Category: Science

Wikis to save the patent office?

Spotting
In a rare moment of potential sense in the U.S. patent, people are seriously discussing the possibility of using wikis to support the public review of patent applications. This is particularly exciting given the particularly sorry state of software patents, where lots of common sense ideas are granted broad, sweeping (and wildly chilling) patents, often when there was clear prior art that the Patent Office didn’t find.

It’s interesting that IBM is a big player in this. On the one hand, they have a ton of patents (including some pretty silly software patents) that are worth an enormous amount. On the other hand, bad software patents have the potential to really stunt certain kinds of open source development, and IBM has seriously hitched their wagon onto the open source train.

Tip of the hat to David Loewi for the original pointer to this Chronical of Higher Ed piece, which was in turned based on this (slightly) longer Fortune piece.

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Death by PowerPoint…literally…

OK, I promise to stop with the PowerPoint bashing Real Soon Now, but the situation is just so terrible that it’s hard to walk away.

In reading this thread from Tufte’s Q&A thing (sort of like his blog), he points to this post from the Arms and Influence blog, which quotes Thomas Ricks’ book Fiasco. Apparently the geniuses in the Bush Misadministration have taken to replacing direct orders and clear plans with PowerPoint Phluff, leaving the well meaning folks at the Pentagon struggling to make sense of it all. Check out, for example, this truly wondrous bit of Phluff that purports to explain how something as complex as the occupation phase of the current Iraq war was going to work:
PowerPoint Phluff explaining how the occupation phase of the current Iraq war was going to work.
Ah, right. I know exactly what to do now…

It’s worth repeating the conclusion from the Arms and Influence piece:

The Iraq disaster did not happen because someone in the JTF-IV planning group or the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) couldn’t write a good PowerPoint presentation. The problem was that anyone used PowerPoint to plan a war. Ricks is absolutely right in saying that only the most careless individual, in love with information technology for its own sake, would misuse technology in such an obvious fashion. Unfortunately, these are the people who planned and executed the Iraq war, and many of them are still prosecuting America’s wars.

BTW, Ricks give an excellent interview on The Daily Show recently. I suspect that Fiasco would be a very worthwhile (if quite depressing) read. After a little skimming I also was surprisingly impressed by the Arms and Influence blog (the title didn’t seem like my cup of tea). His description of flying on the day when the “liquids plot” broke in Britain is thoughtful and retains an impressive sense of perspective under difficult circumstances.

Tags: technology

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