gmtPLUS09 | live from Seoul

The Economist  has a very insightful article into the Chinese perception of not-yet happened auto culture in China.

Just as the availibility of cars played an integral role into the growth of the American middle-class, it appears a similar case will happen there, but it should be interesting to see how it plays out.

The Chinese motorization age should occur light-years ahead of other Asian countries such as Japan and Korea, with its implications on society having a wide reach and scale.

Another interesting perspective this article and many others before it describes in the future outlook of energy distribution. Because the Chinese is now growing dependent on imported oil with a staggering third going to automotive use, it should be also interesting to see if they will break away from the gasoline distribution system. This system is still relatively new to them, and since China is not totally dependent on a gasoline infrastructure, it has the opportunity to go into greenfields a la hydrogen. With the expected number of vehicles that will be on Chinese roads in the next decade and a half, they can really put a dent into reducing global emissions.

A plus side to all this is that by the time the rest of the world is ready to dump the legacy gasoline infrastructure, they can get the hydrogen system at commodity prices and with a knowledge base to go with it.

Interesting stuff.

The USPTO is finally joining the rest of the world with a proposed overhaul of the US patent system. The US tech industry would benefit the most from this. And could this move also pull other straggling nations into the full mix?

In “improving patent quality”, the sweeping changes include:

• the creation of a process, Opposition request, to challenge patents after they are granted by the PTO.
• award a patent by first-to-file, the US currently issues by first-to-use (which is difficult to prove)

Link: A fix for a broken patent system?

In this Wired article, civil engineers have found that disobeying authority was instrumental in saving lives in the 9/11 attacks. Case in point, after both buildings were burning, many calls to 911 resulted in advice to stay put and wait for rescue. The use of elevators (which goes against the recommendation of using stairs in case of evacuation)  coupled with the decision to not stay put, saved roughly 2500 lives.

The disobedience was not a representation of mob panic, the report documents how people stopped to help the injured and assist the mobility-impaired, as well as offering emotional comfort. Experts call these actions as a whole "reasoned flight".

The organizational behavior as seen in this group brings up a point in Chapter 3, Surowiecki writes about a group of army ants who are
moving in a huge circle with a circumference of 1200 feet. Taking each
ant 2.5 hours to complete the loop. A "circular mill", which is created
when army ants find themselves separated from their colony. Once they
have become lost, they obey a simple rule which is to follow the ant in
front of you.

Ants as a species are hard-wired to know nothing, yet they are able to as a crowd efficiently run their colony. What is significant of course is that the simple tools that has enabled ants to survive (locating food sources, completing work/task, and reproduction) are also responsible for the demise of the ants who get trapped in the circular mill. Every decision an ant makes depends on what its fellow ants do, and an ant cannot make decisions as an independent, which could help break the "march to death."

Therefore, the individuals in the two towers who so choosingly broke away from the pack (disobeying orders) and their ‘independent’ decision saved their lives. One thing to remember is:

Independence doesn’t mean isolation, but it does mean relative freedom from the influence of others. If we are independent, our opinions are, in some sense, our own. We will not march to death in a circle just because the ants in front of us are doing so.

One of the lessons all have learned during childhood is, particularly after facing punishment for participating in a misdeed: if your friend jumped off a bridge, would you follow?

So I was talking to my old friends back at Hyundai. They were telling me about how upper management is proposing doing away with individual PCs and issuing instead terminals (monitor and input devices) for each employee.

This is interesting because firstly, it’s Hyundai Motor that is thinking about implementing a huge internal undertaking [sarcasm], and secondly, because this plan symbolizes largely in part the rising threat Korean firms are facing from the Chinese.

As there has been a rise in corporate espionage of employees selling sensitive product planning information to emerging competitors (namely the Taiwanese/Chinese), Hyundai Motor and Samsung Electronics have been highly sensitive toward this trend. Communications of employees are highly scrutinized, like the use of MSN Messenger is limited to off-operating hours.

Just as a single user can log in to a PC that supports multiple users, Hyundai’s plan is just on a scale of hundreds of users.  There was no mention of USB or other accessible exterior ports, but this would be one way of limiting sensitive information from being leaked out.

I remember hearing about a similar plan by Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems a while back. He envisioned users would login with their company IDs at a terminal. The benefit would be that users would not be holed into a single location, they could be literally be mobile throughout the campus, as long as there was a terminal available.

But a question arises, what would happen if there was a coordinated attack (virus, worm, etc.) against the main server that would be attacked from within? Any attack on a hub-and-spoke architecture can be near-fatal. Also, because the user would not "own" his or her tangible PC and the data that is stored on it, would this signify a 1984-like world?

So I’ve been literally bombed with mostly trademark matters, especially that of the Madrid Protocol, lately.

I can wrap up a brief synopsis of communicating back and forth with WIPO and KIPO (Korean IP Office) into these words: politically-motivated and horribly inefficient. I can’t seem to understand why the system is so clogged, and why no one will do anything to clean up the bureaucratic mess. But this won’t be coming anytime soon. It’s true innovation is the key currency of the new economy, thus everyone will want to control the process of managing IP.

I really wish there was some kind of standardization in patents as well. It would really streamline my work. The PCT is a good step yet there are still holes in the system that makes me cringe with sense of pulling another extended working night.

C’est la vie. Perhaps I have no idea what I’m rambling on about…