It would be good if it weren't true that patents were something for the small inventor.
Among novel machines I've looked at recently, there one was invented by a university professor, Kais Atallah (whose invention was a type of magnetic gear, to which he obtained a patent, which got the whole thing funded), Torbjörn Lembke, whose invention was a magnetic bearing, who worked in industry, had an idea for an improvement of today's magnetic gears, wrote a PhD dissertation about it, patented it before publishing and is currently manufacturing it.
You might not call these real garage inventors, but I have a last example. Glenn Thompson, an Australian programmer, who, after what must have been quite careful thought, found a way to make a new kind of constant velocity joint (now called a Thompson Coupling). He patented this, having gotten the patent, got investors and has now, have now, having gotten funded, been manufacturing and selling these joints for some years.
If it weren't for patents these people would likely have obtained minimal reward for their work. If you have an invention, patents do protect it. You might say that they if they were "real small inventors" wouldn't have money to sue, but I imagine that such even a small inventor, with no money and only a good patent, would even in America, be able to take his case to court and win with enough probability to deter patent infringment. At worst such an inventor might be forced to find a lawyer to take his case on contingency.
Usually when one talks about civilians the warfare is such that civilians are clearly defined class, but if during a sustained occupation civilians from one side are granted particular rights, they do in some way become part of the occupying army even if they do not wear uniforms or carry weapons
Surely, for example, a farmer placed by the German army in Poland during the Second World War while a Polish farmer was displaced could not in any meaningful sense be counted as a civilian, due to the particular status he is given by the occupying army. One could think of him as a soldier, only with the somewhat curious rank 'farmer'.
They're certainly not environmentalists and while they are clearly arguing for the wrong reasons there are excellent environmental reasons to mix in ethanol in automobile fuel.
Specifically, the efficiency of a heat engine increases with the hot temperature (which increases with compression ratio). In piston engines this is limited by knocking, which in can be prevented by mixing in various things, some of the horrible or hard to produce, and among these ethanol seems a fairly good choice, it being available in volume and being generally harmless.
The solution to problems created by the goverment is usually to govern the goverment, a process excellently facilitated by democracy.
In this case it seems a bit fiddly, since the US is so large and has its particular voting system, but had this happened in a smaller country I imagine that there would be an inquiry followed, in a year or two, by new laws, banning this kind of government favour to companies.
I would however not be surprised if this kind of thing is not already illegal. How much government you can have strongly depends on how well-functioning a democracy you have. With multi-party system without campaign contributions you'd have fourth or fifth parties seizing upon this kind of thing almost before it ended up in newspapers, and without the campaign contributions the inventives to favour an individual company might not even be there in the first place.
While this might possibly happen (especially in America) this subverted protection might at least better than no protection at all.
Stronger obviousness tests would probably prevent the very worst examples of what you describe, and if you combined this with some sort of legal aid for inventors you could probably have a system which was quite fair.
If they don't have the right to manufacture their invention then it isn't worthy of being granted a patent.
Why would this be true? Whether someone doesn't have the right to manufacture something doesn't really have anything to do with the merit of his improvement, or with its novelty.
Granting a monopoly to someone who cannot possibly take advantage of that monopoly is a pointless endeavor and a waste of money, brains and time for everyone involved.
This is untrue as well, although less obviously so. Take the Einstein-Szilard refrigerator. At the time that it was invented there was still twelve years left on the patent for Baltazar von Platen's and Carl Munter's improvement of the gas absorption refrigerator which was manufactured by Electrolux at the time. While their idea had several advantages, such as avoiding poisonous gases then used in refrigerators, Einstein and Szilard probably never intended to start manufacturing refrigerators. However, not wanting some competitor to start manufacturing refrigerators, Electrolux bought Einstein and Szilards patents.
The benefit we get from this isn't that someone would start manufacturing novel refrigerators (because electrolux didn't), but in getting information about Szilard's and Einstein's idea. If they hadn't decided to patent it the design might not even be known today.
Einstein's an Szilard's design was an excellent one, and has significant merit (that no-toxic-gases thing). I don't think that there was any prototype built in eithe Szilard's or Einstein's time though.
Patents aren't meant to granted in return for manufacturing a product. They're meant to granted in return for releasing descriptions of how novel , non-obvious things work.
It might even be the case that the inventor doesn't have the right to manufacture his invention due to his invention being covered by another's patent. His contribution is then his nonobvious idea-- and the way that he is compensated is by that he's granted a monopoly on his improvement, so that someone who already manufactures the unimproved device would need to license the improvement from him.
Though, while rights might not come from governments property a thing might still not become ones own because one mixed ones labour with it.
Imagine a class of young children drawing on paper, with paper being abundant. Then there would be no reason for anyone to take anyone elses paper and taking anyone elses paper against their will would be wrong.
However, if paper were not abundant, and one class had drawn- and then declared that their labour had been mixed with the paper and that they had the right to exclude a second class from drawing on the back of their drawings, then surely that would surely not be right. At least not if the paper was running out.
I do not think that it is whether ones labour is mixed with a thing that is the reason why one can say that one owns it (although it may be a part), but instead that a thing is ones own in as much as it does not deprive anyone else of anything. So that abundant things could genuinely be owned, but couldn't once they became scarce.
From the wikipedia article Dyson's patent doesn't seem to actually be for a bladeless fan, but for a bladeless fan with a fluid dynamics trick involving an airfoil.
Although it probably is, the concept of a bladeless fan might well not be practical without Dyson's additional innovation. The original fan was never mass-produced after all.
Re:Did Zuckerberg ever have to get past HR?
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I think that you're very wrong here.
Take me for an example. I'm a computer scientist who have also studied financial mathematics (mostly focusing on the problem of pricing derivatives). I probably have at least technical skill (even if one can't very easily be sure of that, trying to assess it oneself). However, until I finish my thesis and graduate I definitely won't have anything but (perhaps glorified) internships.
The degree really matters. Especially if you want to work in anything in which your professional decisions have consequences for people- like in finance, engineering, medicine, aerospace, or almost anything interesting or technical.
A week ago or so I wanted to build some sort of passive optical arrangement to combine two images additively. One can't do it with mirrors and if one tries to do it with lenses, or tries to use internal total reflection somehow it will turn out that one can never get the internally reflected ray and the ray the ray entering through the surface of the lens to coincide. In fact I ended up strongly suspecting that it couldn't be done.
But "coherently adding" beams sounds exactly like this. Does anyone know if it really is the same thing, or how it works?
There are already many such books, some by quite great mathematicians.
At elementary and middle school level books like Israel Gel'fand's "Algebra" or Kiselev's geometry book would probably be excellent, or really any book on an elementary topic by a great mathematician which was initially intended for self-study. If one has the advantage of the tutor one could even read Euclid's Elements, or if one wants a beautiful presentation, Byrne's edition of it.
Unfortunately people never use these kinds of books in practice, preferring less stringent works and preferring exercises over exposition and giving the true reasons why things are as they are.
There are already lots of such books, many written by quite great mathematicians.
For students in elementary school there's Israel Gel'fand's ``Algebra'' and for older students there all sorts of other excellent books, especially books elaborating on Euclid's elements, like Kiselev's. If one has the advantage of a tutor one can probably even go for the original Euclid, or perhaps Byrne's edition of it for elegant presentation.
The thing, however, is that no one actually uses these books, going instead for books that are a little less stringent and serious and go for teaching by exercises as opposed to through reading and understanding.
It definitely is not a useless concept- although I could agree that these very long distance versions might not be very economically feasible (especially considering the risk).
However, in Stockholm, which is located on a set of fairly small islands mostly surrounded by preserved natural areas attempts to alleviate a housing shortage by building new apartments have mostly failed due to the fact that there isn't much space left to build on (especially close to the city).
Imagine then, a train like this going to a nearby town, accelerating at 2 G for the first half of the trip and then braking (electromagnetically) for the second half, perhaps arriving after 7 minutes or so. If such a train existed there would be little reason to prefer to live in Stockholm over living there. If the other town had enough space housing prices would then hopefully equilibriate until Stockholm was no longer so hideously expensive.
Jevons paradox would indicate that one if one can walk easier than another would expend more energy on walking than he would, so to in this way make walking more strenuous would probably reduce people's total energy expenditure on walking (this small amount of walking might be healtiher if these machines make it strenuous enough though).
Although I've only looked at the paper briefly I think that what it proves is that there is no closed-form expression for the partial sums in the Cox-Ross-Rubenstein model. Such a closed form expression would be neat, but ultimately one only cares about the limit, where one has, as you write, the Black-Scholes formula.
I don't work with this, so this might be entirely academic- but isn't convergence in the binomial model extremely slow for barrier options?
Also, there is a nice explicit formula for all standard types (down-and-out, out-and-in, etc.) on any payoff function in Björk's book- and I think that it can be "easily" modified to support fixed continuous dividends.
This feels like the sort of logic oriented AI from the 1970s that involved expert systems, LISP, prolog and constraint satisfaction problems (a sudoku solver even used to be a mandatory assignment in a class on programming paradigms) and the OCR-part is, I think, not very novel either.
Taken all-together the thing does however look very polished and I suspect that we'll see much more like it in the future once the average programmer becomes more familiar with older research.
Mathematics isn't actually the subject that's worst off.
I feel that the general problem is that it is regarded that a subject is worth teaching but that the fundamentals of the subjects are too difficult.
In mathematics this results in that one does not teach proofs and the rest of the fundamentals behind the basic results, in biology things like medelian inheritance, metabolism (the citric acid cycle etc.), DNA, transcriptase etc. are what is left out and in music it's the whole subject (writing down melodies, playing an instrument, singing from sheet music, etc.).
Although not a real university in the sense that it has a medical school, sociology departments etc., Vladimir Arnold, Sergei Novikov and some other Russian mathematicians did this and the university (Independent University of Moscow) still exists.
Their programme is completely terrifying even if one has studied the very same subjects at a normal university though.
Since bacteria are so much more numerous and fast-breeding than humans there must have been many more opportunities for this sort of thing to evolve in bacteria than in humans though.
Yes, now that I've read them I realise that they appear a bit incoherent, but it is proofreading that they need, not to be written differently. The reason the posts appear a bit "dressed up" as you call it is that expressions that are common in my native language can become arbitrarily odd when translated directly into english and not any purposeful effort on my part.
Nash solutions work excellently in real life and in the prisoners dilemma in particular. There certainly can be people who do not play optimally, but they receive less utility from doing so and in real world situations they typically run out of resources to waste and become neglible.
Not being a native English speaker I was unable to tell the two apart, but it is I hope obvious that I meant rock-paper-scissors and not tic-tac-toe, but perhaps less so that I by the strategy of choosing all options with equal probabilities meant the strategy of choosing all options in rock-paper-scissors with equal probabilities.
Regarding the feasability issues in modeling the game properly it is true that actually solving a game completely may be infeasible, but it would in my view be better to use approximate algorithms for the linear programming problems given rise to by it instead of using some easily subverted prediction technique.
The whole thing reeks of technical analysis and using neural networks to "predict stock prices" neither of which has any sound foundation in either economics or as far as I know in reality.
Firstly it must be said the strategy of choosing the alternatives with equal probabilities is no way guessing, but simply playing the optimal mixed strategy, secondly there is nothing special about normal human behaviour; and if one plays the Nash-solutiuon ones opponents expected utility is bounded upwards by his Nash-solution, why he really can't do anything.
I attempted to express that prediction is useless in games and that it is best simply to play the game as it is attempting to maximize ones expected utility by normal means and that strategies based on attempting to predict the opponent are bad: for as soon as ones opponent (or perhaps more properly the other player if it isn't a strictly competitive game) has chosen his predictive strategy one takes the fact that he plays according to a predictive strategy into consideration whereupon it becomes useless, he again predicts ones behaviour according to his strategy and a cycle of idiocy commences.
Playing by predicting therefore is quite silly, but then "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", so one should probably take the risk of ruin (á la the St. Petersburg lottery) into account when deviating too far from trends (why predictions may not be entirely useless*)
*It should be noted that I am a absolute beginner at game theory (only 7.5 credits), may be wrong and will despite my lack of skill apply it to everything due to the mental novelty and that I haven't made any calculations or proofs at all (on this).
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Sorry, Lembke had an improvement of todays magnetic bearings, not today's magnetic gears.
It would be good if it weren't true that patents were something for the small inventor.
Among novel machines I've looked at recently, there one was invented by a university professor, Kais Atallah (whose invention was a type of magnetic gear, to which he obtained a patent, which got the whole thing funded), Torbjörn Lembke, whose invention was a magnetic bearing, who worked in industry, had an idea for an improvement of today's magnetic gears, wrote a PhD dissertation about it, patented it before publishing and is currently manufacturing it.
You might not call these real garage inventors, but I have a last example. Glenn Thompson, an Australian programmer, who, after what must have been quite careful thought, found a way to make a new kind of constant velocity joint (now called a Thompson Coupling). He patented this, having gotten the patent, got investors and has now, have now, having gotten funded, been manufacturing and selling these joints for some years.
If it weren't for patents these people would likely have obtained minimal reward for their work. If you have an invention, patents do protect it. You might say that they if they were "real small inventors" wouldn't have money to sue, but I imagine that such even a small inventor, with no money and only a good patent, would even in America, be able to take his case to court and win with enough probability to deter patent infringment. At worst such an inventor might be forced to find a lawyer to take his case on contingency.
Usually when one talks about civilians the warfare is such that civilians are clearly defined class, but if during a sustained occupation civilians from one side are granted particular rights, they do in some way become part of the occupying army even if they do not wear uniforms or carry weapons
Surely, for example, a farmer placed by the German army in Poland during the Second World War while a Polish farmer was displaced could not in any meaningful sense be counted as a civilian, due to the particular status he is given by the occupying army. One could think of him as a soldier, only with the somewhat curious rank 'farmer'.
They're certainly not environmentalists and while they are clearly arguing for the wrong reasons there are excellent environmental reasons to mix in ethanol in automobile fuel.
Specifically, the efficiency of a heat engine increases with the hot temperature (which increases with compression ratio). In piston engines this is limited by knocking, which in can be prevented by mixing in various things, some of the horrible or hard to produce, and among these ethanol seems a fairly good choice, it being available in volume and being generally harmless.
The solution to problems created by the goverment is usually to govern the goverment, a process excellently facilitated by democracy.
In this case it seems a bit fiddly, since the US is so large and has its particular voting system, but had this happened in a smaller country I imagine that there would be an inquiry followed, in a year or two, by new laws, banning this kind of government favour to companies.
I would however not be surprised if this kind of thing is not already illegal. How much government you can have strongly depends on how well-functioning a democracy you have. With multi-party system without campaign contributions you'd have fourth or fifth parties seizing upon this kind of thing almost before it ended up in newspapers, and without the campaign contributions the inventives to favour an individual company might not even be there in the first place.
While this might possibly happen (especially in America) this subverted protection might at least better than no protection at all.
Stronger obviousness tests would probably prevent the very worst examples of what you describe, and if you combined this with some sort of legal aid for inventors you could probably have a system which was quite fair.
If they don't have the right to manufacture their invention then it isn't worthy of being granted a patent.
Why would this be true? Whether someone doesn't have the right to manufacture something doesn't really have anything to do with the merit of his improvement, or with its novelty.
Granting a monopoly to someone who cannot possibly take advantage of that monopoly is a pointless endeavor and a waste of money, brains and time for everyone involved.
This is untrue as well, although less obviously so. Take the Einstein-Szilard refrigerator. At the time that it was invented there was still twelve years left on the patent for Baltazar von Platen's and Carl Munter's improvement of the gas absorption refrigerator which was manufactured by Electrolux at the time. While their idea had several advantages, such as avoiding poisonous gases then used in refrigerators, Einstein and Szilard probably never intended to start manufacturing refrigerators. However, not wanting some competitor to start manufacturing refrigerators, Electrolux bought Einstein and Szilards patents.
The benefit we get from this isn't that someone would start manufacturing novel refrigerators (because electrolux didn't), but in getting information about Szilard's and Einstein's idea. If they hadn't decided to patent it the design might not even be known today.
Einstein's an Szilard's design was an excellent one, and has significant merit (that no-toxic-gases thing). I don't think that there was any prototype built in eithe Szilard's or Einstein's time though.
Patents aren't meant to granted in return for manufacturing a product. They're meant to granted in return for releasing descriptions of how novel , non-obvious things work.
It might even be the case that the inventor doesn't have the right to manufacture his invention due to his invention being covered by another's patent. His contribution is then his nonobvious idea-- and the way that he is compensated is by that he's granted a monopoly on his improvement, so that someone who already manufactures the unimproved device would need to license the improvement from him.
Though, while rights might not come from governments property a thing might still not become ones own because one mixed ones labour with it.
Imagine a class of young children drawing on paper, with paper being abundant. Then there would be no reason for anyone to take anyone elses paper and taking anyone elses paper against their will would be wrong.
However, if paper were not abundant, and one class had drawn- and then declared that their labour had been mixed with the paper and that they had the right to exclude a second class from drawing on the back of their drawings, then surely that would surely not be right. At least not if the paper was running out.
I do not think that it is whether ones labour is mixed with a thing that is the reason why one can say that one owns it (although it may be a part), but instead that a thing is ones own in as much as it does not deprive anyone else of anything. So that abundant things could genuinely be owned, but couldn't once they became scarce.
From the wikipedia article Dyson's patent doesn't seem to actually be for a bladeless fan, but for a bladeless fan with a fluid dynamics trick involving an airfoil.
Although it probably is, the concept of a bladeless fan might well not be practical without Dyson's additional innovation. The original fan was never mass-produced after all.
I think that you're very wrong here.
Take me for an example. I'm a computer scientist who have also studied financial mathematics (mostly focusing on the problem of pricing derivatives). I probably have at least technical skill (even if one can't very easily be sure of that, trying to assess it oneself). However, until I finish my thesis and graduate I definitely won't have anything but (perhaps glorified) internships.
The degree really matters. Especially if you want to work in anything in which your professional decisions have consequences for people- like in finance, engineering, medicine, aerospace, or almost anything interesting or technical.
A week ago or so I wanted to build some sort of passive optical arrangement to combine two images additively. One can't do it with mirrors and if one tries to do it with lenses, or tries to use internal total reflection somehow it will turn out that one can never get the internally reflected ray and the ray the ray entering through the surface of the lens to coincide. In fact I ended up strongly suspecting that it couldn't be done.
But "coherently adding" beams sounds exactly like this. Does anyone know if it really is the same thing, or how it works?
There are already many such books, some by quite great mathematicians.
At elementary and middle school level books like Israel Gel'fand's "Algebra" or Kiselev's geometry book would probably be excellent, or really any book on an elementary topic by a great mathematician which was initially intended for self-study. If one has the advantage of the tutor one could even read Euclid's Elements, or if one wants a beautiful presentation, Byrne's edition of it.
Unfortunately people never use these kinds of books in practice, preferring less stringent works and preferring exercises over exposition and giving the true reasons why things are as they are.
There are already lots of such books, many written by quite great mathematicians.
For students in elementary school there's Israel Gel'fand's ``Algebra'' and for older students there all sorts of other excellent books, especially books elaborating on Euclid's elements, like Kiselev's. If one has the advantage of a tutor one can probably even go for the original Euclid, or perhaps Byrne's edition of it for elegant presentation. The thing, however, is that no one actually uses these books, going instead for books that are a little less stringent and serious and go for teaching by exercises as opposed to through reading and understanding.
It definitely is not a useless concept- although I could agree that these very long distance versions might not be very economically feasible (especially considering the risk).
However, in Stockholm, which is located on a set of fairly small islands mostly surrounded by preserved natural areas attempts to alleviate a housing shortage by building new apartments have mostly failed due to the fact that there isn't much space left to build on (especially close to the city).
Imagine then, a train like this going to a nearby town, accelerating at 2 G for the first half of the trip and then braking (electromagnetically) for the second half, perhaps arriving after 7 minutes or so. If such a train existed there would be little reason to prefer to live in Stockholm over living there. If the other town had enough space housing prices would then hopefully equilibriate until Stockholm was no longer so hideously expensive.
Jevons paradox would indicate that one if one can walk easier than another would expend more energy on walking than he would, so to in this way make walking more strenuous would probably reduce people's total energy expenditure on walking (this small amount of walking might be healtiher if these machines make it strenuous enough though).
Although I've only looked at the paper briefly I think that what it proves is that there is no closed-form expression for the partial sums in the Cox-Ross-Rubenstein model. Such a closed form expression would be neat, but ultimately one only cares about the limit, where one has, as you write, the Black-Scholes formula.
I don't work with this, so this might be entirely academic- but isn't convergence in the binomial model extremely slow for barrier options?
Also, there is a nice explicit formula for all standard types (down-and-out, out-and-in, etc.) on any payoff function in Björk's book- and I think that it can be "easily" modified to support fixed continuous dividends.
This feels like the sort of logic oriented AI from the 1970s that involved expert systems, LISP, prolog and constraint satisfaction problems (a sudoku solver even used to be a mandatory assignment in a class on programming paradigms) and the OCR-part is, I think, not very novel either.
Taken all-together the thing does however look very polished and I suspect that we'll see much more like it in the future once the average programmer becomes more familiar with older research.
Mathematics isn't actually the subject that's worst off. I feel that the general problem is that it is regarded that a subject is worth teaching but that the fundamentals of the subjects are too difficult. In mathematics this results in that one does not teach proofs and the rest of the fundamentals behind the basic results, in biology things like medelian inheritance, metabolism (the citric acid cycle etc.), DNA, transcriptase etc. are what is left out and in music it's the whole subject (writing down melodies, playing an instrument, singing from sheet music, etc.).
Although not a real university in the sense that it has a medical school, sociology departments etc., Vladimir Arnold, Sergei Novikov and some other Russian mathematicians did this and the university (Independent University of Moscow) still exists. Their programme is completely terrifying even if one has studied the very same subjects at a normal university though.
Since bacteria are so much more numerous and fast-breeding than humans there must have been many more opportunities for this sort of thing to evolve in bacteria than in humans though.
Yes, now that I've read them I realise that they appear a bit incoherent, but it is proofreading that they need, not to be written differently. The reason the posts appear a bit "dressed up" as you call it is that expressions that are common in my native language can become arbitrarily odd when translated directly into english and not any purposeful effort on my part.
Nash solutions work excellently in real life and in the prisoners dilemma in particular. There certainly can be people who do not play optimally, but they receive less utility from doing so and in real world situations they typically run out of resources to waste and become neglible.
Not being a native English speaker I was unable to tell the two apart, but it is I hope obvious that I meant rock-paper-scissors and not tic-tac-toe, but perhaps less so that I by the strategy of choosing all options with equal probabilities meant the strategy of choosing all options in rock-paper-scissors with equal probabilities. Regarding the feasability issues in modeling the game properly it is true that actually solving a game completely may be infeasible, but it would in my view be better to use approximate algorithms for the linear programming problems given rise to by it instead of using some easily subverted prediction technique. The whole thing reeks of technical analysis and using neural networks to "predict stock prices" neither of which has any sound foundation in either economics or as far as I know in reality.
Firstly it must be said the strategy of choosing the alternatives with equal probabilities is no way guessing, but simply playing the optimal mixed strategy, secondly there is nothing special about normal human behaviour; and if one plays the Nash-solutiuon ones opponents expected utility is bounded upwards by his Nash-solution, why he really can't do anything. I attempted to express that prediction is useless in games and that it is best simply to play the game as it is attempting to maximize ones expected utility by normal means and that strategies based on attempting to predict the opponent are bad: for as soon as ones opponent (or perhaps more properly the other player if it isn't a strictly competitive game) has chosen his predictive strategy one takes the fact that he plays according to a predictive strategy into consideration whereupon it becomes useless, he again predicts ones behaviour according to his strategy and a cycle of idiocy commences. Playing by predicting therefore is quite silly, but then "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", so one should probably take the risk of ruin (á la the St. Petersburg lottery) into account when deviating too far from trends (why predictions may not be entirely useless*) *It should be noted that I am a absolute beginner at game theory (only 7.5 credits), may be wrong and will despite my lack of skill apply it to everything due to the mental novelty and that I haven't made any calculations or proofs at all (on this).