Research and invention.

Inventing Oncomice: making natural animal, research tool and invention cohere

This paper examines how the oncomouse became a patentable invention. The oncomouse began life in the laboratory, where it was genetically modified for use as a research tool to assist with the study of human cancer. Its design, a product of genetic modification, made the oncomouse potentially patentable subject matter. The United States was the first jurisdiction to award the patent and several...

Computational Dialectic and Rhetorical Invention

This paper has three dimensions, historical, theoretical and social. The historical dimension is to show how the Ciceronian system of dialectical argumentation served as a precursor to recent computational models like the Carneades argumentation model. The theoretical dimension is to show concretely how these models reveal the interdependency of rhetoric and logic, and so the interdependency of...

Collective Invention

This paper argues that many new production techniques have been developed by a process called 'collective invention'. When firms collectively invent, they make available to their competitors the results of new plant designs so that their competitors can incorporate extensions of tliose designs into new facilities they build. The paper analyses the implications of this behavior for the rate and ...

Cultural Forms, Agency, and the Discovery of Invention in Classroom Research on Learning and Teaching

This paper and commentary is about cultural forms, how agency is frozen into and circulates through them over historical time, and how these processes are relevant for design-oriented studies of classroom learning and teaching. Becker, writing about the costs of being an innovator in the classical music business, frames a lone innovator (Harry Partch, a creator of micro-tonal compositions, inst...

the invention of capitalism