Broken Symmetry

Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops

From Thomas Goetz at Wired:

The basic premise is simple. Provide people with information about their actions in real time (or something close to it), then give them an opportunity to change those actions, pushing them toward better behaviors. Action, information, reaction. It’s the operating principle behind a home thermostat, which fires the furnace to maintain a specific temperature, or the consumption display in a Toyota Prius, which tends to turn drivers into so-called hypermilers trying to wring every last mile from the gas tank. But the simplicity of feedback loops is deceptive.

Via Farnam Street.

I hadn't heard about Bandura's work in the 1960s, although I find that he was cited in Csikszentmihalyi's Flow in passing. It was unclear from the citation how much of an influence he was on C.'s own theory. Although C. does not emphasize flow as a feedback loop, from a systemic perspective that is pretty much what one observes when people are in a state of flow. The topologies get complicated since many experiences of flow involve other people. Think of a jazz quartet and its audience -- live and for its recordings. Or of Congress and the stock market.

I like how this dovetails neatly in with Dweck's mindset theory also. The fixed mindset interrupts any feedback loop, and hence disrupts learning. But too little self-criticism and introspection and there is no feedback.

One of C.'s observations in Creativity is that creative individuals often lose a parent early in life. It seems to me that one would have to develop a capacity for self-criticism earlier on in that instance. Perhaps such individuals have a better capacity for self-generating feedback than do the rest of us, who are looking to others -- especially family -- for queues as to whether we are doing well at this ambiguous assignment that is our existence.

Bleg to Readers Who Code: Better Way to Claim Software?

Mea Vita offers interesting insight into Apple's development procees:

Before writing any production code, we'd write our unit tests. All software engineers should be taught to write their API unit tests first – it's a good discipline to learn. Next, we coded using WebObjects/Java with Eclipse/WOLips and we always ran the app in debug mode with key break points so that we could step through the code. I've frequently seen too many software engineers, elsewhere, who just code away as if they're throwing something against the wall to see what sticks.

Here's what wikipedia says about unit testing:

Each unit test can be seen as a design element specifying classes, methods, and observable behaviour. ... It is true that unit testing lacks some of the accessibility of a diagram, but UML diagrams are now easily generated for most modern languages by free tools (usually available as extensions to IDEs). Free tools, like those based on the xUnit framework, outsource to another system the graphical rendering of a view for human consumption.

Can any BS readers offer a view on whether or not a claim to units would be easier to construe to determine patentability, validity, infringement than a single-English-sentence claim?

More generally, I often wonder how the practice of claiming chemical structures was first adopted and approved by the PTO. What would it take to get the PTO to require software to be claimed in a new way?

Supreme Court Affirms the Priority of Individual Rights under the Patent Act

Stanford v. Roche decided today:

Since 1790, the patent law has operated on the premise that rights in an invention belong to the inventor. The question here is whether the University and Small Busi-ness Patent Procedures Act of 1980—commonly referred toas the Bayh-Dole Act—displaces that norm and automati-cally vests title to federally funded inventions in federal contractors. We hold that it does not.

As noted in the Sotomayor concurrence, footnote 2 on page 5 expressly reserved the questions that would have been raised by consideration of the Federal Circuit's precedents regarding interpretation of patent assignments. Thus, the guidance on choice of law that seemed possible after oral arguments have been reserved for future consideration. It is notable, however, that even the dissenters (Breyer and Ginsburg) who addressed the Federal Circuit precedent were silent as to the choice of law question.