From the monthly archives: November 2004

The ESP Experiments of Soal

By Rufus Pollock On November 28, 2004 · Leave a Comment

The tests carried by the English mathematician Dr Soal are often cited as powerful evidence for the existence of ESP phenomena. However there is strong evidence that Soal engaged in fraud in order to obtain his results and thus such claims should be viewed with caution.

Soal originally became interested in psychical [...]

Continue Reading →

Conference: Trust and Triviality: where is the Internet Going

By Rufus Pollock On November 13, 2004 · Leave a Comment

Conference at UCL entitled, Trust and Triviality: Where is the Internet Going

Date: 2004-11-12

General

Medium doesn’t matter (i trust the other person i am speaking to I don’t worry about the telephone). RP: what about e-voting.

Trade-off between safety and access to information. First it must be acknowledge that there is a trade-off. This [...]

Continue Reading →

The impact on social welfare of introducing patents for pharamaceuticals in India

By Rufus Pollock On November 9, 2004 · Leave a Comment

There is something of a growing belief, I think, among academic economists that patents are a particularly costly way of promoting innovation. Shubham Chaudhuri, assistant professor of economics at Columbia University in New York source

A recent paper by Chaudhuri, Goldberg and Jia entitled Estimating the Effects of Global Patent Protection [...]

Continue Reading →