Declining permission for unproductive studies

David Oliver: Unproductive activity and NHS consultants.

With constrained public money, a growing focus arises on doctors’ key role in reducing variation in processes and outcomes and improving value in healthcare, especially how money is spent and what it delivers in outcomes that matter to patients and system efficiencies. Earlier this year John Appleby published an analysis in The BMJ comparing current and historical productivity of NHS consultant...

Knowing When to Abandon Unproductive Learning

Autonomous learning is the ability to learn effectively without much external assistance, which is a desirable characteristic in both engineering and computationalmodeling. We extend a constructive neural-learning algorithm, sibling-descendant cascade-correlation, to monitor lack of progress in learning in order to autonomously abandon unproductive learning. The extended algorithm simulates res...

Learning How Productive and Unproductive Meetings Differ

In this work, we analyze the productivity of meetings and predict productivity levels using linguistic and structural features. This task relates to the task of automatic extractive summarization, as we define productivity in terms of the number (or percentage) of sentences from a meeting that are considered summary-worthy. We describe the traits that differentiate productive and unproductive m...

Patent Thickets, Trolls and Unproductive Entrepreneurship

I introduce and analyze an equilibrium model of invention, patenting and infringement under monopolistic competition. Profitable use of inventions requires adaptation to complementary technologies. With patents, a thicket of conflicting rights emerges and costly infringements occur. This taxes invention and lowers welfare. When an inventor may be a “troll”—patent without inventing—the rate of i...

Unproductive Labor as Profit Rate Maximizing Labor