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Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following questions. Why do cultural creatives regard themselves alone in the society
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Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following questions. Paul Ray said they discovered that a clear cultural change was happening in many areas EXCEPT______.
Patents, said Thomas Jefferson, should draw "a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not". As the value that society places on intellectual property has increased, that line has become murkier-and the cause of some embarrassment, too. Around the world, patent offices are being inundated with applications. In many cases, this represents the extraordinary inventiveness that is occurring in new fields such as the internet, genomics and nanotechnology. But another, less-acceptable reason for the flood is that patent offices have been too lax in granting patents, encouraging many firms to rush to patent as many, often dubious, ideas as possible in an effort to erect legal obstacles to competitors. The result has been a series of messy and expensive court battles, and growing doubts about the effectiveness of patent systems as a spur to innovation, just as their importance should be getting bigger. In 1998 America introduced so-called "business-method" patents, granting for the first time patent monopolies simply for new ways of doing business, many of which were not so new. This was a mistake. It not only ushered in a wave of new applications, but it is probably inhibiting, rather than encouraging, commercial innovation, which had never received, or needed, legal protection in the past. Europe has not, so far, made the same blunder, but the European Parliament is considering the easing of rules for innovations incorporated in software. This might have a similarly deleterious effect as business-method patents, because many of these have been simply the application of computers to long-established practices. In Japan, firms are winning large numbers of patents with extremely narrow claims, mostly to obfuscate what is new and so to ward off rivals. As more innovation happens in China and India, these problems are likely to spread there as well. There is an urgent need for patent offices to return to first principles. A patent is a government-granted temporary monopoly (patents in most countries are given about 20 years’ protection) intended to reward innovators in exchange for a disclosure by the patent holder of how his invention works, thereby encouraging others to further innovation. The qualifying tests for patents are straightforward--that an idea be useful, novel and not obvious. Unfortunately most patent offices, swamped by applications that can run to thousands of pages and confronted by companies wielding teams of lawyers, are no longer applying these tests strictly or reliably. For example, in America, many experts believe that dubious patents abound, such as the notorious one for a "sealed crustless sandwich". Of the few patents that are re-examined by the Patent and Trademark Office itself, often after complaints from others, most are invalidated or their claims clipped down. The number of duplicate claims among patents is far too high. What happens in America matters globally, since it is the world’s leading patent office, approving about 170,000 patents each year, half of which are granted to foreign applicants. Europe’s patent system is also in a mess in another regard: the quilt of national patent offices and languages means that the cost of obtaining a patent for the entire European Union is too high, a burden in particular on smaller firms and individual inventors. The European Patent Office may award a patent, but the patent holder must then file certified translations at national patent offices to receive protection. Negotiations to simplify this have gone on for over a decade without success. As a start, patent applications should be made public. In most countries they are, but in America this is the case only under certain circumstances, and after 18 months. More openness would encourage rivals to offer the overworked patent office evidence with which to judge whether an application is truly novel and non-obvious. Patent offices also need to collect and publish data about what happens once patents are granted--the rate at which they are challenged and how many are struck down. This would help to measure the quality of the patent system itself, and offer some way of evaluating whether it is working to promote innovation, or to impede it. But most of all, patent offices need to find ways of applying standards more strictly. This would make patents more difficult to obtain. But that is only right. Patents are, after all, government-enforced monopolies and so, as Jefferson had it, there should be some "embarrassment" (and hesitation in granting them. What suggestion does the author offer for the solution of those problems
Think all of Kansas is flat Think again. The Flint Hills, in the eastern part of the state, fan out over 183 miles from north to south, stretching 30 to 40 miles wide in parts, the land folding into itself, then popping up in gentle bumps, with mounds looming far off on the horizon. Seemingly endless, the landscape offers up isolated images--a wind-whipped cottonwood tree, a rusted cattle pen, a spindly windmill, an abandoned limestone schoolhouse, the metal-gated entrance to a hilltop cemetery. Proud of the region’s beauty, Kansas has seen to it that 48 miles of its Highway 177, leading through the heart of the hills, are designed the Flint Hills National Scenic Byway. This stretch starts about 50 miles northeast of Wichita and leads north to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, one of the few place left in the United States where a visitor can see the grasses that once covered so much of the American heartland. While up to a million head of cattle graze each summer in the Flint Hills’ rolling pastures, they’re long gone from Wichita, a metropolitan area of half a million people, at the confluence of two narrow curving rivers. But when a strong dusty wind blows through, it’s a reminder of the city’s roots as a wild cow town. The Flint Hills Scenic Byway winds through almost treeless rolling land where bison once roamed; they have been replaced by prairie chicken, great blue herons, coyote, deer, collared lizards, bobcats and, of course, cattle. The route starts in the tiny ranch town of Cassoday (population 130), where the dirt Main Street has a few weathered 19th-century wooden buildings housing an antiques store and a caré popular with cowboys, truck drivers and bikers. It then goes through a handful of small towns and past the tallgrass prairie preserve to Council Grove, a former staging area on the Santa Fe Train. But what this ribbon of a highway offers most is wide-open space. For dramatic effect, visit at sunset when the sky is awash in reds, purples and blues. Of late, tourist amenities have been beefed up in Flint Hills, especially in Chase County, made famous by William Least Heat-Moon’s 1991 book "PrairyEarth." In Cottonwood Falls, with about 1,000 residents, the two-block shopping district is dominated by the grand Chase County Courthouse, the oldest country courthouse (1873) still in use in Kansas. Made of native honey-hued limestone with a red mansard roof, it resembles a small chateau. In small shops along Broadway Street, a bumpy road paved in red brick, you can find Western gear at Jim Bell & Son, antiques and art at the Gallery of Cottonwood Falls, and bison burger and chicken-friend steak dinners ($ 6.95) at the Emma Chase Caré. One of the town’s biggest annual events took place last month, the weeklong Prairie Fire Festival, paying tribute to the annual controlled burning, to clear out old dry grass and promote new growth, an astonishing sight of flames sweeping through the hills. But near Cottonwood Falls, there are guided tours of the high open hills available now on foot, horseback, four-wheel all-terrain vehicle and 19th-century covered wagon. Kansas Flint Hills Adventures offers two-hour tallgrass prairie interpretive tours, wildflower tours and trail rides led by a naturalist who expounds on local history, cowboy culture, American Indian traditions, plants and animals. Wanna-be cowboys can help out with the chores (or not) at the Flying W Ranch, a 10,000-acre, fifth-generation, working cattle ranch to the west of the byway, off Route 50 in the one-building town of Clements. It offers modern bunkhouse lodging, chuck wagon meals, trail rides, longhorn-roping demonstrations and sunset rides in a 1959 Ford wheat truck. In the summer and early fall, weekend .pioneers can pick up the Flint Hills Overland Wagon Train in Council Grove. Riders camp overnight and are duly fed several "pioneer meals" cooked over an open fire. Saturday night’s entertainment is a performance of cowboy songs and poems. What do you think is this passage most probably taken from
I am ashamed to begin with saying that Touraine is the garden of France; that remark has long ago lost its bloom. The town of Tours, however, has something sweet and bright, which suggests that it is surrounded by a land of fruits. It is a very agreeable little city; few towns of its size are more ripe, more complete, or, I should suppose, in better humor with themselves and less disposed to envy the responsibilities of bigger places. It is truly the capital of its smiling province; a region of easy abundance, of good living, of genial, comfortable, optimistic, rather indolent opinions. Balzac says in one of his tales that the real Tourangeau will not make an effort, or displace himself even, to go in search of a pleasure; and it is not difficult to understand the sources of this amiable cynicism. He must have a vague conviction that he can only lose by almost any change. Fortune has been kind to him: he lives in a temperate, reasonable, sociable climate, on the banks, of a river which, it is true, sometimes floods the country around it, but of which the ravages appear to be so easily repaired that its aggressions may perhaps be regarded (in a region where so many good things are certain) merely as an occasion for healthy suspense. He is surrounded by fine old traditions, religious, social, architectural, culinary; and he may have the satisfaction of feeling that he is French to the core. No part of his admirable country is more characteristically national. Normandy is Normandy, Burgundy is Burgundy, Provence is Provence; but Touraine is essentially France. It is the land of Rabelais, of Descartes, of Balzac, of good books and good company, as well as good dinners and good houses. George Sand has somewhere a charming passage about the mildness, the convenient quality, of the physical conditions of central France, "son climat souple et chaud, ses pluies abondantes et courtes." In the autumn of 1882 the rains perhaps were less short than abundant; but when the days were fine it was impossible that anything in the way of weather could be more channing. The vineyards and orchards looked rich in the fresh, gay light; cultivation was everywhere, but everywhere it seemed to be easy. There was no visible poverty; thrift and success presented themselves as matters of good taste. The white caps of the women glittered in the sunshire, and their well-made sabots clicked cheerfully on the hard, clean roads. Touraine is a land of old chateaux, a gallery of architectural specimens and of large hereditary properties. The peasantry have less of the luxury of ownership than in most other parts of France; though they have enough of it to give them quite their share of that shrewdly conservative look which, in the little, chaffering, place of the market-town, the stranger observes so often in the wrinkled brown masks that surmount the agricultural blouse. This is, moreover, the heart of the old French monarchy; and as that monarchy was splendid and picturesque, a reflection of the splendor still glitters in the current of the Loire. Some of the most striking events of French history have occurred on the banks of that river, and the soil it waters bloomed for a while with the flowering of the Renaissance. The Loire gives a great "style" to a landscape of which the features are not, as the phrase is, prominent, and carries the eye to distances even more poetic than the green horizons of Touraine. It is a very fitful stream, and is sometimes observed to run thin and expose all the crudities of its channel, a great defect certainly in a river which is so much depended upon to give an air to the places it waters. But I speak of it as I saw it last full, tranquil, powerful, bending in large slow curves, and sending back half the light of the sky. Nothing can be finer than the view of its course which you get from the battlements and terraces of Amboise. As I looked down on it from that elevation one lovely Sunday morning, through a mild glitter of autumn sunshine, it seemed the very model of a generous, beneficent stream. The most channing part of Tours is naturally the shaded quay that overlooks it, and looks across too at the friendly faubourg of Saint Symphorien and at the terraced heights which rise above this. Indeed, throughout Touraine, it is half the charm of the Loire that you can travel beside it. The great dike which protects it, or, protects the country from it, from Blois to Angers, is an admirable road; and on the other side, as well, the highway constantly keeps it company. A wide river, as you follow a wide road, is excellent company; it heightens and shortens the way. "In the autumn of 1882 the rains perhaps were less short than abundant; but when the days were fine it was impossible that anything in the way of weather could be more charming." This tells us that ______.
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