Intellectual
property and other information policies in a small country
Seán
Ó Nualláin Ph.D.
Lead
IP adviser,
Reboot
Ireland
3pm Feb 13 2015 107 South
hall UC Berkeley
Even in the depths of the recent
recession, smaller and economically challenged countries kept
scientific research programs that attempt to replicate the NSF and
NIH running. The current bloat in scientific journals allowed the
system to be gamed to make this appear a reasonable step. The first
part of this talk focuses on three burgeoning areas of research;
cancer, computational semantics and immunology to show how this game
is implemented. The conclusion is that, with the possible exception
of the USA, these national programs are a waste of taxpayers' money.
The second part of the talk attempts to
find gaps in knowledge that small, economically distressed countries
could exploit, It is argued that limits to “big data” and other
brute force statistics approaches have been found. This part of the
talk looks at how the elision of syntax and semantics have caused an
asymptote in performance both in genomics and natural language
processing; controversies in mainstream biology with its “central
dogma” and why neuroscientists urgently need to master
physics techniques like the harmonic oscillator
Thirdly,
we look at conventional issues of “orphan” IP like books and
drugs. The talk then briefly segues into issues of personal privacy
In the last section, we look at the
current state of universities. It is argued that their disciplinary
structure mimics the departmental weights assigned by science funding
research after WW2. This has led to anomalies whereby popular
subjects like cognitive science are relegated to the
“interdisciplinary” category; indeed, in this vein, computer
science was not taught as a major at Caltech until the 1980's. This
opens up opportunities for the creation of online universities that
use the myriad excellent freshman and sophomore foundation courses
freely available on the web to create low-price majors in subjects
currently ignored in the science, arts and humanities. The talk
concludes by envisaging a way to do world-class education and
research at a fraction of their current cost both to the student and
taxpayer.
PS
We had a really interesting audience
and a discussion, which I recorded
The EU sent a representative;
The convenor was this guy;
This controversial and brilliant
scientist had much to say;
finally, and perhaps best of all, one
of the cog sci students now changing majors because of th absence of
a dept there showed up, exemplifying one of the main themes
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