November news

Yesterday's Weather, Melissa, Marlowe and Othello

Sometime tonight, all our kids will be back at home for the next few days. What a treat! This afternoon I’m baking my two Thanksgiving contributions - my grandfather Vincent’s yeast rolls and a pumpkin pie - so I can be with the boys and out of the way in the kitchen come Thursday.

It’s been a grey and cloudy few days in Madison. Cold and snow lurk in the lineup next week, and I’ve put the ski racks on my car in anticipation. With any luck, and some round-the-clock snowmaking, we’ll be exercising outside again one day soon.

Last month, I wrote about Windblock, my script for wind sports enthusiasts. Today, it boasts a dedicated collection of 11 users, all of whom I guess discovered it organically via the Workspace Apps Marketplace, or whatever its awkward name is. Over the last month, I shifted to a more reliable weather API provider and solved a bunch of annoying problems.

I’ve also recently been finishing up another software thing I made. It’s called Yesterday’s Weather and it’s the goofiest weather app in the market today. All it does is send you an email each morning summarizing the weather from the day before for places you care about. I built it to keep track of what’s happening in towns where my kids go to school and where my siblings live. It still needs work, but give it a try and let me know what you think. The first people to find it have been using it to keep an eye on the weather where they have a second home.

I’d do that, too, but it’s not easy to get weather data from the Bahamas. I learned that a couple of weeks ago when I was there making repairs and fixing up our house when Hurricane Melissa roared by. It was windy and the seas were up!

Back home, I enjoyed catching up with my friend and health economist, John Mullahy, and talking about the entrepreneurship initiatives on campus. He steered me toward the concept of economies of scope. These are “efficiencies formed by variety, not volume,” and often missing in academic spinouts. My working theory is that absence limits the number of faculty medtech and healthtech inventions getting to market.

Relatedly, I enjoyed a recent piece by Sam Enright exploring how national-level differences in a professor’s rights to their inventions suggest ways to increase translation and commercialization.

“‘Professor’s privilege’ is the concept that academics should own the rights to any technologies they create or patents they file in the course of their employment. Today, Sweden is the only country in the world that has this policy. But several countries used to have it, and in a paper from 2018, Hans Hvide and Benjamin Jones exploit a fascinating natural experiment: the end of professor’s privilege in Norway in 2003.

Turning Academics into Entrepreneurs

In fun reading this month, Raymond Chandler’s books, The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye (my favorite of the two), accompanied me on the long flights to/from London, where I spent the better part of a week for LifeArc activities. I also managed to see a performance of Othello at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, with Toby Jones, David Harewood, and Caitlin FitzGerald. It runs through January 17th. Recommended.

Happy Thanksgiving week!