elnblog: Electronic Lab Notebooks

The importance of Lab Notebooks in showing inventorship

Yet another case of co-inventor issues arising from work in an academic setting is described in Patently-O: Patent Law Blog: Inventorship: Student Denied Co-Inventorship Opportunity (and also here. We’re seeing an increasing interest in PatentSafe from the academic sector, mainly as a quick & cheap way of avoiding such problems. Whilst this sort of dispute doesn’t happen all that often, when it does the legal bills alone would have paid for PatentSafe.

Interestingly, deploying such solutions into academia is rather different from an industrial setting, which caused us to add some additional features. The short version is “less is more”, as this environment doesn’t respond well to top-down imposition of complex systems. So we try to make PatentSafe as invisible as possible.

Blog move

I’ve been trying to consolidate my various Internet hosting services, prompted by my colleague’s initiative to sort out the sprawl that has developed around Amphora’s hosting arrangements. So this blog has moved servers (to Site5) and also platform (to WordPress). I’ll be sad to leave Pebble behind but WordPress is good enough and I can easily get it hosted - in fact, with the benefit of MarsEdit I was able to setup the new Blog and move all the posts over (correcting the dates) in about 30 mins.

So if you notice a bunch of old posts appearing in your feed reader, apologies… normal service (e.g. fairly sporadic posting will now resume.

RSS, Attention and Flocking Behaviour

Just noticed this post, which mentions a “Scanning for Patterns” behavior which is a good summary of how I use RSS/Atom/Blogs. There are about 15 feeds that I will read most articles, and then a few hundred other feeds which I will skim read when traveling. I generally only read a post from this group if it is something that’s especially relevant and/or is something that’s appearing in a number of postings.

In this way I can easily keep my “finger on the pulse” of a wide variety of communities - sure beats having to read dead-tree publications, go to conferences etc. Plus I get to do most of the skim-reading when on a plane, which turns out to be quite convenient.

RSS, Attention and Flocking Behaviour at D’Arcy Norman Dot Net: “Why scan so many feeds? To me, it’s about patterns. Keeping my peripheral vision (peripheral mind? is there such a thing?) pouring over more information than I could ever consciously absorb. And being able to pick up on subtle variations in the attention of the flock that I am a part of, as well as other related flocks.”