A friend of mine had an interview a couple weeks ago with Google Inc. He provided me a list of just some of the questions he was asked. I’ve added a few more from others I have talked to who had interviews with the internet giant, Google, as well. See if you can answer them. Many are open ended with several right answers, therefore I did not provide the answers.

Crazy Questions at Google Job Interview

This paper was recently covered by James Surowiecki in The New Yorker.

The orthodox justification for intellectual property is utilitarian. Advocates for strong IP rights argue that absent such rights copyists will free-ride on the efforts of creators and stifle innovation. This orthodox justification is logically straightforward and well reflected in the law. Yet a significant empirical anomaly exists: the global fashion industry, which produces a huge variety of creative goods without strong IP protection. Copying is rampant as the orthodox account would predict. Yet innovation and investment remain vibrant. Few commentators have considered the status of fashion design in IP law. Those who have almost uniformly criticize the current legal regime for failing to protect apparel designs. But the fashion industry itself is surprisingly quiescent about copying. Firms take steps to protect the value of trademarks, but appear to accept appropriation of designs as a fact of life. This diffidence about copying stands in striking contrast to the heated condemnation of piracy and associated legislative and litigation campaigns in other creative industries.

Why, when other major content industries have obtained increasingly powerful IP protections for their products, does fashion design remain mostly unprotected - and economically successful? The fashion industry is a puzzle for the orthodox justification for IP rights. This paper explores this puzzle. We argue that the fashion industry counter-intuitively operates within a low-IP equilibrium in which copying does not deter innovation and may actually promote it. We call this the piracy paradox. This paper offers a model explaining how the fashion industry's piracy paradox works, and how copying functions as an important element of and perhaps even a necessary predicate to the industry's swift cycle of innovation. In so doing, we aim to shed light on the creative dynamics of the apparel industry. But we also hope to spark further exploration of a fundamental question of IP policy: to what degree are IP rights necessary to induce innovation? Are stable low-IP equilibria imaginable in other industries as well? Part I describes the fashion industry and its dynamics and illustrates the prevalence of copying in the industry. Part II advances an explanation for the piracy paradox that rests on two features: induced obsolescence and anchoring. Both phenomena reflect the status-conferring power of fashion, and both suggest that copying, rather than impeding innovation and investment, promotes them. Part II also considers, and rejects, alternative explanations of the endurance of the low-IP status quo. Part III considers extensions of our arguments to other fields. By examining copyright's negative space - those creative endeavors that copyright does not address - we argue we can better understand the relationship between copyright and innovation.

See also my recent post about space aliens and fashion.

The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design

These model train photos were taken by Peter Feigenbaum on his home train layout. Pete is a guitarist, illustrator, and architecture student at Yale University.

Model Railroad Slums

"Ansel Adams" takes a new look at the work of this important and influential photographer through approximately 125 images drawn from The Lane Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

See also WaPo coverage:

An Adams black-and-white is photography at its most technical: It depends on knowing everything there is to know about a film stock's "characteristic curve" and "spectral sensitivity graph" and other photographic esoterica. Ask anyone who's mastered Adams's famous Zone System -- a kind of 10-step program for perfect photographic exposure -- and they'll speak of long nights in the darkroom and eyes blurred from formulas.

Ah, L.A.

ANSEL ADAMS at the Corcoran Gallery in DC

A reBlog facilitates the process of filtering and republishing relevant content from many RSS feeds. reBloggers subscribe to their favorite feeds, preview the content, and select their favorite posts. These posts are automatically published through their favorite blogging software.

reBlog by Eyebeam R&D

Do you already use services like del.icio.us, flickr, blogger, typepad, etc? SuprGlu is a new way to gather all your content from those sites. In a nutshell, SuprGlu:

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SuprGlu - Gluing your life together.

Charlie Douglas, a spokesperson for Comcast Corporation, called back to clarify what "excessive usage" means and why the company's actions to end its relationship with these customers is good for gamers. First, Douglas defines Comcast's "excessive use" as any customer who downloads the equivalent of 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures or 13 million emails in a month.

So if you have two channels of Internet radio running all the time, you are going to get dropped from Comcast. If you listen to Internet radio during the day, and you use your Netflix WatchNow subscription in the evening, you are going to get dropped from Comcast.

What will non-technical customers think of this? People will relate it to other media delivery mechanisms. Can you imagine your satellite TV provider calling up to complain about your "excessive use" of the television? Can you imagine your NPR affiliate calling to ask you to turn off the radio more often? You know, when you're not "really", seriously, listening to the program?

This plays right into the DSL propaganda about "dedicated" bandwidth.

Comcast Clarifies High Speed Extreme Use Policy

New Oliver Sacks in The New Yorker.

In March of 1985, Clive Wearing, an eminent English musician and musicologist in his mid-forties, was struck by a brain infection—a herpes encephalitis—affecting especially the parts of his brain concerned with memory. He was left with a memory span of only seconds—the most devastating case of amnesia ever recorded.

A Neurologist’s Notebook: The Abyss

From John Cassidy, writing in The New Yorker.

I sometimes wonder what goes on in my head when I make stupid investment decisions.

A few weeks ago, I had a chance to find out.

This essay appears in The Best American Science Writing 2007.

Annals of Economics: Mind Games

From Joshua Davis, writing in Wired.

They can see your eyes, your nose, your mouth – and still not recognize your face. Now scientists say people with prosopagnosia may help unlock some of the deepest mysteries of the brain.

This essay appears in The Best American Science Writing 2007.

Face Blind