I didn’t have time to address a few additional points in my previous post on creativity and innovation. In this post, I wanted to sumarize the evidence underlying my claim that most of innovation results from industry reworking, improving, and advancing existing technology and not from the direct application of […]
Patents
13 posts
This evening, I will be presenting a talk “Some Thoughts on Creativity and Innovation” at Neurostimulation: Stimulating change in patient care by 2024 sponsored by Cambridge Consultants. If you are surprised why an RF scientist with expertise in antennas and near-field wireless systems is speaking at a conference on neurostimulation, […]
Some interesting and informative links from around the net: Via The Art of Manliness, here’s “How to Survive a Lightning Strike,” “Why I Am Not An Environmentalist: The Science of Economics Versus the Religion of Ecology,” by Steven E. Landsburg, excerpted from The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life, Sean […]
Answer: more quickly than it used to if USPTO Patent Commissioner, Robert Stoll, has his way. Patently O reports on a new USPTO initiative to drive toward an average of ten months to an initial office action after an inventor files a patent. To that end, the Patent Office has […]
This post extends on my post of last week: How Full-Body Scanners Work – and Fail The aim of this post is to explain x-ray backscatter scanning in further detail by examining a few of the patents that describe how x-ray backscatter full-body scanners work. In order to receive a […]
It was a busy week to have been out on vacation. Here are some RTLS and Location-Based Services links to help get caught up: My employer, NFER® RTLS vendor Q-Track, unveiled an updated website, took second place in the Global Security Challenge, West Coast Final, and was featured in RFID […]
This piece from Popular Mechanics on the evolution and development of the Leatherman Tool inspired me to draft this post about the evolution of one of my UWB antenna designs from conception, through prototyping, and finally to production. This paper describes the end result, and the design is covered in […]
A few quick updates, while I recover from Wireless Wednesday on Twitter: New Scientist explains the history of complex numbers in a fascinating piece, “Putting the ‘i’ in iPods.” But since the iPod is more an accomplishment of engineering instead of physics, shouldn’t it be called the” jPod?” To learn […]
From the Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Ten Tips for Streamlining Patent Prosecution.
A few “Quick Picks” – highlights from the week past worth passing on… Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds on the pending collapse of the higher education bubble. And Eight Reasons College Tuition is the Next Bubble to Burst. The “stars fell on” Alabama May 18, and now NASA’s looking for the meteorite. […]
Congratulations! Your patent has issued and you have a twenty year monopoly on the sale, manufacture, use, or distribution of your cool new invention, right? Not unless you pay your maintenance fees. At the current fee levels, inventors must pay: $980 ($490) due at 3.5 years after issue, $2480 ($1240) […]
A few quick picks… Austrian physicists claim ball lighting is an optical illusion induced in the visual center of the brain by the intense magnetic fields of lightning. PatentlyO on the USPTO’s proposal to create a “slow,” “standard,” and “fast” lane for patent applications. Applicants will pay more for a […]
A few quick picks: A new radio direction finding system for deployment on Humvees was introduced last week by Southwest Research Institute. Claire Berlinski reporting in City Journal reports a surprising lack of interest in a couple of Russian exiles with copies of the Kremlin’s secret archives needing translation and […]