Staking claims

Staking claims in the biotechnology Klondike.

My first brush with intellectual property came through defending free data release from the human genome project. I was amazed at the tacit acceptance by some that this information could and should be privatized. The product was not an invention: a genome sequence is a clearcut case of public domain material. People need a robust system for handling intellectual property, but patents have ambiv...

Molecular Disjunctions: Staking Claims at the Nanoscale

Nanoscience may be surrounded by controversy but is characterized by its absence. Evidence for this comes from the reconstruction of a peculiarly muted scientific “debate” regarding the claim that a single organic molecule may serve as a wire in electronic circuitry. Even though there are fundamentally different theoretical approaches, the debate remains entirely implicit. This is because the r...

Staking New Ground

Staking a claim for claims: a case study of resource allocation in Australian Aboriginal health care.

There have been numerous ways in which the notion of equity has been put forward in the literature. This reflects the fact that equity is essentially driven by values and is therefore subject to individual interpretation and preferences. Deciding between these various value judgements is however outside the scope of economic analysis, as conventionally defined. This poses a problem for the exam...

Extending Kelly staking strategies to peer-to-peer betting exchanges

In his seminal paper J. L. Kelly Jr. linked information theory with a staking system for calculating the stake of a favourable bet. Kelly’s system is elegant, and under certain conditions can be said to be optimal. In the fifty years since, his ideas have been extended to financial markets, with much success. There have been fewer such extensions to betting. In many countries gambling has been ...