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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The weirdness of future of wars will make us wish
we were dealing with knives and swords again

In 1976, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order forbidding the assassination of any foreign head of state. This order was issued when word leaked out that the CIA had made several attempts on Castro’s life as well as other “enemies” of the US.

This is a topic that I’ve often struggled with because today’s solution to global conflict is often measured in the destruction of the many as opposed to the destruction of the few. Not that I was in favor of assassinating Castro, but placing boundaries on the fighting of a war nearly always insures a larger, longer military engagement than simply removing a few problem people at the top.

The way I see it, the larger the death toll and the greater the path of destruction, the longer it will take to heal the deep-seated emotional wounds festering among the masses. While property damage can be repaired, and economies can be rebuilt, it is the emotional wounds that carry hatred and other significant problems from one generation to the next.

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The coming demise of the retail storefront

Last week my wife Deb and I were relaxing at a new shopping center in the Denver area. Along the sidewalks a series of speakers cast a rather pleasant musical backdrop to the shopping experience.

At one point an interesting song began playing. I reached for my iPhone, and used a program called Shazam to “listen” to the music, revealing the name of the song and the artist. I was then able to purchase the song on my iPhone and download it directly to the phone for later use.

The nature of this transaction is quite revealing in that it gives us clues as to what our shopping experiences will be like in the future.

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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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When the going gets tough, the tough go bootstrapping

Walk a Mile in These Bootstrapped Shoes.

Much the way nature has evolved, the world of business operates in fluid balance with money serving as its breathable oxygen. And in much the same manner as nature, businesses feed off the less fortunate, using their superior strength to suffocate and feed off of the revenue streams of their daily prey, walking casually away to find their next meal.

Welcome to the startup business playground, where some of the best and brightest talent in this country has been burned at the stake. 

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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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Cryonics and our ongoing effort to build the ultimate life-extension toolbox

No person should ever die…. EVER!

Is that the direction we’re headed?

There are many reasons why people die, yet these reasons may all disappear as we develop fixes and cures for everything that ails us.

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The Library of the Future Series:
Part 2 - The Search Command Center

As a child, it was embarrassing to ask for help. I didn’t want people to think I was the “dumb student”, and I especially didn’t want to be the one asking dumb questions in a library around people I didn’t know. My assumption was that if I had to ask, I was obviously missing something. Perhaps I should wait until I was older and come back at a time when I was smart enough to understand the library.

My impression was that librarians were incredibly smart, and in an entirely different intellectual league than I was. I felt as if I hadn’t yet earned the right to be there.

While it may sound like I was slightly paranoid, and especially today, knowing that librarians are the world’s most uniquely helpful breed of people, I’m pretty sure this perception still exists among some of us today.

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Future games will become the ultimate playground for our minds

In 1977 when famed mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot uttered the phrase, “as a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also to seduce,” little did he know that his brainchild, fractal geometry, would become seductive to the point of being addictive.

Over the past decade, fractal geometry, the science that reduces the patterns found in nature to mathematical formulas and also enables us to create artificial forms of nature using the same math, has become the numerical engine driving much of the gaming industry, and more specifically, the hottest technique in gaming - procedural generation. Placing key creative elements in the hands of the player, procedural generation means the game doesn’t store millions of characters and background images, just the methods by which they can be built, leaving the gamers free to focus on creating the worlds in which their next adventures occur.

Where brilliant thinkers like da Vinci, H. G. Wells, and Mandelbrot inspired much of the world around us today, the world of tomorrow, the very world where we will be spending the later years of our lives, is now being imagined inside the young minds of today’s gamers as they learn to harness the awesome power hiding in each gamer’s toolbox.

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Next Generation Gaming is Not for the Faint of Heart

Life is a game. Every day we find ourselves in the middle of the game, involving the work we do, the people we hang out with, and the social structures that surround us.

But who exactly created this game? Each day we live our lives as animated playing pieces, playing by rules that others created. Conformity is a constant force, imposing a lifestyle that most of us were born into, saddled with goals that often go cross-grain with our personal strengths. All of this, however, is about to change.

In the future, the very near future, nothing we hold dear today will remain sacred. Not even the rules for our own game of life.

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