A definition states what a word or concept means, while a description identifies properties or qualities of things.  Both of these answer the question, “What?”

However, to fully grasp a difficult concept, we need an explanation.  An explanation answers the question, “Why?” 

As we wade through the knowledge base of science, it becomes easy to confuse definitions and descriptions with having a thorough understanding of a topic.

To better clarify this concept we need to first look at past efforts to define the world around us.  Let’s start with the creation of the dictionary and the word battles that took place two centuries ago. 

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Understanding the new realities of economic development

The USPTO is hiring. In fact they are doing a lot of hiring, over 1,200 new examiners every year, and they still can’t keep up with the deluge of new patent filings.

But while the number of patent filings has grown from 90,544 in 1967 to 484,955 in 2007, a 535% workload increase in 40 years plus an equally growing backlog of patent applications waiting for examiner attention, and no more room to expand in their current offices, the agency is now looking at a different approach to solving their growing pains.

First, some personal background in this matter. In 2004 I began researching the workload problems at the USPTO and wrote a paper about what I saw as an impending crisis, predicting that they would quickly run out of office space in DC, ending the article by asking the simple question, “Why not come to Colorado?” The article ended up being printed in a local magazine, but I largely viewed this as the end of the matter.

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Although Growing in Numbers, Today’s Female Inventors Still Only
Account for Around 10% of the US Inventor Population

What name springs to mind when you say the phrase “famous female inventor?” If you’re having a tough time answering this, you are not alone.

I became interested in this topic when I ran across a very curious statistic. In 1980 only 1.7% of all the patent filings were filed by women. After doing some research I found that the problem started long before that.

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A terrorist scenario

The two men sit patiently in the small grove of trees, quietly assembling their gear. Few words are spoken between the two of them. Weighted backpacks with connecting wires are placed in a motorized raft, followed by two coolers and fishing rods. Both are dressed as non-descript fishermen to blend in with the Montana population.

Shortly before sunset the two slide their boat into the waters along the east side of the famous Fort Peck dam near the town of Fort Peck, Montana. The dam, located near the headwaters of the Missouri River on the vast prairies of eastern Montana, has water extending as far as the eyes can see. It is one of the worlds largest rolled earth dams. The picture of this man-made creation is a spectacular sight.

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Every industry has its own “favorite son”, but for many areas of new technology there are no real household names associated with them. There are no people like Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, or Chuck Norris rising to the forefront of these technologies. Put another way, these technologies represent industries without their own rock stars.

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Complexity is a Very-Real, Very-Destructive Disease
that Destroys Human-Based Systems

By Thomas Frey, Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute

Often time we hear about some new disease that sounds kind of phony and quickly discard it because it sounds like some made-up name for a common personality quirk. So, when I talk about the “complexity disease”, your first inclination will probably be to say “yeah right!”

But here’s the difference. Complexity is not a disease that affects humans. Complexity is a disease that affects systems. And even though it has never been labeled as such before now, it becomes a very useful frame of reference for people involved in building, operating, or managing a system. Complexity is a very-real, very-destructive disease.

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Roman Numerals were a Numbering System that
Prevented an Entire Civilization from Doing Any Higher Math

By Thomas Frey, Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute

During the time of the ancient Greek civilization several mathematicians became famous for their work. People like Archimedes, Pythagoras, Euclid, Hipparchus, Posidonius and Ptolemy all brought new elements of thinking to society, furthering the field of math, building on the earlier work of Babylonian and Egyptian mathematicians

A few generations later the Romans became the dominant society on earth, and the one aspect of Roman society that was remarkably absent was the lack of Roman mathematicians. Rest assured, the scholarly members of Roman society came from a good gene pool and they were every bit as gifted and talented as the Greeks. But Roman society was being held hostage by its own systems. One of the primary culprit for the lack of Roman mathematicians was their numbering system – Roman Numerals and its lack of numeric positioning Read the rest of this entry »