Valerie Oon's List: UROP 2010

• Part experimentation, part self-help, such "personal informatics" projects
• find meaning in the mundane.
• believe that the compilation of our daily activities can reveal the secret patterns that govern the way we live
• practice is liberating because it shows that our lives aren't random, and are more orderly than some might expect
• I want to create connections where I didn't know that they existed,
• The culture of sharing information online has shifted in recent years, from a focus on blog ramblings to the ubiquitous micro-movements of posters' daily lives.
• What's left to share? Basic data.
• Some of the new data collectors hope to make better decisions about their activities and improve their quality of life.
• Personal data collection can get in the way of living, some people admit. "It becomes an obsession,"

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• or just trying to find patterns where there is none? - Valerie Oon on 2010-02-11

• Gene patents are the most upstream category of biotechnology patents
• anti-commons effect^[

  • if too many patented ingredients or processes are involved in creating a new product, its invention may be impeded by high costs involved in winning patent rights and negotiations with individual patent owners. a potentially beneficial product may not be invented. one of the tragedies of patent laws
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• depends on significant investment in research and development at significant risk of failure

  • must therefore provide enough protection for inventors
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• human genome is often characterised as inherently shared

  • contradict with the principle of offering patent protection. "you can't own a gene"
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• impact on a broad range of industries

  • hence any solution to the patent problem must address evolving technologies. transferability. if not, we run the risk that a solution for this one may fail for another. tricky to foresee problems, especially when new applications are constantly being discovered.
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• life form patent-free zone

  • meaning?
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• Regardless of the sympathies of the courts and the Patent Office, the fact is that lowering the bar of inventiveness in order to protect routine applications of technical know-how is having a dramatic effect. The traditional balancing act between the rights of the inventor and the public interest has been skewed in favour of the inventor.

  • objective test of the requisite 'inventive step' is not so objective; mostly given benefit of the doubt. i.e. easy to get patent protection
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• real risk to the flow of information so vital to follow-on innovators
• Valuable knowledge is removed from the public domain, and downstream research becomes an unenviable lottery

  • and aren't you supposed to be publishing papers with it so it's just a matter of who gets the credit and not about restriction to knowledge?

  • also kind of like anti-commons effect but in this case, others may not even know what they don't know. but what of the internet and free knowledge that it affords?
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• award of erroneous patents
• The term of the patent is much shorter, but upstream patent holders are still given an unfettered right to exclude, and follow-on innovators will still be faced with negotiating access to the tools they require
• The patent system when applied to truly non-obvious inventions is effective in redirecting the flow of investment to solving new problems,^[42] but the strong protection patents afford will always be a problem when applied to incremental innovations.

  • what is incremental innovation?
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• innovators naturally had a competitive advantage because of the lead-time involved in reverse engineering.
• first-mover competitive advantage
• The obvious benefit of such a system is that upstream innovators are not given disproportionate power to control the use of their discoveries
• subsequent innovators must contribute to the research and development costs of the first innovator
• compensatory liability scheme
• The system gives upstream researchers an ability to share in the benefits of downstream innovations in a manner somewhat like reach-through licensing agreements.^[45] The difference is that the market dictates the value of their contribution.^[46]

  • downstream innovators who use the inventions of the upstream returns a percentage of their profits (market dictates value of their contribution). therefore upstream benefits, downstream also benefits and consumers benefit!
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• de-centrism of Foucault, which denies a universal code of ethics or values altogether.
• denies a unifying human essence by a similar argument
• values are the by-products of a non-progressive historical process
• structures of knowledge established by power and violence at a time in history
• history of values is merely the history of dominance and power struggles between the ruling forces of a given time
• the human is simply subjected to this history of violence and exclusion without choice

  • maybe not so extreme as Foucault proposes but to an extents, humans are products of such conditioning
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• Human essence, argues Foucault, is a consequence of power struggles across history; it is neither universal nor determinate, it is simply a concept of humanity prevalent at a time.
• He asserts that establishing human essence would be oppressive, for it would deny difference among humans.

  • postmodern conception that meta-narratives do not in fact exist. by imposing an overarching meta-narrative, we are enforcing power using (a dominant) ideology.
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• If human beings are not essentially self-determining but are always functions of forces external to them, then there is no conceptual ground for the distinction between an oppressed and a free state.
• there can be no notion of oppression, which is the deprivation of human qualities.
• Foucault believes freedom and human autonomy are a myth, which necessitates that oppression is unavoidable. Yet, he misses that freedom itself is a value established by the ruling class of a historical period.
• Throughout history, freedom has predominantly been defined by the white, European male. Hence, freedom cannot be presupposed as a universal quality that humans lack; the definition of freedom is itself a value imposed by power and dominance by the rulers of a time.

  • freedom itself is a western ideology
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• Indeed, even a complete knowledge of a child's genes and developmental environment would not allow the complete specification of the organism: chance also plays a significant role in development.

  • 1. genetics, 2. environment, 3??? --> chance
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