links for 2009-07-16

"Patent systems are often justified by an assumption that innovation will be spurred by the prospect of patent protection, leading to the accrual of greater societal benefits than would be possible under non-patent systems. However, little empirical evidence exists to support this assumption. One way to test the hypothesis that a patent system promotes innovation is experimentally to simulate the behavior of inventors and competitors under conditions approximating patent and non-patent systems. Initial data generated using The Patent Game suggest that a system combining patent and open source protection for inventions (that is, similar to modern patent systems) generates significantly lower rates of innovation, productivity, and societal utility than does a commons system. These data also indicate that there is no statistical difference in innovation, productivity, or societal utility between a pure patent system and a system combining patent and open source protection."

Commentary and speculation about location based services, with some stats (most of the services mentioned were actually available in '08).

RWR blog about a "new Twitter app in development called TwittARound, an augmented reality Twitter viewer for the iPhone 3GS. With the app, you can see live tweets around your location and you can even see how far away they are"… one might ask why you'd want to know any of these things.

RWR blog that a "Swedish software and design company The Astonishing Tribe is developing an AU concept called Augmented ID that "sees" people and tells you who they are." This AR-type application is more a prototype than anything but signals a desire to create these types of application. This kind of application would ask fairly serious questions about privacy, personal security and the notion of 'identity'.

MIT researchers feed data from physical places into Second Life locations as 'sensor portals' (not too sure how they're 'ubiquitous'). This links with research they have entitled as 'cross-reality' yet another 'reality' prefix to explore technical 'augmentation' or mediation of 'life'.

BBC launches new programme called Digital Revolution: "We will take stock of two decades of profound change since the invention of the World Wide Web.
Right now we’re embarking on an experiment to see how you can help us shape both the TV and online projects. We want you to get involved.
Why? Because we want to make a series that is true to its subject – and welcomes the collaborative power of the Web."

BBC's Click speculates about natural language processing in search engines and the semantic web: "Search engines have never really understood the precise meaning or true intent of questions or phrases – semantic search is a process trying to improve this. A new generation of web services is in development to offer results for words and picture searches, and attempt to understand users' questions. Kosmix is one of a new batch of search engines trying to incorporate human understanding into its complex mathematical computations."

"In order to monitor how the pieces of rubbish move around the cities and beyond, the MIT team has developed a small mobile sensor that can be attached to individual pieces of waste. "It's like a miniature cell phone with limited functionality," said Carlo Ratti, a member of the project. … Ultimately, the team hopes that the technology can be miniaturised and made cheap enough that the tags could one day be attached to everything. "Think about a future where thanks to smart tags we will not have waste anymore," said Mr Ratti. "Everything will be traceable."

Arthur speculates about the impact of AR-type 'camera phone as a lens' technologies such as the recent 'nearest tube station' application. An interesting comparison is drawn to the use of information graphics such as 'hawk eye' in the cricket and tennis and Arthur speculates about how such graphics could be available in near-realtime to spectators (and presumably players and umpires?!). A key point – accuracy and reliablity of the data upon which these services (might) operate.