Category: Uncategorized

This post is about the Apple vs Samsung case. OK, so it’s late to the party, but I had a couple of comments thrown together and the Apple-hate that is being tossed around the internet lately made me rethink a couple of them.

Let’s consider why people are upset. It turns out Wikipedia has a pretty good factual summary of the legal battle, which started in 2011 and is actually still being fought in a couple of different countries. The gist is that Apple sued Samsung for a variety of infringements: “patent infringement, false designation of origin, unfair competition, and trademark infringement” (from the Wikipedia article). What many people are getting from this is that Apple acted unreasonably and most are outraged that they would sue over things that appear as petty as the rounded corners on their icons. To a certain extent, many people also see this behaviour as bullying, because Apple is the biggest-ever US company.

Remember, however, that companies are not individuals, but rather that they are made up of many individuals. In fact, Apple has over 60000 employees. Many of the daily operational decisions will be made by largely unconnected departments, which includes Apple’s legal department. I can only assume that they employ very good ones.  It is inevitable these lawyers will apply the law. The fact that a judge awarded damages shows that the legal team who thought they should go for it had a pretty good legal case. The fact that everyone agrees they are douches for bringing the suit shows that the law does not correspond with what most people regard as fair.

The real problem here is the US patent system. Most of the things that are most contentious in these cases are not even patentable in South Africa. I think this is an excellent argument against patents in general, as it is clear how this is harming innovation, but I’m a bit biased.

Every tech company on the planet has a patent arsenal, and most of them seem to have active lawsuits against one another at the moment.

A common argument for patents is the old “why would a company invest billions in research if a competitor could just copy their stuff”. I think they will for the same reasons companies did so before tech patents: first to market and competitive advantage. If an “innovation” is so obvious that just seeing it allows you to code it into your product over a weekend, I doubt it is worth billions in R&D – the hard things are hard to copy. In fact, consider that patents actually make it easier to copy stuff, as you actually have to disclose details of implementation.

Also consider this argument by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine in Against Intellectual Monopoly:

The crucial fact, though, is that the following causal sequence never took place, either in the US or anywhere in the world. The legislative branch passed a bill saying “patent protection is extended to inventions carried out in the area X”, where X was a yet un-developed area of economic activity. A few months, years, or even decades after the bill was passed, inventions surged in area X, which quickly turned into a new, innovative and booming industry. In fact, patentability always came after the industry had already emerged and matured on its own terms.

So much then, for the idea that no-one will invest in an emerging field without protection.

PS: Try to avoid the overly general term “Intellectual Property” when discussing this kind of stuff.

I have just returned from the biannual conference of the South African Instutute of Chemical Engineers. This post is a quick summary of the big themes that emerged from the plenaries and the sessions that I attended.

The first plenary set the tone of most of the plenary sessions: climate change is real and chemical engineers play a critical role in its amelioration. Of course, the chemical industry in South Africa is dominated by Sasol, who have been under much pressure to reduce their vast CO₂ footprint and water use. Interestingly, they are at the point where they can do more to reduce water use by partnering with municipalities to reduce leaks from their water networks than by doing anything better on their plants.

Another plenary focussed on the practicability of biomass for fuels. His conclusion was that biomass is a good carbon source for chemical production, but that it will be at best a bit-player when it comes to energy – our current solar cells are more efficient at producing usable energy from the sun than plants are (W/m²), and we have enough people to start worrying about the amount of arable land we take away from food production.

So, if PV is the future of energy from the sun, we have to adapt to use electricity for more things. At the moment, there are no realistic plans to use electricity for aeroplanes, so the bio-fuels are probably going to be required for those kinds of applications. It is also harder to trade electricity than biofuels. On the personal mobility front though, all the people talking about energy seemed to agree on one thing: if we are going to move to electric cars, the big challenge is going to be battery technology. It is well known that people have what is known as “range anxiety” – even though most people drive less than 100 km a day for the vast majority of their lives, they would feel anxious that they couldn’t drive 500 km at the drop of a hat. They also fear that having drained their battery they wouldn’t be able to charge it again. An exciting innovation in this regard is battery replacement stations which could replace your depleted battery with a fully charged one in 90 seconds.

Many of the other talks addressed energy or sustainability in some way. From detailed work on fuel cells to optimisation of processes for better efficiency, almost everyone referenced this trend. Of course, there was also a lot of basic research and chemical engineering practice, mostly of decent quality, even though there seemed to be a largely student-driven contigent in the talks.

Finally, it was also announced that SAIChE would be forming a closer bond with IChemE. There was a vote for moving forward in this activity, required by our constitution to be favoured by 2/3 of the voters. With something like 300 votes for and 8 against, the intent was clear.

Another blog post cobbled together from Facebook posts. I should get a way to edit my research code on my iPhone…


Last week, a student came to talk to me about postgraduate research and I suggested that she speak to my colleague as her previous experience was aligned with his current research. I mentioned this to the colleague in question and he asked me wether she “looked Nigerian”.  I said I honestly couldn’t say, as I don’t know what a Nigerian is supposed to look like, to which he replied “oh, do all black people look the same to you?”


This exchanged bothered me enough to tweet about it, but I’ve been unpacking why it bothered me for a while. The thing is, I can distinguish between black people easily, it’s just that I don’t think I could classify a stack of pictures of any people (of any colour) into country groups with any accuracy.  I’ve been thinking that I would have remarked on a French accent, because I can recognize it. I’ve been looking at photos of Nigerians online, and I’ve even googled around for West African facial features, but to be honest I would say many of my South African students share those same features, which as far as I can glean are wide face, wide nose and dark skin.



I would say context adds a lot of clues. If you already know someone is from India, you can go into nuances, but how easy is it to take a picture from a stack and say with certainty that a person is from India instead of Pakistan – or South Africa for that matter? Is it easy to tell someone is from West African descent, or is it a stereotype (and one I am unfamiliar with). I know what the stereotypical Dutchman looks like, although I have only met one person from Holland that actually looked like that (tall, blond, biggish teeth). I just didn’t know the Nigerian stereotype, and found its very hard to get that info from looking at Nigerians.

There’s a more subtle point here about the utility of such a distinction. In fact, I find it vaguely racist (or at least discriminatory) to categorize beyond pure description in identifying a student. It’s one thing to refer to skin colour when describing someone’s appearance, as this is directly descriptive. It’s another thing to add references to race when talking about a person’s academic performance, as it’s a clue that you feel that race is related to academic performance.


Many people I spoke to about this repeated the tired old line that stereotypes are based on a grain of truth. Unfortunately, when it comes to perceptions of national character in personality, this paper shows that everyone agrees on the typical character of a German, but Germans don’t test the same as these stereotypes. And if you’re thinking “But they didn’t test the real Germans”, look up the No True Scotsman fallacy. Of course, you may also be thinking that casual classifications like these are not harmful, but you may be interested in the idea of stereotype threat. By the way, if you think you’re impervious to the group effect, have a look at the out-group homogeneity effect, which makes groups you are not a part of look a lot more homogeneous than groups you are a part of. Basically, this explains why you don’t here South Africans asking “did she look like a South African?”


I think it serves everyone best to be vigilant in the use of possibly biased language. I try to refrain from gendered language except where it applies to a known individual. Similarly, I try to avoid mentions of race or other irrelivant information when describing someone’s competence. I know people who seem obliged to precede positive reports of minorities by a description like “oh, that black girl who just started working here is doing so well”, while the “default” white male’s competence is a given. This makes me cringe. I know a couple of my preconceptions end up slipping into my language as well, but at least I am (partly) aware of the issues. If you clicked on the three links in this story, you may be more aware now, too.

Technology seems to be conspiring to stop me from speaking Afrikaans.  First, it was my cell phone and sending SMSs. Every phone I owned which supported the T9 system neglected to add Afrikaans as a language, even though the software existed. This meant I had to learn really quickly how to turn T9 off. Then I upgraded to smartphones and the iPhone had really good routines for guessing what you meant to type on the small keyboard. Unfortunately, again, no Afrikaans support. This time, even though I can switch between keyboards quickly, there seems to be no fast way to disable autocorrect. You have to navigate away from where you are, into settings, then disable it, which probably will cost you more time than you’re losing because you’re constantly told to replace “moet” with “Moët”.

On my desktop, I often have to defend my choice of running Linux and not having Microsoft Word on my computer.  When I tell people that I couldn’t open the document they sent me with the correct formatting, they often act like it is my problem for not running the same software that they do, rather than their problem for using software that not everyone can run.  I get the same strange looks when I complain that some of our intranet can only be used using Internet Explorer, which really has no version for Linux (or Mac for that matter).

The field of computer programming has a similar problem: do you learn one language really well, or use lots of smaller languages that work well for a particular task? Development tools typically favour a single-language approach.

The general picture one gets is that technology, or more properly systems, work best with less diversity. The idea is that everyone could read what everyone writes if we all spoke the same language, or used the same software. The benefits of monoculture and conformity are obvious.

Unfortunately there are benefits to diversity, too. I find myself in two minds here, as I know the benefits of using multiple tools really well. I’m not quite so sure about the benefits of multiple spoken languages, but I suspect that they may justify the idea of a second language in addition to a lingua franca.


I don’t know whether this issue will be resolved any time soon, but my personal take is that conformity drives should be focussed on infrastructure which allows for variation on the user level rather than implicitly assuming conformity.

There is never time to do it right, but there’s time to do it again. Use the right tool for the job. If it’s worth doing it’s worth doing right. These are some items of dogma that I have lived by, and they are making me unhappy and a bad worker.