Original Inventors Research Articles

From raw seismic data to quantitative interpretation via cloud-based FWI

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) has evolved in recent years from a technique for recovering long- to intermediate-wavelength updates of acoustic overburden velocities as part of a broader model building workflow to a standalone tool for high-fidelity seismic imaging using raw seismic data – with ever greater resolution and ever more sophisticated physics being sought. In doing so, it has moved notably closer to fulfilling the vision of its original inventors in the late 70s and early 80s. In this work, two novel approaches to FWI along with enabling technologies for their effective deployment are considered. The first of these allows for robust long-wavelength updates to be generated from raw seismic data in the absence of diving wave energy, providing reliable estimates of acoustic velocity at depths equivalent to or greater than the longest offsets available in the data – thereby enabling more effective imaging with data of limited quality. The second allows for the estimation of elastic amplitude-versus-angle behaviour while still using an acoustic wave equation, thereby mitigating the significant computational burden typically associated with elastic FWI. Finally, it is demonstrated that these approaches can be deployed in a reliable and cost-effective manner via the considered use of public cloud resources, with learnings relevant for analogous massively parallel scientific applications. Case studies from two marine environments are provided for discussion, one being from deep-water US Gulf of Mexico and the other from intermediate water depths offshore Western Australia.

The Roth Net at 40 years: celebrating the spirit of innovation

The Roth Net at 40 years: celebrating the spirit of innovation

Advancing urban ethnopharmacology: a modern concept of sustainability, conservation and cross-cultural adaptations of medicinal plant lore in the urban environment.

The discipline 'urban ethnopharmacology' emerged as a collection of traditional knowledge, ancient civilizations, history and folklore being circulated since generations, usage of botanical products, palaeobotany and agronomy. Non-traditional botanical knowledge increases the availability of healthcare and other essential products to the underprivileged masses. Intercultural medicine essentially involves 'practices in healthcare that bridge indigenous medicine and western medicine, where both are considered as complementary'. A unique aspect of urban ethnopharmacology is its pluricultural character. Plant medicine blossomed due to intercultural interactions and has its roots in major anthropological events of the past. Unani medicine was developed by Khalif Harun Al Rashid and Khalif Al Mansur by translating Greek and Sanskrit works. Similarly, Indo-Aryan migration led to the development of Vedic culture, which product is Ayurveda. Greek medicine reached its summit when it travelled to Egypt. In the past few decades, ethnobotanical field studies proliferated, especially in the developed countries to cope with the increasing demands of population expansion. At the same time, sacred groves continued to be an important method of conservation across several cultures even in the urban aspect. Lack of scientific research, validating the efficiency, messy applications, biopiracy and slower results are the main constrains to limit its acceptability. Access to resources and benefit sharing may be considered as a potential solution. Indigenous communities can copyright their traditional formulations and then can collaborate with companies, who have to provide the original inventors with a fair share of the profits since a significant portion of the health economy is generated by herbal medicine. Search string included the terms 'Urban' + 'Ethnopharmacology', which was searched in Google Scholar to retrieve the relevant literature. The present review aims to critically analyse the global concept of urban ethnopharmacology with the inherent plurality of the cross-cultural adaptations of medicinal plant use by urban people across the world.

The electroshock triangle: disputes about the ECT apparatus prototype and its display in the 1960s.

In the early 1960s, a climate of public condemnation of electroconvulsive therapy was emerging in the USA and Europe. In spite of this, the electroshock apparatus prototype, introduced in Rome in 1938, was becoming hotly contended. This article explores the disputes around the display of the electroshock apparatus prototype in the summer of 1964 and sheds new light on the triangle of personalities that shaped its future: Karl and William Menninger, two key figures of American psychiatry in Topeka; their competitor, Adalberto Pazzini, the founder of the Sapienza Museum of the History of Medicine in Rome; and, between them, Lucio Bini, one of the original inventors of ECT, who died unexpectedly that summer.

From Localization to Glocalization: Contriving Korean Pop Culture to Meet Glocal Demands

Hallyu (the Korean Wave) has been around the world since the late 1990s. Over the period of twenty years, Hallyu has evolved from a regional entertainment pop to a global cultural content. The evolution of Hallyu, like any other evolutions, has involved a long process of localization and globalization. Both K-pop and K-dramas, the two major pillars of the Hallyu revolution, are foreign imports. K-pop has mostly been influenced by European and American dance music since the early 1990s, whereas K-dramas have been heavily influenced by Japanese trendy TV dramas in the past, particularly during the 1980s. However, the localization of K-pop and K-dramas by Korean artists, writers, and producers demonstrated their adept rearrangement skills that ushered in a new era of a domestic pop culture boom that had been on the verge of destruction due to Hollywood films, Japanese pop culture contents, and the financial crisis that swept through the nation since 1997. K-pop and K-dramas have successfully gained domestic fame to propagate its commercial influence in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. The collection of papers gathered in this Forum Kritika on Hallyu Studies presents their analyses on the process of localizing and globalizing Hallyu, or what I call glocalization. Briefly, glocalization denotes a successful localization of foreign products so much so that original inventors of the products want to import the local variations instead of their originals. Americans buying a massive number of Japanese cars, for example, is a good case of glocalizaiton. Hallyu’s glocalization success indicates that the domestic Korean demand for high quality pop culture has induced new types of competition that required importing global pop content, simultaneously requiring them to contrive to produce better quality pop content than the originals for re-exporting to foreign markets, given the enormous investments that cannot be recouped from a small Korean market.

The Bristow-Latarjet procedure, a historical note on a technique in comeback.

The Bristow-Latarjet procedure is a well-known surgical technique designed to treat shoulder instability. In this procedure, the coracoid process is transferred to the glenoid rim, to serve as augmentation of an associated bony defect. Because long-term results following a soft tissue procedure (Bankart repair) reveal that up to 21 and 33% of the patients might experience recurrent instability and with the advent of the arthroscopic coracoid transfer, there is renewed interest in this procedure to treat shoulder instability. The aim of this study is to provide a historical overview, with emphasis on the original inventors Bristow and Latarjet, the complications and following modifications regarding the surgical approach, the coracoid transfer and the arthroscopic technique. Level of evidence V.

Knowledge discovery for friction stir welding via data driven approaches

For a comprehensive understanding towards friction stir welding (FSW) which would lead to a unified approach that embodies materials other than aluminium, such as titanium and steel, it is crucial to identify the intricate correlations between the controllable process conditions, the observable internal process variables, and the characterisations of the post-weld materials. In Part 1 of this paper, multiple correlation analyses techniques have been developed to detect new and previously unknown correlations between the internal process variables and weld quality of aluminium alloy AA 5083. Furthermore, a new exploitable weld quality indicator has, for the first time, been successfully extracted, which can provide an accurate and reliable indication of the as welded defects. All results relating to this work have been validated using real data obtained from a series of welding trials that utilised a new revolutionary sensory platform called ARTEMIS developed by TWI Ltd, the original inventors of the FSW process.

Review: Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990

Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990 . Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 24 September 2011–15 January 2012. In his 1994 essay “The Generic City,” Rem Koolhaas wrote: > Postmodernism is the only movement that has succeeded in connecting the practice of architecture with the practice of panic. Postmodernism is not a doctrine based on a highly civilized reading of architectural history but a method, a mutation in architectural practice that produces results fast enough to keep pace with the Generic City’s development. Instead of consciousness, as its original inventors may have hoped, it creates a new unconscious. It is modernization’s little helper.1 This remains perhaps the only really insightful thing ever written on the subject of architectural postmodernism—unless, that is, one also includes the statement from around the same date by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck—an arch critic—when he described postmodernism generally as a meaningless concept “used by blind people who don’t know what’s going on.”2 There was certainly a sense of both of these tendencies—panic and blindness—in the 2011 exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum on the subject of postmodernism. If, as Manfredo Tafuri declared, the deeper function of bourgeois art is “to ward off anguish,” then the visitor could see that anguish bleeding from its very heart in this show.3 Rooms were stuffed full of furniture, clothes, film clips, pop videos, and everything else in an effort to convey the notion of a populist, exuberant, diverse, ironically low-art approach rooted in a feeling of super-abundance. The problem, of course, is that the period being covered by the V&A show, from 1970 to 1990, felt nothing like that back then. Indeed, it now appears in retrospect to have been a relatively homogenous era in terms of urban culture in Western capitalist countries, certainly when compared to globalized conditions today. It was also notable that the architectural exhibits in the V&A exhibition—including the classic …

Early-stage finance and the role of external entrepreneurs in the commercialization of university-generated knowledge

The past decade has seen a plethora of policy initiatives that seek to bridge the chasm between investments in public R&D and its effective diffusion in society. This article uses a case study approach to explore and contrast the effectiveness of different entrepreneur models in financing and developing university spin-offs (USOs). The distinction between different entrepreneur models is based on whether the USOs are championed by university employees that seek to commercialize their own inventions or by external entrepreneurs who are not the original inventors but with acquired rights to develop and commercialize technology originating from university research. Our analysis show that external entrepreneurs have a different mind-set that makes them better equipped to deal with opportunities and obstacles related to financing and developing USOs. However, the development paths of USOs are embedded in a more complex web of path-dependent interactions, where the championship of the USO becomes interwoven with existing and emerging social relationships and opportunities, and challenges related to the technology that is commercialized.

Patent-based investment funds as innovation intermediaries for SMEs: In-depth analysis of reciprocal interactions, motives and fallacies

SMEs and academic spin-offs play an important role in generating innovations but face resource and competency constraints that have implications for commercializing their technologies. In two in-depth case studies we analyze how patent-based investment funds (PBIFs), operating as innovation intermediaries, help overcome these constraints. In contrast to other patent intermediaries, PBIFs acquire patents and patentable inventions at an early stage of technology development when access to capital is particularly critical. They invest in the technological and legal advancement of their portfolio, which is mostly conducted in close interaction with the technology-providing SMEs and their original inventors. These PBIFs not only provide high added-value in the course of technology commercialization but also operate international networks to facilitate the commercialization of SMEs' technologies at an international scale. Although PBIFs are a promising new agent in the heterogeneous field of innovation intermediaries, their commercialization results and the actual rate of returns are not yet well established.

Patents of Introduction and the Spanish Innovation System

From a long-term perspective, technological innovation could have come from local or domestic inventive and research activity, or from the transfer of foreign technology. In reality either option produces similar effects and often it was a combination of both which drove the historical acceleration of the rhythm of innovation and expansion of industry. This was fundamental for Great Britain and its early followers, and even more so for the latecomers and the underdeveloped countries. Spain, for example, suffered from scientific, technological and industrial backwardness which impeded the implementation of a national research and development infrastructure capable of generating competitive inventive activity. However, the national innovation system was designed, from the 18th century onwards, to favour the transfer of technology and human capital from abroad and thus establish the basis of modern economic growth and the process of industrialization. In this paper we will reflect on the design of the Spanish Innovation System, especially in one of its institutional aspects (the patent system), in order to understand the real role and function of a curios legal process the “patent of introduction”, which in practice promoted and permitted anyone to protect foreign third-person technologies in order to implement them locally, providing they were not already established. Although this legal practice represents a very clear declaration of intentions concerning the innovation policy and despite its existence in other patent systems in lagging countries, economic and technology historians have paid little or no attention to the subject. Therefore it is unclear how patents of introduction functioned and what consequences they had on the innovation and industrialization processes, especially in underdeveloped countries such as Spain, which, incredibly, maintained this practice until joining the European Union in 1986. We will attempt to shed light on how patents of introduction were established and how they evolved, the role they played in the promotion of innovation, who used them and how, and the real impact they had. The conclusions point out that, as with protectionism as a commercial policy, forcing national processes of innovation that take advantage of foreign inventions with or without respecting the original inventors rights – as generally occurs with the transfer of technology from abroad – could have positive consequences on the industrialization processes as well as helping lagging countries such as Spain to catch up with modern societies.

The Perils of Alzheimers Drug Development

The present commentary is based on the thoughtful commentary by Becker and Greig (2008) in the August issue of Current Alzheimer Research, who describe a broken Alzheimer's disease drug development system. Their theme is that it is not the drugs that fail clinical trials but potentially sponsors and investigators who fail the drugs. They argue that “many current problems encountered in Alzheimer's disease drug development can be avoided by changing practices associated with drug development.” According to the authors, we fail to give candidate drugs a fair shake by not finding the right dose, not evaluating patients properly, not using quality controls over our data, not effectively modeling the disease, and not using effective research designs. They say sponsors and investigators fail drugs every which way. It is hard to argue that mistakes are uncommon in AD drug development and easy for us to cherry pick and choose favorite miscues. Becker and Greig with the help of a colleague at the investment firm Rodman and Renshaw identified 100 failed AD drug programs within which according to their analysis 30 compounds possibly showing initial efficacy failed in phase 3. They imply that some of these compounds could possibly have succeeded in phase 3 and been marketed. Given the various errors in development they express concerns that we can not know with adequate certainty whether drugs are failing or investigators are failing drugs. This broad indictment is hard to counter because there are examples for the truth of every point Becker and Greig raise. One or another drug development program has fallen short on one or more of the authors’ critical points (Schneider 2008a). In particular, they example the development programs for two drugs - metrifonate and phenserine – that they knew well as researchers, consultants or original inventors. Metrifonate was developed by the large pharmaceutical company Bayer, and phenserine by a defunct boutique biotech, Axonyx.

The Cusp of a New Era in Long-term Mechanical Circulatory Support

The Cusp of a New Era in Long-term Mechanical Circulatory Support

Contactless cards vs RFID enabled phones

The original inventors of the smart card more than 30 years ago envisaged it being contactless – or RFID. However, affordable contactless cards took a long time to become available. Dr Peter Harrop of analyst firm IDTechEx, which is currently researching a report called ‘Contactless Cards and Near Field Communication’, tells CTT that in spite of initial pessimism from some critics, the technology has proved itself and volumes of shipments are growing rapidly.

Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power (review)

Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power. By Doron Ben-Atar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Pp. 304. Cloth, $38.00.)In a series of short chapters, Trade secrets takes the reader on a multidisciplinary tour of the economic ideas and pragmatic policy concerns about the persistent need for labor, skill, and technology in the revolutionary and early national generations. The narrative is grounded in the familiar historiographies about the scarcity and high costs of North American labor, the urgency of establishing American manufactures without the supposed corrupting influences of foreign luxury, the rising pressures on policy makers to satisfy consumer demand, and abiding concerns about American political stability in a contentious Atlantic world. But even as Ben-Atar affirms the general contributions of the large scholarly fields of industrial, market, and consumer revolution studies, and relies on the more recent studies of scholars with related concerns such as David Jeremy and Larry Peskin, his central argument takes early American historians into less familiar terrain about the thorny matter of intellectual property.As long as North Americans remained in the British Empire, BenAtar argues, they enjoyed the relatively free flow of ideas, goods, and technologies, despite efforts of mercantilists to craft patent laws to protect original inventors. Intellectual piracy prevailed, and foremost among its advocates was Benjamin Franklin. Patents and temporary monopolies on machines and processing equipment, argued Franklin, might spur wouldbe inventors, but they had little role in the overall benefits of satisfying the needs and wants of a rapidly expanding people such as the empire boasted. Franklin and others were convinced that the most useful and sought-after intellectual property in the early Atlantic world was related to agricultural, not industrial, invention, which was in turn suited to the character of virtuous Americans. But even in the case of textile manufacturing, talk about republican simplicity was far less important than the desire to secure technology and labor to produce textiles. It seemed to make sense, then, to promote the free flow of skilled artisans and new machines throughout the Atlantic world, whatever other policies mercantilists advocated. Indeed, few early modern writers knew how to define the ownership of ideas and few cared about identifying original inventors.Postrevolutionary expectations about the rise of American manufacturing tested this attitude toward intellectual property, especially as Americans struggled to recover from a debilitating war and dire shortages of skilled white labor. Yet, as Ben-Atar argues compellingly, there was no rapid movement toward restricting the free flow of ideas, people, or technologies, no great swell of nationalist protectionism. Here, Ben-Atar follows the existing historical narratives about international commerce and migration during the first postwar years, from which we have learned that despite the sense of urgency about building a self-sufficient political economy to overcome the turmoil of disrupted networks of goods and credit, American merchants and manufacturers actually returned to British markets with enthusiasm. For years, a number of policy makers, merchants, and publicists would repeat the Franklinian refrain, and for years, they would remain more attached to the export of staples than to initiating ambitious manufactures.An undercurrent of opposition became evident by the late 1780s, embodied in the writings of men such as Tench Coxe, Mathew Carey, Albert Gallatin, and Alexander Hamilton. …

The emergence of radically new health care technologies: Inventive users as innovation networkers

Besides a large body of research on user innovation, little is known which role users play in the emergence of radically new health care technologies. Such technologies are 'new-to-the-world', highly complex, shift market structures, and require user learning as they often induce significant behaviour changes on side of the users. In a multi-case-study-analysis we identified an 'entrepreneurial' role of inventive users. Those surgeons that were the original inventors of radically new health care technologies established and organized the required innovation networks. They identified relevant partners, formed a network of experts with complementary knowledge bases, and coordinated this network. These innovation networks were required to transform their radically new ideas into first physical prototypes. To better understand the observed phenomenon we analysed factors that might explain this exclusive role. We find that a high problem pressure, an active role of users in the idea generation phase, a high degree of innovativeness of the prospective product, and missing competencies as well as missing resources explain the networking activities of inventive users. The findings shed light on the role of users in the emergence of radically new health care technologies.

Basic function of Cu/Ni-based catalyst in a colloidal state for one-pot amination alcohols to N,N-dimethyl tertiary amines

One-pot amination of fatty alcohols with dimethylamine at normal pressure, using Cu/Ni-based colloidal catalyst stabilized by barium sterate (Cu/Ni/Ba colloidal catalyst, Cu:Ni:B = 5:1:1). proceeded without charging bulk hydrogen with an amine yield of more than 90%. It demonstrated the effective use of active hydrogen, generated by the dehydrogenation of a starting alcohol over copper, for the following hydrogenolysis of an aldehyde-dimethylamine adduct to form the final product, N,N-dimethil-long alkyl-tertiary amines. The basic function generated by the combination of copper and nickel, especially in a colloidal state, was named as “Self-supplying System for Active Hydrogen”. On the other hand, reductive amination of aldehydes with dimethylamine, in the presence of hydrogen flow at a normal pressure using the same colloidal catalyst, proceeded with an amine yield of 40–80%, and significant amount (12–26%) of aldols were formed. These observations demonstrated the essential difference between one-pot amination of alcohols containing active hydrogen and reductive amination of aldehydes in the presence of bulk hydrogen which has to be activated separately. This is the first description of basic function of Cu/Ni-based catalyst by the original inventors of the catalytic system. More than five-fold increase in catalytic activity by incorporation of calcium stearate with Cu/Ni was observed for one-pot amination of fatty alcohols. Comparison of catalytic activity of Cu/Ni-based catalyst in a colloidal state and in a solid state showed superiority of the former catalyst in catalytic activity, 40–50 times higher based on a unit amount of copper.

THE DUTCH INVENTION OF THE ROTOR MACHINE, 1915–1923

The rotor machine was invented in 1915 by two Dutch navy officers, R. P. C. Spengler and Th. van Hengel, who were working at the Navy Department in the Dutch East Indies. A prototype was built by W. K. Maurits, a mechanical engineer, and tested during the summer of that year on board the flagship of the Dutch Navy in the East Indies on order of the fleet commander Rear Admiral F. Bauduin. Though the Dutch Navy decided not to adopt the device for it prevented the invention from being patented by the original inventors. The Navy could not prevent the rotor machine from being patented, however, by Hugo Alexander Koch—an engineer and businessman working in close collaboration with Arthur Scherbius in Germany—who probably became familiar with the idea through his brother-in-law, Huybrecht Verhagen, a patent attorney working at the firm that had supported the abortive patent application by the original inventors.

Book of the month: The Obstetrician's Armamentarium: Historical Obstetric Instruments and their Inventors

Book of the month: The Obstetrician's Armamentarium: Historical Obstetric Instruments and their Inventors

Bridging the Differences between Social Theory and Technological Invention in Human-Computer Interface Design

A number of different theories have been proposed to explain the relationship between technological development and social change, including: technological determinism, symptomatic development and social constructionism. A popular and influential theory describing this relationship is technological determinism. An examination of the history of the computer's graphical user interface reveals that the original inventors of this technology were influenced by theorists associated with the determinist perspective. However, when creating their actual interfaces, early designers Douglas Engelbart and Alan Kay utilized methods that support a social constructionist view of technology development. Moreover, as new social interfaces emerge that incorporate software agents into the process of computer interaction, these new designs continue to support a constructionist approach. This article will describe the relationship between theories of technological determinism and the development of graphical user interfaces to argue that a social constructionist approach bridges the gap between theory and invention.