2,010 research outputs found
Narrative and Belonging: The Politics of Ambiguity, The Jewish State, and the Thought of Edward Said and Hannah Arendt
At the core of this thesis, I examine the difficulties of giving an account of oneself in modern associational life. By integrating the theory and political activism of both Edward Said and Hannah Arendt, I follow the Zionist response to European antisemitism and the Palestinian responses to Jewish settler colonialism. Both parties struggle against their ambiguous presence within local and regional hegemonic social taxonomy, and within the world order. Contemporarily, this struggle takes place in the protracted conflict between Israeli and local Arab groups, which has been managed through violence and objectification, as opposed to allowing the dynamism and reconfiguration of political subjectivities. In their later writings, Arendt and Said respond to the violence and resentment that arises from the form of the nation-state by prescribing, and arguably practicing, an understanding of politics where the âotherâ is constitutive of the âself.â By seeing this relation of alternity as the contemporary heir to diasporic Judaism and Jewish cosmopolitanism, I argue that this project holds the historical traction to reinvigorate the future beyond static and growing violence and dispossession
A Comment on âDo Patents Facilitate Financing in the Software Industry?â
âDo Patents Facilitate Financing in the Software Industry?â by Ronald J. Mann contributes empirical evidence to our understanding of how software startups use patents. However, a close examination of the actual empirical findings in this paper points to rather different conclusions than those that Mann draws, namely: few software startups benefits from software patents and patents are not widely used by software firms to obtain venture financing. Indeed, among other things, the paper reports that 80% of venture-financed software startups had not acquired any patents within four years of receiving financing.
A Lower Bound for the Sturm-Liouville Eigenvalue Problem on a Quantum Computer
We study the complexity of approximating the smallest eigenvalue of a
univariate Sturm-Liouville problem on a quantum computer. This general problem
includes the special case of solving a one-dimensional Schroedinger equation
with a given potential for the ground state energy.
The Sturm-Liouville problem depends on a function q, which, in the case of
the Schroedinger equation, can be identified with the potential function V.
Recently Papageorgiou and Wozniakowski proved that quantum computers achieve an
exponential reduction in the number of queries over the number needed in the
classical worst-case and randomized settings for smooth functions q. Their
method uses the (discretized) unitary propagator and arbitrary powers of it as
a query ("power queries"). They showed that the Sturm-Liouville equation can be
solved with O(log(1/e)) power queries, while the number of queries in the
worst-case and randomized settings on a classical computer is polynomial in
1/e. This proves that a quantum computer with power queries achieves an
exponential reduction in the number of queries compared to a classical
computer.
In this paper we show that the number of queries in Papageorgiou's and
Wozniakowski's algorithm is asymptotically optimal. In particular we prove a
matching lower bound of log(1/e) power queries, therefore showing that log(1/e)
power queries are sufficient and necessary. Our proof is based on a frequency
analysis technique, which examines the probability distribution of the final
state of a quantum algorithm and the dependence of its Fourier transform on the
input.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figures; Major changes in Theorem 3 to previous version.
To be published in the Journal of Complexit
Patent Thickets: Strategic Patenting of Complex Technologies
Patent race models assume that an innovator wins the only patent covering a product. But when technologies are complex, this property right is defective: ownership of a productâs technology is shared, not exclusive. In that case I show that if patent standards are low, firms build âthicketsâ of patents, especially incumbent firms in mature industries. When they assert these patents, innovators are forced to share rents under cross-licenses, making R&D incentives sub-optimal. On the other hand, when lead time advantages are significant and patent standards are high, firms pursue strategies of âmutual non-aggression.â Then R&D incentives are stronger, even optimal.
Sequential Innovation, Patents, and Imitation
We argue that when discoveries are "sequential" (so that each successive invention builds in an essential way on its predecessors) patent protection is not as useful for encouraging innovation as in a static setting. Indeed, society and even inventors themselves may be better off without such protection. Furthermore, an inventor's prospective profit may actually be enhanced by competition and imitation. Our sequential model of innovation appears to explain evidence from a natural experiment in the software industry.
Knowledge Sharing among Inventors: Some Historical Perspectives
This chapter documents instances from past centuries where inventors freely shared knowledge of their innovations with other inventors. It is widely believed that such knowledge sharing is largely a recent development, as in open source software. Our survey shows, instead, that innovators have long practiced "collective invention", including in such key technologies as steam engines, iron and steel production and textile machinery. Generally, innovators? behavior was substantially richer than the heroic portrayal often found in textbooks and museums. Knowledge sharing sometimes coexisted with patenting, at other times, not, suggesting the importance of public policy that accommodates knowledge sharing to foster cumulative innovation.technological change, knowledge sharing, collective invention, patents
The software patent experiment.
Over the past two decades, the scope of technologies that can be patented has been expanded to include many items previously thought unsuitable for patenting, for example, computer software. Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office grants 20,000 or more software patents a year. Conventional wisdom holds that extending patent protection to computer programs will stimulate research and development and, thus, increase the rate of innovation. In "The Software Patent Experiment," Bob Hunt and Jim Bessen investigate whether this has, in fact, happened. They describe the spectacular growth in software patenting, who obtains patents, and the relationship between a sharp focus on software patenting and firms' investment in R&D.Patents
An empirical look at software patents
U.S. legal changes have made it easier to obtain patents on inventions that use software. Software patents have grown rapidly and now comprise 15 percent of all patents. They are acquired primarily by large manufacturing firms in industries known for strategic patenting; only 5 percent belong to software publishers. The very large increase in software patent propensity over time is not adequately explained by changes in R&D investments, employment of computer programmers, or productivity growth. The residual increase in patent propensity is consistent with a sizeable rise in the cost effectiveness of software patents during the 1990s. We find evidence that software patents substitute for R&D at the firm level; they are associated with lower R&D intensity. This result occurs primarily in industries known for strategic patenting and is difficult to reconcile with the traditional incentive theory of patentsPatents
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