Random bits

Like others, I recently found myself struggling to use the LibreOffice program “base” to do database calculations, when it was running on a Linux OS (in my case, Ubuntu 11.04). The main issue was the fact that the problem took ridiculous amounts of time to do just about anything. The problem is not evident on a Mac, and apparently not on Windows either.

Apparently this is a JAVA issue. Specifically, you need to tell the Linux version of OpenOffice/LibreOffice to use an older run time version of Java, or it just will not work right.

I found a good solution to the problem in this forum. (more…)

This is the May to August schedule for the USPTO’s Global Intellectual Property Academy (GIPA).

http://www.uspto.gov/ip/training/schedule.jsp#heading-8

Among the countries mentioned in the schedule are Ghana, Indonesia, Iraq, Japan, Kenya, Liberia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Nigeria, Philippines, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine and Vietnam. However, many of these events are regional or topical meetings that include officials from many other countries. The costs of these operations have to be fairly substantial. (more…)

(Update: Note that the NIH Report database key word searches report grants, and some patents are associated with more than one grant. This is true for all search terms listed below.

As part of a larger research project involving the role of government funded research, I was doing some counts of grants and patents associated with those grants, using the NIH RePort database.

The counts reported below are from searches on June 29, 2011.

Not surprisingly, if you have a disease, there are advantages to having one with a large patient population, and at least equal prevalence in high income countries.

I have also calculated the ratio of the patents to the number of grants, expressed below as a percent, in parenthesis after the number of patents. The unweighted mean and median were 4.8 and 4.1 percent, with a range of 0 to 12.3 percent, and a standard deviation of 2.77 percent. The tendency for grant recipients to obtain patents does not seem to differ much between Type I, II or III diseases — a classification used by the World Health Organization to indicate how the global incidence of the disease relates to national incomes. (more…)

Manon Ress on KEI rejection of OECD Statement on the “Principles of Internet Policy Making.”

Bill Gates is listed as an inventor of United States Patent, 7930197, issued April 19, 2011, for “Personal data mining.”

What did Bill Gates claim to have invented regarding data mining? According to the patent Abstract: (more…)

Another data point to suggest U.S. trade officials may be focusing on the wrong industries with regard to global norms for intellectual property.

The availability of free software platforms may be more important to the economy than some U.S. policy makers acknowledge or appreciate.

Software publishers employ only 4 percent of the BLS defined category for “Computer and Mathematical Occupations,” and just 4.9 percent of occupation code for computer programmers. In the BLS category for “Software Developers, Applications,” just 8.1 percent work in the “Software Publishing” sector. This suggests the role of commercial software applications is only a relatively small element of value added work involving software.

Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2010

The following are BLS estimates of the changes in output per person and employment in the United States for 13 4-digit NAICS information industry sectors.

See too: U.S. employment and wages in 14 information sectors, which suggests U.S. trade policy on intellectual property rights in the information sector favors lower wage industries over higher wage industry, and includes this graphic: