Aw, crap. I was all set to write a snarky little bit about creepy Michael Wolff’s keynote address to the SIIA Information Industry Summit, wherein he opines that the Wall Street Journal “stopped mattering” when it placed its online content behind a paywall and that weblogs “lower the value of all information.” But The Rake beat me to it in fine, dandy style.
This one’s good, kids. Really good.
Yes, I know McAfee’s WiFiScan is the “first phase” of a multi-phase product launch. But it’s a poor implementation on at least two levels:
Sheesh.
At which point—or more precisely—at which percentage does an organism become too human to patent? Without acknowledging just how out of control US intellectual property laws have become, the US Patent and Trademark Office rejected a seven-year old attempt by Stuart Newman, a New York professor and scientist to patent a chimera. It’s important to note that Newman wanted the patent rejected, setting the precedent which would prevent other researchers from obtaining similar patents.
Whew, that was close, but it really doesn’t resolve the issue. The last (and only) time the US Supreme Court addressed patents on life was 25 years ago when, in a 5 - 4 decision, it found that patents could be issued on “anything under the sun that is made by man.” Dangerous precedent, that. Since that decision, the patent office has issued patents on 436 animals but announced in 1987 that it would not issue patents on humans. The patent office made the announcement without offering “legal rationale or statutory backing” according to Rick Weiss’s excellent article in this morning’s Washington Post.
MedicineNet.com has one of the better overviews of kidney failure and dialysis that I’ve seen, including the best single-paragraph explanation of kidney failure on the net:
Healthy kidneys clean the blood by filtering out extra water and wastes. They also make hormones that keep your bones strong and blood healthy. When both of your kidneys fail, your body holds fluid. Your blood pressure rises. Harmful wastes build up in your body. Your body doesn’t make enough red blood cells. You develop fatigue, nausea, and loss of appetite. When this happens, you need treatment to replace the work of your failed kidneys.
The overviews are flawed in their simplification and lack of depth—home dialysis isn’t mentioned in the dialysis section (but is in the kidney failure section), for example, and nocturnal dialysis isn’t mentioned at all—but it’s a pretty good start.
All the talk of Google being an operating system left me scratching my head for more than a year. I just didn’t get it until I read Steven Johnson’s “Tool for Thought” essay in this morning’s New York Times. Then the light went on and I remembered what I already knew (hell, what I’d written three books about fifteen years ago): associative search changes everything.
“These tools are smart enough to get around the classic search engine failing of excessive specificity: searching for ‘dog’ and missing all the articles that have only ‘canine’ in them. Modern indexing software learns associations between individual words, by tracking the frequency with which words appear near each other. This can create almost lyrical connections between ideas”
Of course none of this is new. The idea originated with Vannevar Bush in the 1940s, was refined by Doug Engelbart in the 1960s, polished by Ted Nelson in the 1970s, romanticized by Apple in the 1980s, and finally partially executed by Tim Berners-Lee in the 1990s.
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