was working on. Something about acceleration of hot gasses through a water-air interface? The "bong effect", I think it's called. I think such experiments would be very inspiring for many undergraduates.
I suspect he's thinking of Jennifer Beals, the star of the groundbreaking motion picture, Flashdance. Written by Joe Esterhaus (before he got cancer and became religious), produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. Jennifer Beals was a "welder by day, stripper by night" who wanted to go to dance school. You can't beat that for plot. After this movie, Jennifer Beals' fine performance led many young women to prance around in ripped up sweatshirts and leg warmers. Good stuff.
A Syllabus is not enough. The teacher should make the students sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement and a Non-Compete clause. Unethical, ineffective, and inane rules need legal jargon to be effective.
I find this moral stance quite odd - it would suggest that the deliberate destruction of the only surviving tissue sample of a deceased person should be treated as a murder.
Don't throw away Great Grandpa's toothbrush!
Imagine a base 4 code!
It's been done. It's called DNA.
It's not all love and kisses; but I do think that if there are patents made and money to be made, that the people who invented the damn thing should get a cut. So, from the standpoint of the inventor -- it seems that B-D is not a terrible deal. In my biz, 99.999% of the work is done trying to get publications, which is its own short-sighted goal as well. I'm in basic research, not drug development, so we pretty much give everything away.
Yeah, that was a mistake. Sorry about that. I think I got confused with the whole "March in rights" which apparently looks better on paper than in practice (that's the right of the federal government to compel the university to release the IP to specific parties).
I have seen a "profit sharing" clause come in to play with private foundations (I'm pretty sure that such a clause was in the agreement for a grant I received).
It's worth adding that in the real world you don't keep your ideas. When you accept a job you are required to sign a piece of paper that assigns ALL your rights to your employer.
To put the IP rules of most universities in context: They ain't that bad. The prevalent rule (law) in place is the Bayh-Dole act that regulates patents/IP derived from projects receiving federal funds. And, since most university research labs are federally funded to some extent, it's generally the rule that applies.
In general, if you're a graduate student, researcher, or faculty working in a University research lab, you are expected to approach the University IP office if you think you have something patentable. They will review it, and if it's deemed to be valuable IP, they'll file the patent or other protection, and they will handle licensing the technology, etc. If the patent/IP ends up worth nothing, then the University eats that cost. Any profits from licensing/etc are divided among the stakeholders -- with the inventor, the inventor's department, and the university all getting substantial shares, as well as a share going back to the funding agency (or agencies). Everything I've read suggests that a similar arrangement exists for non-federally funded work (e.g. through private funds, or using University resources), though the "stakeholders" are different.
So, while the University may "take" your idea, they will do the legal work to patent it, enforce the patent, and license it. And the named inventors will get a cut, usually between 20 and 50% (depending on the number of stakeholders, and the arrangements that the University has with them).
From my discussions with people who did development work at research universities before the Bayh-Dole act, this current setup is a vast improvement. Before the B-D act, it was very hard to get University IP people to move on technology in its early stages (e.g. when it needs to be patented), so, for example, you often couldn't get them to patent drugs before they entered clinical trials. Of course, after a successful clinical trial (when the drug is worth $$$), it's too late for patent protection. And, the terms were far less favorable to the inventor than are currently seen with the B-D act (e.g. the University took all the $$ and gave you a nice "thank you" letter).
Hot damn, I've even been on Slashdot for a couple years now and I didn't see this one coming!
"So the price of your grant is we get your IP" - beautiful. I was just defending education against some standard trolling, except this is real. Yuk.
Yeah, I'm pro-exploitation. That's it. You should see my pro-child-slavery web site, too.
Seriously, though. I doubt the university IP office sneaked up behind the guy in his dorm room and said "Gee, that's a mighty nice idea! We're taking it!". He was a grad student, working on a Federally funded research project (through NASA), which supplied the tools to pursue the project, and funding for his stipend, etc. He also presumably used the University's IP office to file the patent, and they are acting as agents to pursue licensing agreements.
I'm not "pro-exploitation"; I'm a researcher, and I've got some ideas in the pipeline myself that might be worth something some day. But I use University and Federal dollars to work on them, I get paid by University and Federal dollars. If I get a patent, the legal work (filing of the patent, licensing, etc) will be presumably be handled by the University IP office. Since it's covered under the Bayh-Dole act, I'll legally be entitled to a cut of any profits. It's the law, and the contract I signed. It's not everything I'd dream of, but it's better than many people get in private industry.
If a student thinks of something in his or her role as a student, they should be free to patent that idea on their own time, with their own money, if they'd like to. But, as soon as federal dollars come into the picture, the Bayh Dole act applies. You can argue that it's unfair, or that it's the return on taxpayer dollars for the Federal investment in research. Whatever you think, it's the law.
It's unfair (or at least ironic) that the University won't license this guy his own idea for nothing. However, if they decide to license it to Nike for millions of bucks, he will get a cut. I guess that's his consolation prize.
That might be reasonable, if the Ph.D. student does not receive a stipend (paid for by Fed dollars or off of research grants), and only works in student labs (not in a grant funded research lab). If a student comes up with an idea in Physics 101, or while working out in the student gym, your idea would hold. If he or she is working in a research institute, I guarantee that those tuition and fee dollars are not funding their work.
And if they put a big "Linux Compatible" sticker on the box (or it comes pre-loaded with a non-working Linux), I'd be pissed off at that, too.
It is if MS demands a "Vista Ready" certification programme from the vendors before said vendors can claim its suitable for Vista.
I wonder what that certification program involves -- in addition to waiting for a check to clear.
If I go to the Honda dealer to get a part, I don't want to hear that it's the dealer's fault. If the part has a Honda label on it, it better damn well be "Honda compatible".
The "Vista Ready" sticker is not just marketing -- it's an implicit promise that the damn thing will run Vista. If MS can't work it out with the OEMs that they will only put "Vista ready" or "Win 7 ready" stickers on the boxes of computers that actually run the software, they shouldn't put the stickers on the box. Period. It's nice that after a year and a half (and a few updates including SP1) that my laptop is actually compatible with Vista. And, I'm sure it was the fault of Realtek for not producing a decent driver for the network hardware in a prompt fashion, and Gateway for choosing that chipset, etc. But, in the end, if MS is allowing vendors to fraudulently stick a label on the box that says that the computer is all set to run Vista or Win 7 when it isn't -- that's piss-poor business on MS's part.
Sure, MS may be right about driver and application incompatibilities. But, when I bought a brand new laptop, pre-loaded with Vista, that has the Vista logo on the box, I don't want to hear that it's the fault of the network chipset provider that the wireless network works marginally at best. MS and the hardware vendors need to get their shit together, so that they don't tell me that a computer is "Win 7 Compatible" or comes pre-loaded with Win 7 when it really isn't.
If you're trying to install a new OS on an old machine, that's one thing. You definitely need to do your homework to make sure that the off-brand network card you bought will work with the new OS. However, a new machine pre-loaded with the OS should run. If MS can't make sure that the OEMs have working machines before they slap a "Vista" or "Win 7" sticker on the damn thing, they should stop making software, period.
Looking at the NCBI database of DNA sequences and publications, there's a fair amount of research into the synthetic pathway that has been done. There's even a study that analyzes the DNA polymorphisms in the strains that produce THC versus the ones that don't. There might not be quite the info to produce the magic oranges, but there's more material towards that end than I would have thought.
But we have a "War on Terror", and of course, a "War on Drugs". And of course, the local car dealership has declared a "War on High Prices". I'd say that justifies just about anything.
"It's capable of the lower levels of human functionality. Say, somewhere between Forest Gump and a chimpanzee"
This is exactly why we shouldn't do it. It's bound to vote Republican...
I'd say with credentials like that, he or she could be Sarah Palin's running mate!
Generally, people who can hear the high-pitched whine of a TV or the whine of transformers can also hear hard drives whine and find all the whining noise annoying. People going deaf won't know what the hell I am talking about.
Just go to a few more rock concerts. Problem solved!
And you forgot the part where the lady got a law passed demanding the teaching of "cow theory" and "turtle theory" in science classes.
If the primary device control software for the SOLiD sequencers is as reliable as their QPCR software, then you'll probably lose about 10% of your runs due to software failure. Of course, that means you get to spend 10% extra on ABI consumables, and if it was a particularly valuable sample, well, tough. It's nice that they're opening up the analysis package, but the true "mission critical" software is the control package. I've yet to find a vendor of (rather expensive) hardware that seems to think the control software is anything other than an afterthought.
That's kind of funny; I was thinking about a bug ridden piece of ABI software (the control software for their 7500 real-time PCR machines) as I was reading the original post. I've lost a whole lot of sample runs when the software craps out mid-run. Then again, it could have been the control software for the $500K confocal microscope that renders the hardware largely unusable. Or it could be any number of other software packages that run plate readers, scintillation counters, or anything else. The quality of software on the control systems for even the most expensive hardware is abysmal; they love to produce poor software that loves to crash, and writes proprietary files that can't be readily imported into more powerful software. It's gotten somewhat better over the past 5 years, but as the hardware lives for 20 years, we end users get to enjoy the crappy software long after the company has moved on. It certainly does color my decision about which hardware I will buy in the future, though.
Take MS word.. You have grammer checking, but what about background googling to do FACT checking.
Exactly. There's a million things that a "simple" program like Word could do; instead, they just add on cosmetic crap that slows the program down. I haven't seen a significant advancement -- something that made the old program obsolete -- in Word in a decade.
As one example of a pathetic feature, Word has an option to "compare two documents". In theory, this would be a useful feature when someone extensively edits a document and hands it back to you. In reality, it's completely useless. If you take a document, and swap the beginning and ending paragraphs, it tells you that the entire document was deleted and a new one inserted. How useful. We have software algorithms (freely available!) for analyzing DNA sequences that allow for automatically identifying how entire genomes have been rearranged and modified, yet Microsoft can't figure out how to identify that a single paragraph has moved.
They're lazy, unimaginative, and sloppy. There are a million tasks that could be implemented to truly revolutionize the process of writing documents (particularly long documents). They could make inserting figures into long documents less painful (delete a sentence, reformat all the pictures!). They could provide real hooks to allow EndNote or other referencing software to not be so clunky (insert a reference, wait 2 minutes for a flurry of script "search and replaces" to complete! Instead, the Word designers, in the finest MS tradition, choose to bring us "clippy" and the "ribbon bar". Gee, thanks!
Like hell Word should be single threaded. Sure, I can only type one letter at a time, but word has to repaginate, check spelling and grammar, and render the page so I can see it. Not that Word isn't usually sufficiently fast at them; at least until I turn on Endnote. Then it takes about 2 minutes to add a single reference to a 40 page proposal.