Firstly, 360-2020’s patent claims cover over 30 unique and proprietary features. Secondly, I was recently involved with some friends’ scoping of a social network as well as at various IP conferences as part of my analysis about how to deal with one aspect of Project ART. There seem to be three schools of thought on IP:

(1.) There’s no point filing anything.

(2.) Let’s just build it with no project plan, no contractual responsibilities between the founder(s) and maybe look at filing something after the product launches.

(3.) File everything NOW.

It really boils down to the founder(s) preferences and how much they’re prepared to spend to file IP and enforce it. It also varies according to whether the founder(s) believe their product is unique, the market opportunity is sizable, whether they want to use the IP as leverage to attract investors, the likelihood of the patent being enforceable and how much they could earn from licensing their product. For example, there is little point IP filing a typewriter in this day and age when people are migrating towards touch mobile devices where they don’t have to change the ink ribbons or to buy paper or swap the carriage. Equally, there are valid reasons to IP file any pharmaceutical which can cure cancer, aging or diabetes. The different applicability and the sizes of the markets means that the IP considerations are different.

There is no black+white, hard+fast, do-this-and-you-will-become-billionaires rule about IP or about Internet entrepreneurialism. As with Life itself everything is in shades of gray or rainbows and some things simply happen out of coincidence rather than deliberate planning.

Still, I read with interest that Facebook has had patents granted for its newsfeed and user affinity towards applications:

*  http://gigaom.com/2010/02/25/facebook-granted-news-feed-patent/

* http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/02/facebook-awarded-patent-for-measuring-use-affinity-toward-applications/

*  http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_granted_patent_on_the_news_feed_-_this_co.php

I know that some of my friends don’t believe in IP so the Facebook patent may give them some pause for thought, and maybe they’ll realize that when I say that it should be considered I do so in the interests of protecting them from themselves.

Serious investors are unlikely to be interested or to get involved if what to do about IP has not even been considered.

That’s what’s happening out there.

“If you discussed 360-2020 with them, aren’t you afraid they’ll steal your ideas?”

This was after I met with some smart technologists and investors.

“Well, I stated clearly that 360-2020 is a registered trademark and the patent application for the system itself is filed,” I replied. “Also, without my involvement there is NO way anyone can replicate the 360-2020 system or business model since the most important and critical core of it is something only I know and can do.”

Unfortunately, this is the negative side of business: some unprincipled types try to steal your ideas, pass off your hard work and innovation as their own and then make money from it. Ideas and brainstorms themselves have no trademark, patent or other intellectual property rights. However, actual logos and systems do so wherein possible find a good IP lawyer and ask them for advice.

Yes, it costs quite a lot of money but may prove to be worthwhile.

As for being realistic about our inventions and the potential timelines involved, I refer to James Dyson the inventor of the Dyson vacuum cleaner:

The Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner came from a simmering frustration that took nearly twenty-five years to boil over. I channelled this frustration into something practical. I started with a crude cardboard cyclone which appeared to work and this led to machined prototypes as I refined the design. Fifteen years and 5,127 prototypes later I had perfected a vacuum cleaner that didn’t lose suction, the Dual Cyclone. It took 15 years of swearing, struggling, creating, being knocked back by several short-sighted companies and inventing to get to this stage today — James Dyson

The positive aspect of sharing ideas with the RIGHT PEOPLE (i.e., smart, honorable and trustworthy) is that they can either help you accelerate and achieve the realization of your invention and / or they can introduce you to other people who can. The negative risks of sharing with the WRONG PEOPLE (i.e., clueless, dishonorable and untrustworthy) is that they will either steal your ideas and defame you in the process and / or they waste your time.

The latter has happened to me which explains a certain amount of wariness even if I am, by nature, an optimist and enjoy sharing knowhow.

It should also be noted that inventors can take measures to safeguard their brands and inventions but even the likes of Twitter can’t trademark “tweet”:

* http://www.mediabistro.com/webnewser/social_nets/tweet_trademarked_not_so_fast_124860.asp?c=rss

So what arose from my interactions with those smart technologists and investors?

They suggested some helpful options:

(1.) Computer algorithms worth looking into.

(2.) Some people to get in touch with.

(3.) HTML5.

These were the events in and around London on Sunday 21st February 2010:

* Chinese New Year celebrations

* BAFTA 2010

* London Fashion Week

These are some of the reasons London is such a diverse and vibrant city to live in!

Well whilst romantic Westerners preoccupy themselves with St. Valentine’s Day, the Chinese are celebrating the start of the New Year so here’s a card and a message for the Year of the Tiger:

Typically Chinese families gather on New Year’s Eve and have a family feast; the Chinese need little encouragement to cook, eat, converse, wish each other fortuity and enjoy ourselves — LOL. Amongst the dozen or so delicacies served at the family meal, the centerpiece is always……….the fish (our two were braised with shallots whose homophone in Chinese has links with “smartness / intelligence” — what a language, hmmn (?) when even shallots have semantic meanings, LOL):

Anyway, I wish everyone a “新年快樂!”

2010 is the Year of the Tiger and also an important election year in the UK. Current polls suggest that it will be a hung Parliament and the vote from minorities will be the deciding one on the fates of the Conservative, Labor and Liberal Democrat’s electoral endeavors. That was the theme at the Chinese New Year reception at Westminster. Every MP, councillor and the six Chinese PPCs (prospective parliamentary candidates) who attended made this the focus of their speeches in addition to the reminder that it is critically important for the Chinese community to register to vote and mobilize themselves to find out more about the political process.

At the moment there are no Chinese MPs so attendees were and are hopeful that 2010 could prove to be a breakthrough year for the community.

A by-product of the evening is that a BBC World Service producer wants to include me in various program strands in the lead-up to the general election. This is because she asked why people are so apathetic to the political process in the UK and how the Chinese community seems to be part of that apathy and lack of engagement. I shared with her that my family isn’t representative of that apathy; as soon as the electoral registration forms appear I ensure that we register and on polling day we make time to put our ticks in the ballot boxes. In fact, there was one recent occasion where there was a local council election and an anomalous oversight meant that my mother wasn’t able to vote and she was upset about this.

So……..MY FAMILY ARE REGISTERED AND WILL DEFINITELY BE VOTING IN THE MAY 2010 ELECTIONS.

Now, as a general rule we are apolitical — in the sense that we each have our own political affiliations (independent of anyone else in the family), we vote and we discuss global politics, but we don’t get into political stand-offs with other people. We respect that perspectives and political philosophies are diverse because the nature of human experience varies, culturally and ideologically.

Moreover, in our family history, politics has been the source, cause and solution of various situations. Without going into too much information, on the maternal side of my family there have been some important Chinese community figures.

In my own case I would say that I was more involved with political processes and interests when I was younger. At college, I was elected Chair of the Political and Social Studies Group (even though I wasn’t a humanities student like the other participants) and Treasurer of the Student Council. Later, at university, I was elected to the Student Council and subsequently to the Academic Board. All of these experiences involved listening to fellow students about improvements and changes they wanted, ensuring their interests were appropriately communicated to the teaching body and/or providing a platform for students to explore issues that mattered to them.

What I will say is that anyone who is elected into a position of responsibility and representation needs to be genuinely committed to their audience’s interests and to convert any concerns into implementable actions.

The reason people disengage from the political process and elected officials, I noted to the BBC producer, is for the simple fact that the operational turnaround of policy manifesto to legislative passing typically takes at least one term of office (4 years) and the small progress steps are rarely and inappropriately communicated. Ergo, people question what the point of voting is if they can’t directly EXPERIENCE any policy changes. This then makes them perceive politics and politicians as abstracts, removed from them, rather than as realities implementing solutions.

Anyway, amongst the 6 PPCs, there was one candidate I thought represented their party and themselves in an articulate and coherent way and has a good chance of being elected — despite campaigning in a constituency which is a long-time stronghold of another party. They also seem to have a smart online approach to communicating and engaging with their potential voters which will make a difference. People want candidates and information which are accessible, easy to track and comprehensible.

Now here are the pictures and some accompanying comments. Yes and, alas, the iPhone doesn’t take great pictures at night.

(1.) To enter the Westminster complex, there is a thorough security process to pass:

(2.) This is the Great Hall which has recently been renovated:

(3.) The speakers in a group photo and the 11-year-old girl is standing for Junior Parliament:

(4.) The photographers and press show their presence:

(5.) A side room for press and video interviews:

(6.) Simon Woolley, Chair of Operation Black Vote, tells the audience, “The Chinese Barack Obama could be in this room!”:

(7.) Later I open the Chinese fortune cookie handed out to me:

(8.) The message reads, “The opportunity to show your leadership will soon be here.”

LOL!

No, I will not be standing as a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate in 2010 and have no plans to become the first elected Chinese MP in the UK.

I’d much prefer to be the person who contributes to cracking the conundrums of synergizing global human and machine consciousness to interconnected on+offline spheres of coalescence, coherence and contextualization.

Three serendipitous events happened yesterday (08 February 2010) which sparked a personal “Eureka!” / Epiphany moment, so I’d like to record them here:

(1.) My mother discussed how English dictionaries, whilst seemingly logical in their alphabetical listings, are actually incoherently ordered.

The same is true of Chinese dictionaries — albeit there we’re dealing with the number of brushstrokes which demarcates where a character is listed rather than any alphabetical primacy.

Even online resources are not as coherently ordered as they could be.

(2.) My friend GC and I discussed the difference between doing something for fame and doing something with purpose: the instant gratification versus legacy principle.

(3.) I showed my mother some of the Italian grammar tables I’ve been constructing and converting into an online database — which I’ll write a search and structure script for once I have all 5,000+ verbs captured.

We’ve been comparing the learning challenges of different languages and about semantics/semiotics generally. Her position is that the English language is the most difficult. This is quite LOL since most Westerners believe the Chinese language is impossibly oblique to grasp. My position is that neither English nor Chinese are as grammatically complex as the Latin languages.

Since my mother doesn’t know any Latin languages she kept fighting her corner for English.

Anyway, whilst I was taking her over the 15 (FIFTEEN!!!) different tenses in French-Spanish-Italian-Portuguese and their rules about subjunctives, imperfect tenses, gender agreements, progressives, prepositions and……..CONNECTORS………

(And watching her eyes enlarge and then glaze over because it was simply mind-boggling to her that with Latin languages we’re dealing with 15 different tenses that affect the verb conversions — one each for the 8 objective pronouns of I, you, etc……)

I HAD THIS EUREKA MOMENT THAT’S RELATED TO SEMANTICS AND THE 360-2020® TOOLS: I NEED TO CODE A DICTIONARY THAT’S DIFFERENT FROM THE WAY SAMUEL JOHNSON AND GOOGLE INDEX THEIR WORDS!!!

(NB: As shown above, Google Translate is wrong yet again. I wrote: “I am a dictionary of life.” GT gave: “My life dictionary.”)

No, the dictionary I have in mind is not about adding semantic layers on top of existing structures or even FOAF. It’s about taking those original logic root alphabetical structures apart and converting them into natural, organic context mechanisms. Logic root approaches are pre-determining what we can currently do with FOAF and is actually making it limited as a contributing framework, from my perspective. “The Semantic Web is a step in the right direction but we’re carrying a sub-optimal tool kit to venture into foreign language terrains…..” that’s my analogy for the situation. Even in an English-speaking terrain the compass can only tell us which is North-South-East-West (direction) and therefore where the wind’s coming from, but the compass has no perception of how cold that wind is or why we keep walking into the wind.

LOL!

The legacy principle is a simple one:

Fame is fleeting, synchronicity is timely and realization is progress — (C) Twain, 2010.

Every year, there’s a Chinese New Year reception at the Houses of Parliament (by invitation) and this year I’m accepting and will go along. It will be interesting to hear what’s ahead for Sino-Anglo relations, particularly since Madam Fu Ying (an excellent Chinese Ambassador to the UK, imo) is returning to China following her promotion to become the second female Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Chinese New Year in 2010 coincides with St. Valentine’s Day, btw, so maybe we’ll all receive love and prosperity!

There are three specific reasons I’ve enrolled into Italian classes:

(1.) Project ART — I need to translate some material from Italian-English and vice versa.

(2.) 360-2020® — I’d like to incorporate some Italian idioms into the system.

(3.) Personal reasons — my boyfriends tend to be Italian or somehow connected to Italy, so it helps if we can communicate in Italian as well as in English; it would be asking too much for them to be able to speak Chinese, French (and enough German and Spanish to find restaurants and order food, but so long as I can we won’t starve on vacation)! Moreover, Italy is one of my favorite countries in the world and I love visiting it and it’s a lot more fun to be able to speak with the locals!

Anyway, I’ve been allocating some time to constructing my Italian grammar tables and an example for AMARE (to love) can be viewed here if readers click on the image; Firefox is better since Safari seems to exclude the table borders:

I discovered two beautiful phrase examples to use:

(1.) Ogni persona che abbiamo amato è una pianta che fruscii nel vento nel giardino della nostra anima — Every person we loved is a plant that rustles in the wind in the garden of our soul.

(2.) Si amarono fuori dagli schemi ma dentro la loro logica, si cercarono più di loro stessi — They loved outside the box but inside their own logic, they sought more than themselves.

Now, readers can search the entire Internet and all the Italian grammar books out there and they’re unlikely to find a single source, one-page overview of every tense related to a verb and how it’s constructed with examples of usage the way that I create my grammar tables.

This is because I learn languages (and do most things like most people) in my own unique, specific, rational and synergistic way so it makes more sense to draw up my own grammar tables — particularly since most online and book resources contain useful albeit disjointed information, and not what I need:

* logical, stranded timeline of tense applicability

* English equivalent of and equivalence with the tense

* Examples that allow clear differentiation between tenses, notably where the subjunctives are concerned.

My languages teacher in high school (who spoke French, Italian, Spanish and English) wrote in my report: “Twain has a natural flair for languages!” At the time I scored either 100% or high 90%s in English, French, German and Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin) exams at school. There’s no magic or genius to this; an effective memory, some simple learning strategies and consistent application are helpful to the curious child. Later, she was fairly upset when, against her hopes, I decided to choose Physics, Chemistry and Computer Science as my electives and only French as a language. She believed I should study Modern Languages at university and then go and work for the UN or a diplomatic service.

Clearly, I’m not perfect (linguistically) or an AI robot since I didn’t get 100% all the time — ha ha. Additionally, it’s obvious from reading this blog and some of my online musings that I’m experimental with the grammatical structure, lexicon, vernacular and idioms of languages (whether foreign or code). Still, just because I do this doesn’t mean that I wasn’t properly educated and didn’t earn the appropriate educational qualifications.

I was published in a leading finance trade journal aged 22, was Editor of e-Intelligence and responsible for writing Strategic Investment reports, equity research reports, policy papers and business plans so when I need to write “professionally” I apply a different set of language rules to the ones I use on this blog.

There’s an adage for rebels / anarchists / groundbreakers that flows something like this:

YOU HAVE TO KNOW THE RULES TO BREAK THEM!

My philosophy and approach is more: We have to UNDERSTAND the rules to evolve something smarter.

Now, in recent years, there’s been an educational backlash against the established “rote learning” methodology of education that can still be found in most Oriental classrooms towards “creative learning”, as commented upon here:

· http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article5270092.ece

All I can say is that if readers examine my Italian grammar table, it’s an example of CREATIVE ROTE LEARNING. The main reason I can be creative in my approach now as an adult is because as a child I learnt the rote foundations whether it was a language, a times table or the order of a recipe / equation / chemical reaction etc.

For some current educationalists to say that the Google generation doesn’t need to learn by rote at all and can simply go online and google answers and somehow make the structural connections between discrete points of information and “facts” is LAZY, MYOPIC and risks endangering the development and achievements of future intelligence.

There is NO WAY I will let my own child loose onto the Net without any rote learning structure, ability to contextualize and discern genuine facts from threaded untruths to back them up beforehand.

Now let’s make this observation in situ. If I hadn’t benefitted from the rote learning of grammatical structures in English, French, German and Chinese that now help with my accelerated acquisition of Italian, I would just go onto Google Translate, type in a phrase and accept the translation wholesale without any ability to discern its translation accuracy or knowhow to correct any mistakes myself. Why? Well, because those key reference points and structural connectivity that I’d normally develop during rote learning would be missing.

I like Google Translate and it’s good for some but not all uses. Hopefully, Google’s engineers will be able to refine the language filters and grammar construction codes towards more nuanced (semantic) meaning and understanding.

Here are some examples of Google Translation’s “lost in translations”.

(1.) Quando in profumeria vi venderebbero anche la luna.

* Google Translate: When you sell perfume in the moon.

* My human interpretation: (When you’re) in the perfume store they’d also sell you the moon.

(2.) Anche nel caso in cui abbiate venduto tutto e non avete piu’ nulla da riportare in Italia…

* Google Translate: Even if you sold everything and you’re out ‘nothing to report in Italy…

* My human interpretation: Even if you sold everything and you have no more to report in Italy…

(3.) Abbiamo venduto le nostre parti l’anno scorso.

* Google Translate: We sold our shares last year.

* My human interpretation: Abbiamo venduto le nostre azioni l’anno scorso.

(Parti is the literal translation for the plural share of a pie / house. The LATERAL translation of stock shares are azioni and Google Translate’s software interpreted literally, not laterally.)

(4.) Tu mi vendesti per pollastra!

* Google Translate: Thou vendesti for chicken!

* My human interpretation: Thou soldeth me for a chicken!

(Google Translate hasn’t quite mastered antiquated historical Italian idioms yet, :*))

(5.) Non me la sentirei di non farla più la politica.

* Google Translate: I do not feel like it no longer Policy.

* My human interpretation: I don’t feel like doing politics any more.

(Google Translate struggles with direct articles “il, lo, la, i, gli, le” associated with the verb that’s acting on the subject.)

(7.) I Greci sentirono ben presto la necessità di trovare allo Stato un fondamento intrinseco.

* Google Translate: The Greeks soon felt the need to find the state a basis intrinsic.

* My human interpretation: The Greeks soon felt the need to find an intrinsic base for the State.

(Again, this is the Italian literary past tense at play and interpretation of precedence relating to the adjective associated with the subject. The direct object are the Greeks, not the base.)

Readers will note that I refer to Google TRANSLATE whilst my own abilities as human INTERPRETATION. Interpretation embodies with it contextualization and the perceptual reading of sentiments / emotions / intent.

There are definitely challenging tenses for Google Translate and readers won’t be surprised that these tenses involve the expression of hope, desires, emotions, probability, doubt, uncertainty and undefined (non-specific) timelines. Principally:

* imperfetto (imperfect)

* congiuntivo (subjunctive across the board: present, imperfect, past perfect, present perfect)

* trapassato remoto (preterite perfect tense)

It’s well-known that translation software deploys some of the most sophisticated AI and NLP (natural language programming) out there. The fact that the software can’t semantically distinguish or derive tenses involving human emotions and ambiguity (whether in terms of sentiment probability or timeline) is a reflection that there is some way to go before AI agents will make human operators obsolete.

I also want to remark on the fact that Google is a US company and the majority of its employees’ mother language and mental orientation is English. Ergo, it’s not surprising that Google Translate’s reference structures for the imperfect and subjunctive tenses aren’t fully developed. This is because English — whether American English or English English — doesn’t make much use of it whereas in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese it’s “de rigeur” to know it and use it properly.

Also, it may be worth noting how Google Translate is performing with Chinese. My mother’s helping me interpret my ‘ Global Brain’ knol into Chinese (simplified) and Mandarin — her technical Chinese is stronger than mine — and she’s said more than once, “This Google translation makes no sense at all!”

LOL.

Yes, it’s possible that I may contribute to cracking the conundrum: “What can we program into machine code to enable them to understand human emotion, intent and multi-stranded (and not necessarily consequential) verb events?”

I believe that the answers will arise from people who can code at a high-level and are also multi-lingual, so their natural radars can spot where the bridges between machine rules and human context still need to be built and developed.

However, despite Google Translate’s offer for us to contribute to making their translations better, I’m not personally going to sit and spend time manually inputting all my human interpretations and corrections of Google Translate’s various faux pas and faux amis! I use the term “faux amis” deliberately — how can we sense someone is our true friend / language navigator / experience explainer or another human being? There’s some hype about AI agents attached to the Cloud making human customer services redundant. yet there are also voice-to-text translation services out there which have been uncovered and alleged to be little more than thousands of humans in a call center in India / Brazil / China doing the translations rather than the machines.

Let’s also reference back to our experiences with Elbot and the Turing Test:

LOL.

So here’s the reality check: a woman who believes in the Internet and its wonderful tools and is digi-savvy, still goes into a physical rather than virtual classroom to learn and prefers to interact with other human beans rather than online language bots.

[Note to my kid(s): 如果你正在閱讀這篇文章在2020年，媽媽說：“請回到您的公式 / 元素周期 / 表文法的工作了。謝謝。我愛你。理由的所有在這裡!"

Google Translate gets this wrong too, both sides of the translation, i miei bambini. That's why you have to go to Chinese school and be taught it properly. Also, please listen to your 姥姥 when she's explaining the nuances between logic and rationale! ]

:*).

Here’s what I got for my Christmas present:

That’s right, I got the best Christmas present anyone could give another person: unforgettable memories. Those are more valuable than receiving another pair of shoes, a handbag or the latest Chanel make-up kit (these, apparently, are what women covet the most).

Incidentally, of the two cars, I think the beaten up old Fiat that’s being held together with the sticky tape has a lot more character and pulls a person in more than the Lamborghini. Unequivocally, the Lamborghini has a “WOW” factor and it would be on most supercar fan’s wish list. However, the Fiat is the one that arrests a person on a street, makes them smile at its quaintness and then wonder, “Who are the owners? What type of conversations and adventures has this little machine experienced? Why on earth did they use brown stick tape instead of send it to the scrap yard? How cool would it be to be weaving over the narrow cobblestones of Roma in this?!”

My Xmas trip was partly a vacation and partly a reconnaissance trip for Project ART. I’m going to the Venice Biennale this year for reconnaissance too, :*). When I’m in Roma I stay in a beautiful rooftop apartment near the Spanish Steps which is convenient for walking to all the major landmarks: the Coliseum, the Vatican, the Village Borghese, the Pantheo, the Trevi fountain and all the main shopping areas.

Mostly, I simply liked wandering off the tourist hotspots and experiencing what the locals did on a daily basis. One Sunday, after I went to listen to the Pope’s New Year message, I walked all the way to the Villa de Pomphilij where an armed military guard kindly escorted me across a busy road. He was shocked to see me emerging from one of the side roads because there was no pedestrian footpath on the side road and I was laden with groceries I’d bought from the supermercato that doubled up as a petrol station.

Anyway, that was strange to see: armed military guards and a military jeep in the city.

Then I found myself watching two brothers in the park (about 18 months and 4, respectively) kicking a football around whilst their family of 12+, including grandparents, watched on from their picnic. That’s right, a picnic at Christmas time — how cool is that?! Of course, the temperature did hit about 20 degrees Celsius and it was sunny, so………..

The scene was especially touching because the toddler was unsteady on his feet and kept falling onto his derrière (as evidenced by the notable patches of mud there), but his older brother seemed to be completely oblivious to his plight and kept running with the ball until, finally, he realized the youngster was no longer chasing him or the ball but plumped on his backside and struggling to get up again. At which point the older one would abandon his football and run over to help the baby up. It was very sweet.

Something else magical I managed to video was the thunder and lightning over St. Peter’s Square on New Year’s Eve. It was quite an experience being stranded under the colonnades, waiting for the torrential rain to stop, and hearing one of the nuns say, “Oh, Papa!” as if she was sure God was sending us a message about the new decade.

After the rain eventually stopped, I managed to navigate my way to the Via dei Fiori near the Coliseum to watch the fireworks and the concert that augured in 2010.

All-in-all, an eventful and revelatory trip with lots of videos and photos taken; far too many to post!