Home » News » Design » Legislation & Skills (page 11)

Legislation & Skills

Patents: Obama declares war on the patent trolls

presidential-seal-300x200.jpg

When ordinary activities like using Wi-Fi in a coffee shop or updating smartphone apps provokes lawsuits you know something is seriously amiss with the legal system. That has been the state of play for some time in the US – but perhaps not for much longer. Recently US president Barack Obama announced a series of measures that he hopes will ...

Electronics patent of the month: Radio tracking of hospital assets

Awarepoint-Sensor-300x200.jpg

GB Patent Number: 2483006 Granted to: Awarepoint Corporation I was really quite shocked last week when listening to a news report about ‘never events’. These are serious surgical blunders which are preventable and should never have happened. Examples of such ‘never events’ include operating on the wrong body part and leaving instruments in a patient after surgery, the latter of ...

Comment: GPS chips track afterlife of electronic waste

Is it real or wilful ignorance that permits us to foul our own planet with Styrofoam cups and rusted batteries? Would we curb our wasteful activities if only we knew the error of our ways? Technophiles from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology think so, and to equip the public with the knowledge we need to change our behaviour they've tagged our technological trash with GPS chips and tracked it across the globe. "Some trash is recycled, some is thrown away, some ends up where it shouldn't end up," says Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Senseable City Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts.