Another silly patent

US Patent 6,513,042 Internet test-making method What is claimed is: 1. A method of making a test and posting the test on-line for potential test-takers, said method comprising the steps of: providing a host system and a plurality of remote terminals operatively coupled to the Internet; inputting questions at one of the remote terminals; compiling the questions at the host system to make a compiled test; posting the test on-line for potential test-takers; wherein a test-taker is required to pay to take the compiled test; and wherein the test-maker and the proprietor of the host system share the revenues generated by the test-taker taking the test. Granted, this is another arrogant business method, but required? Their patent writer (or drafter, or a paralegal) should have maintained the claiming style and written: wherein a presenting a test taker with... to take the test - the phrase fits the technical description and an example therefrom. It should say, albeit in legalese doublespeak, but as a stronger claim wherein a presenting a test taker with ...for participating in the test... and share - hasn't it been discussed by hundreds of patent examiners as ambiguous? Because share in method claims is better represented by dividing that's all. It's very simple.

State Department seeks out the web savvy

I got hold of the State Department's Foreign Service Exam. It is of 4 parts - but the first part which contains 90 questions on general information, all multiple choice, such as naming Tunisia's two neighboring countries, is the most interesting. Each question had 4 possible answers. There were several questions about computers and the Internet. The first question was really tough. They wanted to know what else you needed to successfully login to your computer with besides your username. Maybe a password? The second question was right up there with the first. They wanted to know what the full name of the symbol was that goes between the username and the domain name in an e-mail address. The third question demanded to know what the acronym ISP meant. One of the choices was Internet Senior Professional! That would be you, I guess. They also had a challenging question asking us to identify the one item from the list that was not a device for storing data. The choices were Zip Drive, Disk Drive, Hard Drive, and CPU. The next question asked us if we knew what "html" was. Finally, the last question wanted to know if we understood the concept of "bookmarking" a website. Thus 6 of 90 questions about high technology and internet and you wonder why the State Department and USofA in general is so behind in technology, and, furthermore, on the recieving end of foreign and industrial espionage implementation.

Stem cells can be extracted from baby teeth

I found the following article by browsing back issues of Scientific American. The discovery significantly alleviates the stem cell controversy. However, I do not see it recieve enough news coverage. On April 23, 2003, the magazine reported that a seven-year-old's baby tooth may be worth a lot more than the quarter the tooth fairy left under the pillow. Scientists have discovered that the pulp inside deciduous teeth is a treasure trove of fast-growing stem cells. Naturally-shed choppers could thus provide an easily accessible new source of these sought-after cells for clinical studies of stem-cell transplantation and tissue engineering. When his six-year-old daughter pulled out her baby tooth, Songtao Shi of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research in Bethesda, Md., washed it off to prepare it for the tooth fairy. Holding his daughter's partial tooth, the stem cell researcher noticed living tissue inside and wondered whether it might contain relatively young stem cells. Shi took the tooth to his lab and found that he was indeed able to isolate such cells from the tooth pulp left in the crown. Extracting more stem cells from the lost baby teeth of seven- and eight-year-olds, Shi called the new group of cells SHED (stem cells from human exfoliated deciduous teeth). In the lab, the cultured cells grew quickly, forming sphere-like clusters indicative of a fast rate of proliferation not observed in stem cells isolated from bone marrow or adult teeth. Not only did they grow rapidly, but when implanted under the skin of immunocompromised mice, SHED induced bone formation -- a feat that stem cells extracted from adult wisdom teeth could not accomplish. SHED cells also triggered neural cell formation in the brain and fat cell growth; stem cells from adult teeth, on the other hand, are not as good at neural cell generation and cannot trigger fat cell growth at all. A report describing these findings was published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. One of the challenges of stem cell research is that nobody quite knows the extent to which they can be used to induce growth in tissues other than that from which they were extracted. In that regard, SHED cells could potentially work better than other types of stem cells because of their youth (and thus fast proliferation) and their demonstrated ability to induce the growth of several types of cells. "When kids' teeth fall out we can save them," Shi remarks. "If they need [the stem cells from] them in 20 years, there will be no immunorejection." Just what those needs might be, Shi cannot say. But considering that other researchers are already freezing stem cells from umbilical cords, he muses, "Why don't we save this one?"