Friday, August 12, 2011
The Great Splintering
by Umair Hague
There are many kinds of looting. There's looting your local superstore — and then there's, as Nobel Laureates Akerlof and Romer discussed in a paper now famous among geeks, there's looting a bank, a financial system, a corporation...or an entire economy. (Their paper might be crudely summed up in the pithy line: "The best way to rob a bank is to own one.") The bedrock of an enlightened social contract is, crudely, that rent-seeking is punished, and creating enduring, lasting, shared wealth is rewarded and that those who seek to profit by extraction are chastened rather than lauded. Today's world of bailouts, golden parachutes, sky-high financial-sector salaries — while middle incomes stagnate — seems to be exactly the reverse. Perhaps, then, our societies have reached a natural turning point of built-in self-limitation; and this self-limitation is causing a perfect storm to converge.
An enlightened social contract is not built on subsidies or "handouts" — whether to the impoverished, or to the pitiable welfare junkies formerly known as "the markets." It's built on a calculus of harm and benefit not just accepted by a plurality of its citizens (versus a tiny Chalet-owning, caviar-gobbling minority at the top) — and also a calculus that can be said to meaningful in the sense that it results in real human prosperity. Without such a bargain to set incentives and coordinate economic activity, even the mightiest, proudest societies will find themselves as bent old men on an endless plateau, searching for a lick of shelter as the typhoon bears down.
For much of the previous economic boom, the bargain on offer in modern Britain could have been abbreviated something like: "Want not merely to get rich — but to get richest, fastest? Then loot, plunder, and enjoy the rewards of conquest." (Consider the eye-popping bonuses for bankers just after the economy went into meltdown.) It was a recipe not for prosperity, but for fragmentation and decline; less a social contract than a sociopathic compact. And though the rioters are guilty of much — and that deserves nothing less than the iron fist of the law — I wonder if, perhaps, the crime inside their crime wasn't perversely, insidiously following the hideous logic of this sociopathic compact through to the fatal end.
Call it the logic of opulence: a paradigm of plenitude centred on more, bigger, faster, cheaper, nastier, now. Its glittering, unattainable fever dream seems to have driven the rioters mad. As one told the Guardian, "Why are you going to miss the opportunity to get free stuff that's worth loads of money?" Indeed: why, given a poisonous compact tattooed into the deeper calculus of everyday culture, not? Hence, as many have pointed out, the mob hasn't exactly been looting bookshops, but the stuff of faux-luxe, mass-designer plenitude: plasma TVs, fast fashion, video games. The vision they seemed to be pursuing, as if their long-denied birthright, is less one of sign-waving activism, fighting against deep-seated social injustice, and more one of raiding a consumerist Disneyland to which they've long been glumly denied a ticket.
Read more:
There are many kinds of looting. There's looting your local superstore — and then there's, as Nobel Laureates Akerlof and Romer discussed in a paper now famous among geeks, there's looting a bank, a financial system, a corporation...or an entire economy. (Their paper might be crudely summed up in the pithy line: "The best way to rob a bank is to own one.") The bedrock of an enlightened social contract is, crudely, that rent-seeking is punished, and creating enduring, lasting, shared wealth is rewarded and that those who seek to profit by extraction are chastened rather than lauded. Today's world of bailouts, golden parachutes, sky-high financial-sector salaries — while middle incomes stagnate — seems to be exactly the reverse. Perhaps, then, our societies have reached a natural turning point of built-in self-limitation; and this self-limitation is causing a perfect storm to converge.
An enlightened social contract is not built on subsidies or "handouts" — whether to the impoverished, or to the pitiable welfare junkies formerly known as "the markets." It's built on a calculus of harm and benefit not just accepted by a plurality of its citizens (versus a tiny Chalet-owning, caviar-gobbling minority at the top) — and also a calculus that can be said to meaningful in the sense that it results in real human prosperity. Without such a bargain to set incentives and coordinate economic activity, even the mightiest, proudest societies will find themselves as bent old men on an endless plateau, searching for a lick of shelter as the typhoon bears down.For much of the previous economic boom, the bargain on offer in modern Britain could have been abbreviated something like: "Want not merely to get rich — but to get richest, fastest? Then loot, plunder, and enjoy the rewards of conquest." (Consider the eye-popping bonuses for bankers just after the economy went into meltdown.) It was a recipe not for prosperity, but for fragmentation and decline; less a social contract than a sociopathic compact. And though the rioters are guilty of much — and that deserves nothing less than the iron fist of the law — I wonder if, perhaps, the crime inside their crime wasn't perversely, insidiously following the hideous logic of this sociopathic compact through to the fatal end.
Call it the logic of opulence: a paradigm of plenitude centred on more, bigger, faster, cheaper, nastier, now. Its glittering, unattainable fever dream seems to have driven the rioters mad. As one told the Guardian, "Why are you going to miss the opportunity to get free stuff that's worth loads of money?" Indeed: why, given a poisonous compact tattooed into the deeper calculus of everyday culture, not? Hence, as many have pointed out, the mob hasn't exactly been looting bookshops, but the stuff of faux-luxe, mass-designer plenitude: plasma TVs, fast fashion, video games. The vision they seemed to be pursuing, as if their long-denied birthright, is less one of sign-waving activism, fighting against deep-seated social injustice, and more one of raiding a consumerist Disneyland to which they've long been glumly denied a ticket.
Read more:
Would You LIke a Smile With That?
Pret a Manger, the veddy British chain, has gained a foothold in our McWorld of burgers and fries, where you can fun-size this, combo that and, let’s face it, sort of expect sullen service.
Next to, say, McDonald’s, Pret a Manger amounts to a fleck of relish, if that. Last year, Pret posted sales of £327.5 million, or about $534 million at current exchange rates. The take at McDonald’s: $24 billion. But Pret a Manger — the name means “ready to eat” in French — is slowly expanding in New York and other American cities with its own brand of grab-and-go food and, more significantly, a fresh approach to fast-food service. Pret feels almost nothing like an American chain. At a Starbucks in Midtown, you can wait 10 minutes for your latte during the morning rush. At Pret, the goal is to serve customers within 60 seconds. At some fast-food outlets in the city, cashiers might fling your cheeseburger across the counter, Frisbee-style. At Pret, they compliment your earrings.
What makes Pret a Manger a compelling business case study is its approach to customer service and to training and motivating its staff. Yes, Pret happens to make sandwiches — but the lessons are worth knowing, whatever your line of work.
Many businesses have trouble getting longtime employees to work well and, in particular, to work well together. But Pret has managed to build productive, friendly crews out of relatively low-paid, transient employees. And its workers seem pretty happy about it. Its annual work force turnover rate is about 60 percent — low for the fast-food industry, where the rate is normally 300 to 400 percent.
At the request of Sunday Business, Francis Flynn, a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, reviewed some of the management practices of Pret a Manger. He liked what he saw.
“A lot of people think about these jobs as almost hopeless when it comes to motivating the employees who work there, and it’s kind of sad, and I also think it’s incorrect,” Professor Flynn said. “My sense is there’s a really holistic approach, a comprehensive approach, to development.”
Pret is succeeding with just such an out-of-the-box approach. So far this year, the sales in its 34 American stores — in New York, Chicago and Washington — have increased 40 percent from the same period last year. The company’s total profits, with its approximately 225 British shops contributing the most by far, rose about 37 percent, to £46 million ($75 million) in 2010. Pret plans to expand further in the United States, and in — yipes! — Paris, where it plans to open two shops this year.
How does Pret a Manger do it? To find out, I went to London to learn about the company’s approach to training and teamwork, as well as how to make a proper Pret sandwich. When I landed, I grabbed a coffee at a Pret shop across my from hotel and watched a thin, shaggy-haired employee pick up garbage and sweep the floor. He was skipping as he worked.
This, I thought, was going to be interesting.
Read more:
Friday Book Club - I Know This Much is True
by Karen Karbo
In this follow-up novel to Wally Lamb's Oprah- sanctioned best seller, ''She's Come Undone,'' everyone is bereft, in realms both seen and unseen. Characters have lost love, faith and hope, not to mention hands, legs, thumbs, even lips.
Lamb's narrator, Dominick Birdsey, has lost his mother, his wife, his infant daughter, his career. His identical twin brother, the gentle Thomas, has lost his mind. A paranoid schizophrenic with the usual obsessive interest in alien life-forms, Communism, God and government conspiracy, Thomas goes into the public library one morning during the early rumblings of Desert Storm and cuts off his hand in a biblically inspired protest against the impending war.
What follows is the 40-year-old Dominick's meltdown. In his struggle to do right by Thomas, the brother he loves, resents and envies in equal measure, he is forced to face not just his own demons but the entire cavalcade of nightmares that have bedeviled the Birdsey clan. After Dominick decides on Thomas's behalf not to have his hand reattached -- '' 'I'll just rip it off again,' my brother warned. 'Do you think a few stitches are going to keep me from doing what I have to do? I have a pact with the Lord God Almighty' '' -- Thomas is transferred from the state hospital to a maximum-security forensic institute that ''houses most of the front-page boys: the vet from Mystic who mistook his family for the Vietcong, the kid at Wesleyan who brought his .22-caliber semiautomatic to class.''
Meanwhile, Dominick has been trying to put other parts of his unhappy past to rest -- by getting over his divorce from Dessa, the woman he still loves, and sorting things out with Joy, his current live-in girlfriend, a perky, twice-divorced 25-year-old who works at the local health club and whose life is a mess, even by Dominick's liberal standards.
Happily, this isn't the half of it. Also running through the story is Dominick's quest to get a translation of the memoir written by his Sicilian grandfather (and namesake) as a present for his dying mother. The memoir is lost, then found, then eventually shared with the reader in its entirety.
Lamb takes a great risk here. The bombastic, self-aggrandizing ''History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man From Humble Beginnings'' begins two-thirds of the way through a novel that is already full to bursting with calamitous activity, appearing just when Dominick has hit bottom. It's a tribute to Lamb's considerable gifts that we wind up feeling sorry for this obnoxious patriarch, even as we loathe him.
''I Know This Much Is True'' is big and somewhat blowzy -- there should be an enforceable limit to how many psychotherapy sessions can be included in one novel -- but it never grapples with anything less than life's biggest questions. How do you live with unresolved issues that die with the dead? How do you deal with an abusive parent who, nevertheless, was always there for you? Being touched by an angel is not an option.
Lamb clearly aims to be a modern-day Dostoyevsky with a pop sensibility. In his view, it's not just the present that's the pits, that gives you nightmares and ruins your chances for happiness, it's also the ghosts of dysfunctional family members and your nonrelationship with a mocking, sadistic God, whom you still turn to in times of trouble -- which is all the time.
About the death of his 3-week-old daughter, Dominick says: ''Life didn't have to make sense, I'd concluded: that was the big joke. Get it? You could have a brother who stuck metal clips in his hair to deflect enemy signals from Cuba, and a biological father who, in 33 years, had never shown his face, and a baby dead in her bassinet . . . and none of it meant a . . . thing. Life was a whoopee cushion, a chair yanked away just as you were having a seat. What was that old Army song? We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here.''
Luckily for lovers of the novel, so is Wally Lamb.
via:
In this follow-up novel to Wally Lamb's Oprah- sanctioned best seller, ''She's Come Undone,'' everyone is bereft, in realms both seen and unseen. Characters have lost love, faith and hope, not to mention hands, legs, thumbs, even lips.Lamb's narrator, Dominick Birdsey, has lost his mother, his wife, his infant daughter, his career. His identical twin brother, the gentle Thomas, has lost his mind. A paranoid schizophrenic with the usual obsessive interest in alien life-forms, Communism, God and government conspiracy, Thomas goes into the public library one morning during the early rumblings of Desert Storm and cuts off his hand in a biblically inspired protest against the impending war.
What follows is the 40-year-old Dominick's meltdown. In his struggle to do right by Thomas, the brother he loves, resents and envies in equal measure, he is forced to face not just his own demons but the entire cavalcade of nightmares that have bedeviled the Birdsey clan. After Dominick decides on Thomas's behalf not to have his hand reattached -- '' 'I'll just rip it off again,' my brother warned. 'Do you think a few stitches are going to keep me from doing what I have to do? I have a pact with the Lord God Almighty' '' -- Thomas is transferred from the state hospital to a maximum-security forensic institute that ''houses most of the front-page boys: the vet from Mystic who mistook his family for the Vietcong, the kid at Wesleyan who brought his .22-caliber semiautomatic to class.''
Meanwhile, Dominick has been trying to put other parts of his unhappy past to rest -- by getting over his divorce from Dessa, the woman he still loves, and sorting things out with Joy, his current live-in girlfriend, a perky, twice-divorced 25-year-old who works at the local health club and whose life is a mess, even by Dominick's liberal standards.
Happily, this isn't the half of it. Also running through the story is Dominick's quest to get a translation of the memoir written by his Sicilian grandfather (and namesake) as a present for his dying mother. The memoir is lost, then found, then eventually shared with the reader in its entirety.
Lamb takes a great risk here. The bombastic, self-aggrandizing ''History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man From Humble Beginnings'' begins two-thirds of the way through a novel that is already full to bursting with calamitous activity, appearing just when Dominick has hit bottom. It's a tribute to Lamb's considerable gifts that we wind up feeling sorry for this obnoxious patriarch, even as we loathe him.
''I Know This Much Is True'' is big and somewhat blowzy -- there should be an enforceable limit to how many psychotherapy sessions can be included in one novel -- but it never grapples with anything less than life's biggest questions. How do you live with unresolved issues that die with the dead? How do you deal with an abusive parent who, nevertheless, was always there for you? Being touched by an angel is not an option.
Lamb clearly aims to be a modern-day Dostoyevsky with a pop sensibility. In his view, it's not just the present that's the pits, that gives you nightmares and ruins your chances for happiness, it's also the ghosts of dysfunctional family members and your nonrelationship with a mocking, sadistic God, whom you still turn to in times of trouble -- which is all the time.
About the death of his 3-week-old daughter, Dominick says: ''Life didn't have to make sense, I'd concluded: that was the big joke. Get it? You could have a brother who stuck metal clips in his hair to deflect enemy signals from Cuba, and a biological father who, in 33 years, had never shown his face, and a baby dead in her bassinet . . . and none of it meant a . . . thing. Life was a whoopee cushion, a chair yanked away just as you were having a seat. What was that old Army song? We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here.''
Luckily for lovers of the novel, so is Wally Lamb.
via:
Moral Hypocrisy, and How to Avoid It
by Dan Jones
At the beginning of 2005, Ted Haggard’s stock was high and rising. Time magazine had just included him on a ‘Top 25’ chart of influential Evangelical Christian pastors in America. He had the ear of not only a huge public following, but also President Bush and his advisors. You could easily have thought God was on his side.
At the beginning of 2005, Ted Haggard’s stock was high and rising. Time magazine had just included him on a ‘Top 25’ chart of influential Evangelical Christian pastors in America. He had the ear of not only a huge public following, but also President Bush and his advisors. You could easily have thought God was on his side.
But it wasn’t to last. By the end of the following year, his value on the Evangelical market had plummeted. The fatal bombshell hit at the start of November 2006. During a live radio interview, Mike Jones, a 49-year-old fitness fanatic who formerly worked as a masseur and escort, revealed a hidden — and deeply hypocritical — side to Haggard. Jones reported that for the previous three years, and until just three months earlier, he and Haggard had hooked up on a monthly basis to get high on crystal meth and have sex. Haggard paid for both.For such a prominent Evangelical, one so publicly opposed to gay rights and so vocal in preaching the virtues of clean, family living, this is about a bad as PR can get. It beats a bit of gambling or garden-variety adultery hands down. Haggard, naturally, denied the charges at first, but later capitulated. He soon stepped down as pastor of New Life Church (the megachurch he founded in Colorado Springs 32 years earlier), resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and dropped out of the limelight. In 2007, Haggard and his family relocated to Phoenix to begin the ‘restoration process’.
Now I know Schadenfreude isn’t the noblest sentiment to nurture or admit to, but I confess that I sometimes find it irresistible. Moralistic blowhards exposed for indulging in the supposed sins that they castigate and denounce other people for succumbing to; that usually does it for me. (Obviously I feel bad for his family; and, if I think about it, Haggard too, who must be a fairly conflicted soul.)
Moral hypocrisy isn’t usually so spectacular. Yet even in its more mundane manifestations — the friend who claims to care about the environment but makes a needless 15-minute drive to the supermarket — it’s still pretty annoying. Double standards generally are.
In recent years psychologists have begun to probe our capacity for moral hypocrisy, and the factors which influence whether we hold ourselves and others to comparable moral standards. Moral hypocrisy can be studied in the lab in a number of ways. One is to have people judge the fairness of their own actions, and to compare that with how they judge seeing someone else perform the very same action. The discrepancy between the two judgments is a measure of moral hypocrisy.
Pearl Jam
[ed. I prefer the Mother Love Bone version with Andrew Wood. After he died, Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament went on to form Pearl Jam and this version of Crown of Thorns is not bad, either. Eddie is great, as always.]
Iraq Foots the Bill for its Own Destruction
When considering the premise of reparation being paid for the Iraq War it would be natural to assume that the party to whom such payments would be made would be the Iraqi civilian population, the ordinary people who suffered the brunt of the devastation from the fighting. Fought on the false pretence of capturing Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the war resulted in massive indiscriminate suffering for Iraqi civilians which continues to this day. Estimates of the number of dead and wounded range from the hundreds of thousands into the millions, and additional millions of refugees remain been forcibly separated from their homes, livelihoods and families. Billions of dollars in reparations are indeed being paid for the Iraq War, but not to Iraqis who lost loved ones or property as a result of the conflict, and who, despite their nation’s oil wealth, are still suffering the effects of an utterly destroyed economy. "Reparations payments" are being made by Iraq to Americans and others for the suffering which those parties experienced as a result of the past two decades of conflict with Iraq.
In addition to making hundreds of millions of dollars in reparation payments to the United States, Iraq has been paying similarly huge sums to corporations whose business suffered as a result of the actions of Saddam Hussein. While millions of ordinary Iraqis continue to lack even reliable access to drinking water, their free and representative government has been paying damages to corporations such as Pepsi, Philip Morris and Sheraton; ostensibly for the terrible hardships their shareholders endured due to the disruption in the business environment resulting from the Gulf War. When viewed against the backdrop of massive privatization of Iraqi natural resources, the image that takes shape is that of corporate pillaging of a destroyed country made possible by military force.
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Smartphones of the Future
by Ginny Miles
As you're reading this article, developers, engineers, and product designers are working on the next great mobile technology. The mobile world is rapidly changing: Smartphones have gone from portable messaging and email devices to streaming-video machines that surf the Web at blazing speed and have cameras that rival point-and-shoots (and they also happen to make calls). What will smartphones look like in five years? Or ten? What sort of amazing things will they be able to do?
Of course, we have no way to predict exactly how cell phones will evolve (unless some sort of magical crystal ball comes along), but looking at today’s trends and tracking what the geniuses at MIT and other academic institutions are up to can give us a pretty good idea of what’s to come.
Read more:
As you're reading this article, developers, engineers, and product designers are working on the next great mobile technology. The mobile world is rapidly changing: Smartphones have gone from portable messaging and email devices to streaming-video machines that surf the Web at blazing speed and have cameras that rival point-and-shoots (and they also happen to make calls). What will smartphones look like in five years? Or ten? What sort of amazing things will they be able to do? Of course, we have no way to predict exactly how cell phones will evolve (unless some sort of magical crystal ball comes along), but looking at today’s trends and tracking what the geniuses at MIT and other academic institutions are up to can give us a pretty good idea of what’s to come.
Read more:
'Huge' Results Raise Hope for Cancer Breakthrough
by Eryn Brown, LA Times
In a potential breakthrough in cancer research, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have genetically engineered patients' T cells — a type of white blood cell — to attack cancer cells in advanced cases of a common type of leukemia.
Two of the three patients who received doses of the designer T cells in a clinical trial have remained cancer-free for more than a year, the researchers said.
Experts not connected with the trial said the feat was important because it suggested that T cells could be tweaked to kill a range of cancers, including ones of the blood, breast and colon.
"This is a huge accomplishment — huge," said Dr. Lee M. Nadler, dean for clinical and translational research at Harvard Medical School, who discovered the molecule on cancer cells that the Pennsylvania team's engineered T cells target.
Findings of the trial were reported Wednesday in two journals.
To build the cancer-attacking cells, the researchers modified a virus to carry instructions for making a molecule that binds with leukemia cells and directs T cells to kill them. Then they drew blood from three patients who suffered from chronic lymphocytic leukemia and infected their T cells with the virus.
When they infused the blood back into the patients, the engineered T cells successfully eradicated cancer cells, multiplied to more than 1,000 times in number and survived for months. They even produced dormant "memory" T cells that might spring back to life if the cancer was to return.
"We knew [the therapy] could be very potent," said Dr. David Porter, director of the blood and marrow transplantation program at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and a coauthor of both papers, which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine. "But I don't think we expected it to be this dramatic on this go-around."
Read more:
In a potential breakthrough in cancer research, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have genetically engineered patients' T cells — a type of white blood cell — to attack cancer cells in advanced cases of a common type of leukemia.Two of the three patients who received doses of the designer T cells in a clinical trial have remained cancer-free for more than a year, the researchers said.
Experts not connected with the trial said the feat was important because it suggested that T cells could be tweaked to kill a range of cancers, including ones of the blood, breast and colon.
"This is a huge accomplishment — huge," said Dr. Lee M. Nadler, dean for clinical and translational research at Harvard Medical School, who discovered the molecule on cancer cells that the Pennsylvania team's engineered T cells target.
Findings of the trial were reported Wednesday in two journals.
To build the cancer-attacking cells, the researchers modified a virus to carry instructions for making a molecule that binds with leukemia cells and directs T cells to kill them. Then they drew blood from three patients who suffered from chronic lymphocytic leukemia and infected their T cells with the virus.
When they infused the blood back into the patients, the engineered T cells successfully eradicated cancer cells, multiplied to more than 1,000 times in number and survived for months. They even produced dormant "memory" T cells that might spring back to life if the cancer was to return.
"We knew [the therapy] could be very potent," said Dr. David Porter, director of the blood and marrow transplantation program at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and a coauthor of both papers, which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine. "But I don't think we expected it to be this dramatic on this go-around."
Read more:
Thursday, August 11, 2011
The Patent System Isn't Broken - We Are
[ed. Two patent articles in one day (you might conclude that I've been sensitized to patent and copyright issues lately, and you would be right - see the Note and Interesting Article link on the sidebar). But, wow, this article is impressive. Great essay on the history, function and use of patents and how they affect intellectual property and technical innovation.]
by Nilay Patel
There is a fundamental problem with patents in the United States.
It is us.
By that I mean all of us: the companies and people who directly interact with the patent system, the media that reports on those interactions, the analysts and experts who inform the media, and finally the large, active, and vocal readership that we try and service with our reporting. As a group, we have accepted and let lie the lazy conventional wisdom that the patent system is broken beyond repair, a relic of a previous time that has been obsoleted by the rapid pace of technical innovation, particularly in software, and that it should perhaps be scrapped altogether.
In the past few months, this rhetoric has grown to a furious roar, as the patent system seems to be affecting more and more of the technology industry in a negative way: small mobile app developers have been targeted with spurious lawsuits from companies that make nothing, major players like Apple, HTC, and Samsung are locked in patent-related litigation, and a pair of multibillion-dollar patent auctions has sparked an unprecedented war of words between Microsoft and Google. The most passionate critics loudly argue that whatever benefits our current patent system might offer have now been exceeded by its costs; that resources that should otherwise go to the development of new ideas are instead being misspent on the overzealous protection of the old.
This line of thinking has been so forcefully and insistently repeated that it has become almost axiomatic, an intellectual and rhetorical cheat that is rarely (if ever) questioned. But it’s also wrong — painfully wrong, in ways that sabotage any real attempt at reform. Being loud and angry is a great way to get attention, but it’s a terrible way to actually get anything done — especially since most of the emphatic chest-pounding sounds like a slightly dumber version of an argument we’ve been having in this country since Thomas Jefferson was appointed the first head of the Patent Office.
So let’s start over, shall we? Let’s actually look at how the patent system works, where it’s specifically malfunctioning, and how we can fix it. Ready? Let’s go.
Let’s think about what that means in practice. Here’s US patent #6,285,999, which is Larry Page’s patent on PageRank, the core algorithm that powers Google search. Because getting a patent means Page had to fully disclose the technology, we can go right ahead and look at some of the math behind one of the most important and disruptive inventions in the history of the world.
(Remember, this isn’t what’s actually patented — it’s just the required specification that supports the patent claims.) Because getting a patent means accepting a time-limited monopoly on your invention, anyone will be able to use this specification to build their own search engine when the patent expires in 2018. In the meantime, you’re free to look at Google’s work and attempt to design around the specific claims in the patent. That’s an important way the patent system encourages innovation, actually: it forces inventors to build alternative ways to do things. You can bet Microsoft’s Bing team has spent hours studying the PageRank patent in an attempt to build something that works differently — and hopefully better.
There is a fundamental problem with patents in the United States.
It is us.
By that I mean all of us: the companies and people who directly interact with the patent system, the media that reports on those interactions, the analysts and experts who inform the media, and finally the large, active, and vocal readership that we try and service with our reporting. As a group, we have accepted and let lie the lazy conventional wisdom that the patent system is broken beyond repair, a relic of a previous time that has been obsoleted by the rapid pace of technical innovation, particularly in software, and that it should perhaps be scrapped altogether.
In the past few months, this rhetoric has grown to a furious roar, as the patent system seems to be affecting more and more of the technology industry in a negative way: small mobile app developers have been targeted with spurious lawsuits from companies that make nothing, major players like Apple, HTC, and Samsung are locked in patent-related litigation, and a pair of multibillion-dollar patent auctions has sparked an unprecedented war of words between Microsoft and Google. The most passionate critics loudly argue that whatever benefits our current patent system might offer have now been exceeded by its costs; that resources that should otherwise go to the development of new ideas are instead being misspent on the overzealous protection of the old.
This line of thinking has been so forcefully and insistently repeated that it has become almost axiomatic, an intellectual and rhetorical cheat that is rarely (if ever) questioned. But it’s also wrong — painfully wrong, in ways that sabotage any real attempt at reform. Being loud and angry is a great way to get attention, but it’s a terrible way to actually get anything done — especially since most of the emphatic chest-pounding sounds like a slightly dumber version of an argument we’ve been having in this country since Thomas Jefferson was appointed the first head of the Patent Office.
So let’s start over, shall we? Let’s actually look at how the patent system works, where it’s specifically malfunctioning, and how we can fix it. Ready? Let’s go.
The patent exchange
The core public policy behind the patent system is widely ignored, even though it’s extremely simple and really quite clever. Patents are more than just a simple incentive for people to develop new inventions — they’re actually an exchange between inventors and the public. In exchange for a time-limited monopoly on their inventions, inventors must fully disclose the invention itself in the patent specification, and agree to release their work into the public domain once their monopoly runs out. The rules for disclosure are laid out in 35 U.S.C. § 112, and they’re fairly strict: the specification must be detailed enough so that anyone with “ordinary skill in the art” of the invention can build the claimed technology, and they must also disclose the “best mode” of building the invention. Breaking the rules can have severe consequences, since a patent that doesn’t adequately disclose the claimed invention can be ruled invalid. And since patent specifications fall into the public domain once the patent expires, we get a huge and constantly-growing vault of fully-disclosed technology that anyone can use to build new products.Let’s think about what that means in practice. Here’s US patent #6,285,999, which is Larry Page’s patent on PageRank, the core algorithm that powers Google search. Because getting a patent means Page had to fully disclose the technology, we can go right ahead and look at some of the math behind one of the most important and disruptive inventions in the history of the world.
(Remember, this isn’t what’s actually patented — it’s just the required specification that supports the patent claims.) Because getting a patent means accepting a time-limited monopoly on your invention, anyone will be able to use this specification to build their own search engine when the patent expires in 2018. In the meantime, you’re free to look at Google’s work and attempt to design around the specific claims in the patent. That’s an important way the patent system encourages innovation, actually: it forces inventors to build alternative ways to do things. You can bet Microsoft’s Bing team has spent hours studying the PageRank patent in an attempt to build something that works differently — and hopefully better.
Seu Jorge
Inside Pfizer's Palace Coup
by Peter Elkind and Jennifer Reingold
For Jeff Kindler, it was a humiliating moment. The CEO of Pfizer, the world's largest pharmaceutical company, had been summoned to the airport in Fort Myers, Fla., on Saturday, Dec. 4, 2010, for a highly unusual purpose: to plead for his job.
Three stone-faced directors, representing the company's board, sat inside a drab airport conference room as the CEO, trained as a trial lawyer, struggled to argue his most important case. Alerted to this meeting less than 24 hours earlier, Kindler detailed his accomplishments, speaking nonstop for the better part of an hour. He touted his bold reorganizations, praised his administration's sweeping cost reductions, and rhapsodized about his reinvention of Pfizer's crucial research-and-development operations.
But the three board members, Constance Horner, a former deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; George Lorch, an ex-CEO of Armstrong World Holdings; and Bill Gray, a former Philadelphia congressman, weren't there to debate the direction of the company. The board had spent a frantic week in an urgent investigation: A revolt had erupted against Kindler among a handful of senior managers, and the directors were trying to figure out what was going on. One possibility: an internal power grab. Another: a CEO who was unraveling.
As the meeting continued -- it lasted more than two hours -- it became clear that Kindler had little chance of saving his job. Perhaps, he finally said, it was time for him to resign. The directors, who seemed ready for this suggestion, told Kindler they were prepared to give him a far more generous settlement package if he didn't take the fight to the full board. Kindler agreed to think it over and flew home.
A day later, in an unusual Sunday night announcement, the 55-year-old CEO retired, effective immediately. Pfizer's press release offered a surprisingly candid explanation, which was inserted by Kindler himself: "The combination of meeting the requirements of our many shareholders around the world and the 24/7 nature of my responsibilities has made this period extremely demanding on me personally."
As revealing as it was, that statement only hinted at the turmoil inside Pfizer (PFE). Indeed, what has occurred at the company -- whose $68 billion in annual sales are built on blockbuster drugs such as Lipitor and Viagra -- is extraordinary. Once a Wall Street darling and corporate icon, Pfizer has tumbled into disarray. In the decade that ended with Kindler's departure, its stock price sagged from a high of $49 down to $17 and its drug pipeline dried up (problems the company continues to grapple with today). Pfizer lost its way, stumbling through a frantic series of zigzags in the hopes of finding new blockbusters to sustain its prodigious profits in the future.
Meanwhile, its managers descended into behavior that would do Shakespeare -- or Machiavelli -- proud. There was the ex-CEO who couldn't relinquish his power and quietly maneuvered to undercut two successors he had helped install. Then there was the human resources chief who divided the staff rather than uniting it. Most of all, there was Kindler himself, a bright man with some fresh ideas for reforming Pfizer but a person who agonized over decisions even as he second-guessed everybody else's actions. The story of Jeff Kindler's tumultuous tenure at Pfizer is a saga of ambition, intrigue, backstabbing, and betrayal -- all of it exacerbated by a board that allowed the problems to fester for years.
The full story of Kindler's downfall has never before been told. Fortune reported this article for four months, interviewing 102 people, including executives and directors who worked closely with him at Pfizer and at previous stages of his career. For their parts, both Kindler and the company say that they are bound by a confidentiality agreement they signed as part of Kindler's departure.
Kindler declined to speak about Pfizer, but a representative provided a written statement: "Pfizer is a great company I was privileged to serve for nine years. I am proud of what our team accomplished and delighted to see [new CEO Ian Read], together with the business and scientific leaders we brought together, continue to build on these achievements." In its own statement, the drug company told Fortune: "We thank Jeff Kindler for his many years of service to Pfizer," noting that "Jeff came into the industry at a tumultuous time and faced significant challenges such as patent expirations of some of our major products .… We wish Jeff well in all of his future endeavors."
In the end, the story of Jeff Kindler's time at Pfizer provides a window into the challenges facing a mammoth company in an essential industry -- and the people who aspire to govern it. Pfizer is an enterprise with the noble calling of easing pain and curing disease. Yet its leaders spent much of their time in the tawdry business of turf wars and political scheming.
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Three stone-faced directors, representing the company's board, sat inside a drab airport conference room as the CEO, trained as a trial lawyer, struggled to argue his most important case. Alerted to this meeting less than 24 hours earlier, Kindler detailed his accomplishments, speaking nonstop for the better part of an hour. He touted his bold reorganizations, praised his administration's sweeping cost reductions, and rhapsodized about his reinvention of Pfizer's crucial research-and-development operations.
But the three board members, Constance Horner, a former deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; George Lorch, an ex-CEO of Armstrong World Holdings; and Bill Gray, a former Philadelphia congressman, weren't there to debate the direction of the company. The board had spent a frantic week in an urgent investigation: A revolt had erupted against Kindler among a handful of senior managers, and the directors were trying to figure out what was going on. One possibility: an internal power grab. Another: a CEO who was unraveling.
As the meeting continued -- it lasted more than two hours -- it became clear that Kindler had little chance of saving his job. Perhaps, he finally said, it was time for him to resign. The directors, who seemed ready for this suggestion, told Kindler they were prepared to give him a far more generous settlement package if he didn't take the fight to the full board. Kindler agreed to think it over and flew home.
A day later, in an unusual Sunday night announcement, the 55-year-old CEO retired, effective immediately. Pfizer's press release offered a surprisingly candid explanation, which was inserted by Kindler himself: "The combination of meeting the requirements of our many shareholders around the world and the 24/7 nature of my responsibilities has made this period extremely demanding on me personally."
As revealing as it was, that statement only hinted at the turmoil inside Pfizer (PFE). Indeed, what has occurred at the company -- whose $68 billion in annual sales are built on blockbuster drugs such as Lipitor and Viagra -- is extraordinary. Once a Wall Street darling and corporate icon, Pfizer has tumbled into disarray. In the decade that ended with Kindler's departure, its stock price sagged from a high of $49 down to $17 and its drug pipeline dried up (problems the company continues to grapple with today). Pfizer lost its way, stumbling through a frantic series of zigzags in the hopes of finding new blockbusters to sustain its prodigious profits in the future.
Meanwhile, its managers descended into behavior that would do Shakespeare -- or Machiavelli -- proud. There was the ex-CEO who couldn't relinquish his power and quietly maneuvered to undercut two successors he had helped install. Then there was the human resources chief who divided the staff rather than uniting it. Most of all, there was Kindler himself, a bright man with some fresh ideas for reforming Pfizer but a person who agonized over decisions even as he second-guessed everybody else's actions. The story of Jeff Kindler's tumultuous tenure at Pfizer is a saga of ambition, intrigue, backstabbing, and betrayal -- all of it exacerbated by a board that allowed the problems to fester for years.
The full story of Kindler's downfall has never before been told. Fortune reported this article for four months, interviewing 102 people, including executives and directors who worked closely with him at Pfizer and at previous stages of his career. For their parts, both Kindler and the company say that they are bound by a confidentiality agreement they signed as part of Kindler's departure.
Kindler declined to speak about Pfizer, but a representative provided a written statement: "Pfizer is a great company I was privileged to serve for nine years. I am proud of what our team accomplished and delighted to see [new CEO Ian Read], together with the business and scientific leaders we brought together, continue to build on these achievements." In its own statement, the drug company told Fortune: "We thank Jeff Kindler for his many years of service to Pfizer," noting that "Jeff came into the industry at a tumultuous time and faced significant challenges such as patent expirations of some of our major products .… We wish Jeff well in all of his future endeavors."
In the end, the story of Jeff Kindler's time at Pfizer provides a window into the challenges facing a mammoth company in an essential industry -- and the people who aspire to govern it. Pfizer is an enterprise with the noble calling of easing pain and curing disease. Yet its leaders spent much of their time in the tawdry business of turf wars and political scheming.
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The Motorcycle Gangs
[ed. Slow news day today: just stuff about rioting, revolutions, collapsing economies, starving multitudes, endless wars, venal politicians and rapacious bankers. Ho hum, eh? So here's an essay from Hunter S. Thompson, circa 1965, about the Hell's Angels. What makes this seem relevant today is how easy it is to substitute our current bogeymen - terrorists, illegal immigrants, minorities in general - and feel the same dynamic playing out in our media, over and over again.]
by Hunter S. Thompson
Last Labor Day weekend newspapers all over California gave front-page reports of a heinous gang rape in the moonlit sand dunes near the town of Seaside on the Monterey Peninsula. Two girls, aged 14 and 15, were allegedly taken from their dates by a gang of filthy, frenzied, boozed-up motorcycle hoodlums called "Hell's Angels," and dragged off to be "repeatedly assaulted."
A deputy sheriff, summoned by one of the erstwhile dates, said he "arrived at the beach and saw a huge bonfire surrounded by cyclists of both sexes. Then the two sobbing, near-hysterical girls staggered out of the darkness, begging for help. One was completely nude and the other had on only a torn sweater."
Some 300 Hell's Angels were gathered in the Seaside-Monterey area at the time, having convened, they said, for the purpose of raising funds among themselves to send the body of a former member, killed in an accident, back to his mother in North Carolina. One of the Angels, hip enough to falsely identify himself as "Frenchy of San Bernardino," told a reporter who came out to meet the cyclists: "We chose Monterey because we get treated good here; most other places we get thrown out of town."
But Frenchy spoke too soon. The Angels weren't on the peninsula twenty-four hours before four of them were in jail for rape, and the rest of the troop was being escorted to the county line by a large police contingent. Several were quoted, somewhat derisively, as saying: "That rape charge against our guys is phony and it won't stick."
It turned out to be true, but that was another story and certainly no headliner. The difference between the Hell's Angels in the paper and the Hell's Angels for real is enough to make a man wonder what newsprint is for. It also raises a question as to who are the real hell's angels.
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Eat More Fiber
Level 3 Communications, a fiber network company with 84,000 miles of cable, comes clean about the real danger to its business
By
Among the enemies of the future, we should count the common squirrel. According to Level 3 Communications, which maintains an 84,000-mile fiber network, the cute rodents do 17 percent of the damage to their fiber optic network.
Fred Lawler, a company vice president who "is passionate about fiber protection," wrote about the "furry little nut eater" problem in a blog post for Level 3.
Of all the animals in the whole world, almost all of our animal damage comes from this furry little nut eater. Squirrel chews account for a whopping 17% of our damages so far this year! But let me add that it is down from 28% just last year and it continues to decrease since we added cable guards to our plant. Honestly, I don't understand what the big attraction is or why they feel compelled to gnaw through cables. Our guys in the field have given this some thought and jokingly suspect the cable manufacturers of using peanut oil in the sheathing. If you have any new ideas on how we can combat these wayward rodents, I'd love to hear from you. We are always looking for ways to improve.Read more:
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