Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

Talk about a development with implications for the role of innovators in the world.  Here is an accessible article on the DIY biology moment, complete with names of the corresponding academic journals.  You can do it.  Happy exploring:

Hackers aim to make biology household practice – The Boston Globe
CAMBRIDGE – In a third-floor loft where programmers build Internet start-ups, Mackenzie Cowell is talking about the tools he and like-minded young colleagues are using to fuel what they hope will be the next big thing in biology. The list includes a cut-up Charlie Card, ingredients bought on eBay to make a kind of scientific Jell-O, and a refrigerator, just scored on Craigslist.com, that chills to 80 degrees below zero.

Cowell is part of an effort called DIYbio – short for do-it-yourself biology – that aims to move science into the hands of hobbyists. It is starting by holding sessions where amateurs extract DNA, and attempt genetic fingerprinting using common household items and the kitchen sink.

“It shows you how much science can be about duct tape and having a few screws in the right place,” Cowell said. “It shatters that clinical image.”

What Cowell and crew hope to achieve is a democratization of science that could propel the field of biology into the mainstream, much as computer hackers fueled computer development a generation ago. After all, Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club played a part in the personal computer industry and counts Apple Inc. founders among its attendees; Cowell would like DIYbio to be the Homebrew Club of Biology.

Check this out, by way of Samantha Warren wonderful on design, type.  I can’t figure out how to show the example image–must see.

A Brief History of Avant Garde « Thinking for a Living™
Given the high volume of requests for the font, Lubalin formed Lubalin, Burns & Co. (which later became the International Typeface Corporation) and released ITC Avant Garde in 1970. Unfortunately, Lubalin quickly realized that Avant Garde was widely misunderstood and misused in poorly thought-out solutions, eventually becoming a stereotypical 1970s font due to overuse.

Tony DiSpigna, one of Lubalin’s partners and co-creator of ITC Lubalin Graph and ITC Serif Gothic, has been quoted as saying, “The first time Avant Garde was used was one of the few times it was used correctly. It’s become the most abused typeface in the world.” Ed Benguiat, one of type’s legends and a friend of Lubalin’s, commented, “The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words Avant Garde. Everybody ruins it. They lean the letters the wrong way.” Steven Heller also noted that the “excessive number of ligatures […] were misused by designers who had no understanding of how to employ these typographic forms,” further commenting that “Avant Garde was Lubalin’s signature, and in his hands it had character; in others’ it was a flawed Futura-esque face.”

The strength of the Avant Garde font is certainly in its all-cap ligatures and it should be used as it was originally intended – a display face whose ligatures can be carefully crafted into magnificent letterform combinations. There were two original designs of ITC Avant Garde Gothic: one for setting headlines and one for text copy. The display design contained ligatures and alternate characters and the text design did not. Unfortunately, when Avant Garde Gothic was turned into a digital font, only the text design was chosen, and the ligatures and alternate characters were not included leaving designers with the least interesting aspect of the font.

A welcome dose of Meg Fowler–here’s a taste but you want to go there…

megfowler.com » About Meg
I might try to: write a novel; go kiteboarding; live in Prague, study for my Masters in Journalism; get hitched to a decent human being; and stop doing that weird thing with my toes. Or not. Anything is possible (though I don’t see my toes changing anytime soon.)

I’m better at laughing than crying. Logical, abstract, measured, and messy, all at once.

I probably like hockey more than you do.

I love my mom and dad.

This blog isn’t about anything; it just is.

As soon as it manages to be about something, I’ll let you know.

I had almost forgotten about Amyloo, but she is still out there with insightful, well, insightful insights!

Amyloo: Tuesday, September 02, 2008
You can almost see the Twitter team sitting there, hugging themselves, clutching at their wonder feature, knowing they’re onto something, but thinking “Oh shit, what do we do with this monster of a success? All we know is we’re not looking at a traditional ad model. How do we sell this realtime market research? Better freeze it for now, not give it away, then figure it out.” Twitter did buy Summize, one way to search the stream for keywords, so that’s an indication they understand the value of the business intelligence gained by scanning the Twitterverse environment. It’s now called Twitter Search, and it’s very nearly an easter egg, not linked from the regular Twitter pages.

I’ve noted recently that the anti-patent ideologues are now claiming that patents prevent sharing of knowledge and information.   Of course what they are missing is that patents can make it possible to share information and still keep ownership.  Thus a strong, effective patent system encourages disclosure and makes society open to ideas.

AIPPI 41st World Intellectual Property Congress
IP Protection for Software-related Inventions

In the software sector, the protection of software-implemented inventions has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. In the early days of computing, commercial software development was led by a handful of hardware manufacturers that catered primarily to large enterprises. In that era, firms viewed trade secret or confidential information protection as the best means of protecting innovative new software ideas against misappropriation. Given the rise during the 1970’s of both the volume of users as well as the ability to rapidly copy new software products, companies were increasingly concerned about piracy and turned to copyright law to protect and enforce their rights. While software innovators continue to rely on trade secret and copyright protection, patent protection has emerged in recent years as a tool that is widely used for the protection of software-implemented inventions. Patents on software-implemented inventions allow the sharing of technical information with others while retaining the ability to be compensated for investments in research and development that lead to new products and functionality.

The workshop will provide an overview of this parallel evolution of commercial software development and use of various tools for intellectual property protection. The intellectual property systems of various countries have taken different approaches regarding the direction and speed of this evolution. The speakers in the workshop will discuss these different approaches and, in this connection, the workshop will take particular advantage of the work of AIPPI Special Committee Q132 on Patent Protection for Computer Software Related Inventions.

Moderator: Richard Wilder, Microsoft Corp. Redmond, WA, USA

Speakers:
Gustavo de Freitas Morais, Danneman Siemsen Sao Paulo, Brazil
Pravin Arnand, Arnand & Arnand New Delhi, India
F. Scott Kieff, Washington University School of Law St. Louis, MI, USA
Karen Copenhaver, Choate Hall & Stewart LLP Boston, MA, USA
Leo Steenbeek, Philips Intellectual Property & Standards Eindhoven, Netherlands