The Lewis Carroll Patent Racket

'Now the cleverest thing of the sort that I ever did,' he went on after a pause, 'was inventing a new pudding during the meat-course.'

'In time to have it cooked for the next course?' said Alice. 'Well, not the NEXT course,' the Knight said in a slow thoughtful tone: 'no, certainly not the next COURSE.'

'Then it would have to be the next day. I suppose you wouldn't have two pudding-courses in one dinner?'

'Well, not the NEXT day,' the Knight repeated as before: 'not the next DAY. In fact,' he went on, holding his head down, and his voice getting lower and lower, 'I don't believe that pudding ever WAS cooked! In fact, I don't believe that pudding ever WILL be cooked! And yet it was a very clever pudding to invent.'

'What did you mean it to be made of?' Alice asked, hoping to cheer him up, for the poor Knight seemed quite low-spirited about it.

'It began with blotting paper,' the Knight answered with a groan.

'That wouldn't be very nice, I'm afraid -- '

'Not very nice ALONE,' he interrupted, quite eagerly: 'but you've no idea what a difference it makes mixing it with other things -- such as gunpowder and sealing-wax. And here I must leave you.' They had just come to the end of the wood.

Alice could only look puzzled: she was thinking of the pudding.

- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

In my many years as a software engineer I have had the misfortune of bearing witness to a United States Patent system that increasingly has less to do with protecting true intellectual property and has more and more become the first refuge of scoundrels.

The software revolution is largely responsible. The volume of requests for patents has overwhelmed everyone's ability to distinguish merit of such award. The system is broken and easily corrupted by overwhelming financial powerbrokers who manipulate and distort the marketplace. The patent process today may as well be a government sanctioned criminal enterprise.

As an educator and innovator who has always offered ideas into the public domain for discussion, refinement, and enrichment by any audience that will listen I recoil in horror more and more often as patents are awarded for ever more dubious reasons. So with all that in mind, here's the news story that makes me recoil once again;

Who invented e-learning computing? by AP, CNN

Every day, millions of students taking online college courses act in much the same way as their bricks-and-mortar counterparts. After logging on, they move from course to course and do things like submit work in virtual drop boxes and view posted grades -- all from a program running on a PC.

It may seem self-evident that virtual classrooms should closely resemble real ones. But a major education software company contends it wasn't always so obvious. And now, in a move that has shaken up the e-learning community, Blackboard Inc. has been awarded a patent establishing its claims to some of the basic features of the software that powers online education.

The patent, awarded to the Washington, D.C.-based company in January but announced last month, has prompted an angry backlash from the academic computing community, which is fighting back in techie fashion -- through online petitions and in a sprawling Wikipedia entry that helps make its case.

Critics say the patent claims nothing less than Blackboard's ownership of the very idea of e-learning. If allowed to stand, they say, it could quash the cooperation between academia and the private sector that has characterized e-learning for years and explains why virtual classrooms are so much better than they used to be.

The patent is "is antithetical to the way that academia makes progress," said Michael Feldstein, assistant director of the State University of New York's online learning network and one of the bloggers who has criticized the company.

Blackboard, which recently became the dominant company in the field by acquiring rival WebCT, says the critics misunderstand what the patent claims. But the company does say it must protect its $100 million investment in the technology. The day the patent was announced, Blackboard sued rival Desire2Learn for infringement and is seeking royalties.

"It just wouldn't be a level playing field if someone could come onto the scene tomorrow, copy everything that Blackboard and WebCT have done and call it their own," said Blackboard general counsel Matthew Small.

Actually the lawyer is wrong on a number of counts. First he presumes that companies working in this domain for years have copied or even heard of his client.

But beyond that, unless someone is selling warez - that is a carbon-copy product re-engineered from his client's original work - the claim seems to be that all innovation in virtual education somehow belongs to his client.

The article continues;

Blackboard's patent doesn't refer to any device or even specific software code. Rather, it describes the basic framework of an LMS. In short, Blackboard says what it invented isn't learning tools like drop boxes, but the idea of putting such tools together in one big, scalable system across a university.

"Our developers sat down and said 'college IT departments are having a lot of trouble managing all these disparate Web sites from each class. How can we turn this into one computer program that manages all of the classes?"' Small said. "That was a leap."

Critics say it was a tiny hop at most.

In software engineering there are numerous methodologies [as there are in education] to implement logic and organizational process. Now, if Blackboard is saying that the traditional public school process can only be implemented exclusively by their software then I think the patent office is perpetuating a fraudulent claim.

Software engineering routinely is used to re-implement existing business and social processes. The perfunctory and bureaucratic legacy of assigning homework, grades, reports and so on can hardly be considered invention or original thought. The fact that disparate software programs would converge to make a coherent whole of several processes is not compelling either - this swiss-army knife metaphor is nothing new.

If this company's technology suite were worthwhile the marketplace is the place to prove that point, not the patent office. And as a critic, let me say I disagree that the so-called innovation was a "leap".

The idea of converging small software tools is the very basis of UNIX, an operating system common to Universities that established the idea that small tools and processes could be added to each other to create a greater whole.

The ubiquitous nature of the Windows operating sytem which combines spreadsheets, word processors, and so on is another example of "e-Learning" convergence. In my opinion, the patent and claim are absurd.

Procuring School Computers

I've had numerous discussions on this topic at Board meetings and privately. Bruce Silva gets it, few others do.

I have long advocated the following formula.
Invest in the most inexpensive PC equipment you can get that fits a need.
Invest in the best monitor you can afford [min. 17", 19" if you can swing it, flat screen].
Rotate PC boxes out every two years, monitors every three or four.
For laptops spend no more than $800/unit.

Everyone thinks I'm demented. School procurement policy is to by the best, most bulletproof item they can. They want it to last for years. That's all wrong.

As Kurtzweil points out in The Singularity Is Near, technology [especially PCs] is advancing at exponential rates. Actually faster. By 2009 or 10, the PC in the classroom will be smarter than any teacher in the school, equivalent to a humanoid tutor per student. Why invest long term in PCs that today are no smarter than a mouse?

The answer is to not invest heavily. Invest inexpensively and turn over older units to needy kids, as fund-raisers, or as donations. Every year from now on will mean profoundly improved machine intelligence that must not be confused with today's primitive products.

Also note that this article indicates schools can shop wisely and save big dollar amounts.

Look and learn from this snippet [click the link for the full story];

Your Money
Timing the Electronics Market for the Best Deal on a New PC
By DAMON DARLIN
Published: May 27, 2006

Some analysts had expected coming into the year that prices would actually go up slightly. Instead, the average price of a notebook computer dropped to $963 in April, an 18.5 percent decrease from a year ago, according to Current Analysis, which is based in Sterling, Va.

When an electronic device breaks through the $1,000 psychological barrier, sales take off. Samir Bhavnani, director for research at Current Analysis, said 37 percent more notebooks have been sold so far this year. About 60 percent of all notebook computers sold last month were priced below $1,000. He credits Dell, saying, "They love getting down in the mud."

Dell is running a promotion, which it bills as a celebration of its 22nd anniversary, with a $400 discount on PC's, plus a free monitor and free shipping.

Another statistic will tell you just how good consumers have it. While the number of notebooks sold is up 37 percent, revenue growth in the period is up only 15.5 percent, Mr. Bhavnani said. Companies are making less money on each notebook. Desktop computers are literally being given away. Retailers sold 14.8 percent more of them in the first five months of the year, but revenue declined 4 percent, Mr. Bhavnani said. Half of the computers sold for less than $500.

Consider the Hewlett-Packard Compaq Presario desktop offered this week at Office Depot. For $300 you get a PC with 512 megabytes of RAM and a 100-gigabyte hard drive. Office Depot tossed in a 17-inch CRT monitor and a printer.

"The material cost, before the printer, was around $400," estimated Mark Hill, Acer's vice president for sales in the United States. "It's crazy." Not that he's complaining. Acer has gained one point of market share this year by artful pricing.

So how does a consumer play this? As always with electronics, it is worth waiting. Expect even better deals around the Christmas season. But if you need to get one now, you certainly won't suffer. Deals will abound during the back-to-school season, which starts in June just as the school year ends.

School Communications

In the past couple of years I have had the hair-pulling experience of having to deal with email attachments that come from schools. My wife is a teacher and my sons high school students but this phenomenon started when they were in elementary school.

Let me tell you why schools make parents (and fellow teachers and administrators) nuts.

For some reason, school secretaries have decided that Microsoft products are the best way to communicate. So they send the Word document based on the latest, greatest school version of Word, say, Word 2006. The trouble is that most parents and students haven't yet "upgraded" to that version so the student or parent can't read the file. That is, unless they know where to get a special reader or go out and spend hundreds of dollars on the upgrade.

But wait, even assuming you can read the file, Word email attachments are notorious for carrrying viruses and malicious stuff in them. And schools are great places to launch such things. So many saavy parents won't let such attachments be open out of fear that the computer itself is compromised.

The best way for schools to send attachments is by PDF file, a much safer alternative, for reading files.

Unfortunately, the State Department of Education often sends PDF files that have to be filled in with data. Without a PDF editor this is a nightmarish experience.

The recommendation I continue to make despite it falling on deaf ears is to send documents to be read only as PDF files. All others should be OpenOffice documents.

Why? Because OpenOffice is freely downloadable to the school, the parents, and the teachers. And, generally speaking, a less risky medium than Word.

Is anyone listening?

Legislating Deadly Education

American education is being strangled by bad education law. These laws, often sugar-coated with magnanimous sounding titles, do far more damage to society than anyone can dream.

AREN'T I GOOD? I WILL NOT LEAVE ONE CHILD BEHIND! I MUST BE GOOD.

The most mean-spirited monsters America has ever created hold the levers of power these days. They win elections by convincing their all too eager followers that kids are lazy, distracted, stupid, and unworthy of promotion through the school system. Their sneering animous for teachers, schools, and children rewards them richly with re-election time after time.

You are all supposed to believe that children aren't working hard enough. Oh, and parents are too lazy to control their kids or spend enough time with them or... And kids disrespect authority - they can't read or write or remember everything Conservative Holy Seers like William Bennett DEMAND they know. "Don't know it yet - we have time - we'll repeat it and repeat it and repeat it... YOU MUST KNOW THIS BECAUSE I KNOW THIS"

Oh, yes. These kids need testing till their eyes bleed and their fingers blister. It's all for the good brothers and sisters.

Let's be sure that the CMTs punish all kids not passing and any schools who pass too few. Let's just PUNISH EVERY childhood educational thing we can - it is all corrupt (unlike the Carlyle Group or Halliburton).

Yes, all this testing is for our own good. Where are you if you aren't an absolute clone of the student sitting next to you? We wouldn't want anyone to be different because that would mean SOMEBODY'S exercising illegal individuality!

Forget what you read in the NYTimes. Things like;

Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn
By ERIK ECKHOLM
Published: March 20, 2006

In response to the worsening situation for young black men, a growing number of programs are placing as much importance on teaching life skills — like parenting, conflict resolution and character building — as they are on teaching job skills.

These were among the recent findings:

The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990's. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.

Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.

In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.

The tangle of legislation, the mind-numbing emphasis on high-stakes testing, and the neo-nazi enthusiasm for educational conformity to the Bush oligarchy and Orwellian "accountability" practices is paralyzing schools. We can no longer provide even second-world standards of education to our kids. And curriculums are near impossible to change for the better.

In Ashford, school computers are TEN YEARS OLD. In technological terms, we are three generations of technology removed from yesterday. The school owns one smartboard.

EOSmith, similarly, offers far too many programs that beg and cookie-sale their way through the school year. The school needs a new curriculum, up-to-date technology (smartboards, iPOD server, teacher training, curriculum development finances, freedom from idiot-driven legislation, the right to experiment to improve education for our kids no matter what NCLB says, and so on). We need the ability to develop programs tha that inner city students can plug into. We need regional programs that would currently violate even more idiot laws. We need to free ourselves of Texas education and get back to Yankee ingenuity. We need some Hartford insurance companies to sponsor Chinese teachers with insurance and cost-of-living so that the schools and businesses here can learn together.

Connecticut has some of the very poorest cities in the country and we live in a state hell-bent on not graduating our students, not creating alternative prohgrams, not trusting teachers, not promoting individuality, not thinking independently, not exercising its federal autonomy - in short, kissing Bush's ass rather than treating education as a sacred trust. That has got to change.

We don't need one more day of right-wing propaganda about schools, kids, or teachers. Not one. We need relief from bad law, we need federal funding and state funding and we need a moritorium on media jackasses who freely bash our kids, parents, and schools without a fight.

Frank Moss on educational futures...

Frank Moss, an entrepreneur and former CEO of Tivoli Systems, was named head of MIT's Media Lab in February. Here's a sample of what he says about education;

MARCH 13, 2006
Business Week Special Report: Young Entrepreneurs of Tech
How the Masses Will Innovate
interviewed by Stacy Perman

Interviewer: "Moving forward, what are the major areas in technology where academic institutions and venture capitalists will be channeling resources and investments?"

Moss: "The societal business model. Companies are now paying attention to some of the major socioeconomic problems in the First and the Third World. We have a billion people using computers in the First World. It is still limited to wealthier societies.

In the next 20 years we will see the adoption (increase) to 5 billion to 6 billion. And the kinds of killer apps that are important in that world are not those necessarily centered on communication and commerce.

I think as we experience the problem of aging populations we will need to supply different ways to educate, and traditional schools are not the way to go. We will see technology dramatically change the way kids learn. We will see health care without hospitals. That is where the action will be. Just another tweak to a telephone or a handheld device will happen, but it will not be a major source of growth. That is becoming a commodity."

Interviwer: "What new directions will you pursue as head of the Media Lab?"

Moss: "The Media Lab has done a lot to shape the world of technology. We will continue to develop and find brand-new areas. One is between humans and computers, and how the computer relates to people and expresses itself in ways it never has before. For instance, (this means) giving computers common sense and reasoning like people, not just crunching numbers, but having an emotional intelligence as well.

We will (help) to break barriers between a much broader adoption of technology and solutions to the problems facing society today.

We talk about how to make life more pleasant and fulfilling for the aging. We have drugs now that can increase people's lives until their 90s and 100. This is an untapped resource –- the incredible wisdom and knowledge that resides in seniors' brains. We will develop ways to extend their capabilities with technology.

We will improve mental and cognitive abilities. It is esoteric, but think about the problem of aging. People tend to weaken physically as they age, but if we can expand their minds to contribute to society, it will greatly enhance the experience of aging."

Interviewer: "You talk about education and the bottom-up effect that millions more people will play in societal advances. How do you see this unfolding?"


Moss: "We will undergo another revolution when we give 100 million kids a smart cell phone or a low-cost laptop, and bootstrap the way they learn outside of school. We think of games as a way to kill time, but in the future I think it will be a major vehicle for learning.

Creative expression (is another area). No longer will just a few write or create music. We will see 100 million people creating the content and art shared among them. Easy-to-use programs allow kids to compose everything form ringtones to full-fledged operas. It will change the meaning of creative art in our society.

We are already seeing early signs of it in blogs. The source of creative content is coming from the world. That revolution will go well outside of the written word to all forms of visual and performing arts. "

Jodi Rell and Taxpayer's millions in the toilet!

Yeah, that last post gives you a taste of the effectiveness of CABE -shudder-. Here's another whopper. CABE's The Journal reports that "one of the goals of then Lieutenant Governor Rell's technology initiatives was to build a statewide network linking schools, universities and libraries together."

Oh, that ain't all. CABE "has recommended, that there be adequate annual operating funding to maintain, support, and operate the State Education network and that there be sufficient content on the network to provide every school and library with comprehensive and beneficial information."

Really. Let's ask Ms. Rell what this costed the taxpayers, the article says, "after four years and millions of dollars spent". That's right folks, MILLIONS OF DOLLARS SPENT!

Um, I hate to sound like a Monty Python rerun but did Jodi work for the Redundant Department of Redundancy when the State was spending MILLIONS OF [Taxpayer] DOLLARS to build something that sounds an awful lot like the internet but not as good?

In fact, CABE's suggestion for this thing is that we now find something to do with it. Huh? Why in god's name would we spend another penny on this?

Rell should be impeached long before we spend another dime on something like this. It's an outrage and an insult to people's intelligence that good money be flushed after bad.

Maybe, Rell never heard of the internet (CABE's Journal waxes poetic about the need to keep up technologically yet their publication is hardcopy only!). Or maybe her vision was a MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR copy of this freebie, SchoolTool.

I won't be voting for more of this any time soon.

Please, SOMEBODY, ANYBODY tell me the State didn't outsource the work. Lie to me if you have to.

Not your parent's Shakespeare

I wonder what parents and teachers will make of this.

It could be the future of Shakespeare.

Dot mobile, a British mobile phone service aimed at students, says it plans to condense classic works of literature into SMS text messages. The company claims the service will be a valuable resource for studying for exams.

Academic purists will be horrified. Hamlet's famous query, "To be or not to be, that is the question," becomes "2b? Nt2b? ???"

John Milton's epic poem "Paradise Lost" begins "devl kikd outa hevn coz jelus of jesus&strts war." ("The devil is kicked out of heaven because he is jealous of Jesus and starts a war.")

Some may dismiss the summaries as cheat notes for the attention-deficit generation, but John Sutherland, a University College London English professor who consulted on the project, said they could act as a useful memory aid.

"The educational opportunities it offers are immense," said Sutherland, who chaired the judging panel for this year's Booker Prize for fiction.

Sutherland said the compressed nature of text messages allowed them to "fillet out the important elements in a plot."

The Tech-tonic Report, what do you think?

Here's a report that discusses technology in the lives of children. It is dedicated to the memory of Fred Rodgers and Neil Postman and is good reading.

Click the title to read it. These are the three points it talks about:

"1. Our children face a daunting technological frontier of irreversible changes in human biology and the world's ecology. They need a radically different kind of technology education to make wise choices in such a future.

2. Children's lives are increasingly filled with screen time rather than real time with nature, caring adults, the arts, and hands-on work and play. Yet only real relationships, not virtual ones, will inspire and prepare them to protect the Earth and all that lives on it.

3. There is scant evidence of long-term benefits—and growing indications of harm—from the high-tech life style and education aggressively promoted by government and business. It is time for concerted citizen action to reclaim childhood for children."