'Do intellectual property (IP) rights on existing technologies hinder subsequent
innovation? Using newly-collected data on the sequencing of the human genome by
the public Human Genome Project and the private rm Celera, this paper estimates
the impact of Celera's gene-level IP on subsequent scientic research and product
development. Genes initially sequenced by Celera were held with IP for up to two
years, but moved into the public domain once re-sequenced by the public eort.
Across a range of empirical specications, I nd evidence that Celera's IP led to
reductions in subsequent scientic research and product development on the order of
20 to 30 percent. Taken together, these results suggest that Celera's short-term IP
had persistent negative eects on subsequent innovation relative to a counterfactual
of Celera genes having always been in the public domain.' (via Tony Finch)

PDF of the 15-page Vanity Fair article -- from interviews I've read in advance, this seems pretty good

modern web-scraping tech, using Ruby and Nokogiri

document scanner app for the iPhone/Android smartphones; take a photo of a doc, it'll fix geometry, remove shadows, white balance and sharpen appropriately, generate PDFs and image files, and upload to Evernote for OCRing. EUR4.99 though

PDFs, docs, links

specifically, Hadoop and Pig for log/metrics analytics, Cassandra going forward; great preso, lots of detail and code examples. also, impressive number-crunching going on at Twitter

interesting prez from some IBM researchers on using Cassandra as a mail store, via Jeremy

one for the to-get queue

'Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don't have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online.' sweet!