What's Actually Wrong with Yahoo's Purchase of Summly

Researchers in the private sector publish a healthy amount of papers in peer-reviewed journals. The elephant in the room is drug design. Many of the drugs on the market today were indeed developed and funded by pharmaceutical companies; yes, pharma companies do occasionally push bullshit products. But imatinib works. It's a trillion-dollar industry for a reason.

As an aside, academia probably shouldn't be lumped under the banner of "state" -- the independence of academia helps it succeed.

>This is a problem for today's generation of enthusiastic free-market proponents. Who is going to pay for the next generation of innovation?

Take a deep breath. The bottom line is this: scientific research is cheap.

The US spends a paltry portion of its budget on research. Hell, I think they even spend more on education. Funny, right? So in the context of the great economic circus, publically funding scientific research affects the "freeness" of the market about as much as publically funding, say, the police. Even Ron Paul wasn't looking to make very large cuts to research.

And that's another reason you should vote for whoever is going to increase my salary: it won't hardly cost you anything.

No, what this really underscores is a fundamental change in thinking for equality that our civilizations seeks since centuries: taking people seriously, no matter of gender, race or in this case age. Many people have good reason to be jealous, being jealous this was not possible when they/we were so young.

When I was that age I hated the fact that only old people would be taken seriously when it comes to business. We can be happy this is possible and as a further sign that age discrimination is going to be eradicated. Besides, this is about discrimination of young people but old people are discriminated against too.

The interview opened with the newsreader restating the fact that he had been covered on the front page of almost every major newspaper. Then here he was, talking to her on TV, talking about Yahoo, and their amazing 'focus on mobile' etc etc. Suddenly it dawns on me - I live in Australia. Australia is practically the other side of the universe. Yahoo has a fresh faced 17 year old kid talking to just about every living room in this country about how focussed they are on mobile.

Every country in the Western world from the US to Australia and beyond, front pages of newspapers, prime time TV interviews on government owned ad free broadcasters during primetime - no amount of PR spend can buy this.

I know the PR rationale was mooted, but nobody could have imagined it would be this big.

This is something I've researched a bit in the past. It ends up being a case of semantics. The market produces plenty of innovation but not much basic research; whether it encourages invention is ambiguous.

These three terms (innovation, invention, discovery) are well-defined in the academic literature; typically innovation is the only act of progress that can be monetized. Innovation occurs both on a technical level (hey, this transistor doo-hickey can be put in microchips!) and procedural (hey, organizing in an assembly line increases the speed with which we can make model T's!). Invention is creating something new from known principles, innovation is applying an invention, and discovery is finding previously unknown principles.