The Japanese Patent Office is providing limited free searching of some Japanese patent abstracts, at . [PATNEWS, 14May97.]

The US now has 4.3M high-tech jobs, up 240K last year. Nearly 60% of the new jobs were in software and computer-related services; 30% were in manufacturing. [AEA. IBD, 09May97. EduP.] (Whatever we're doing, it seems to be working pretty well.)

A BankBoston report, "MIT: The Impact of Innovation," says that a "nation" of the companies founded by MIT graduates and faculty would have the 24th largest economy in the world. [Robert L. Park, WHAT'S NEW, 16May97.]

A new NSF study says that 73% of the non-patent citations in industry patents are to publicly funded research (domestic and foreign, sponsored by government or by non-profit organizations). "Even at IBM, 80% of the [non-patent] papers cited in patents were public science." [Robert L. Park, WHAT'S NEW, 16May97.]

(Yeah, sure. Remember what Greg Aharonian wrote (TCC 7.32) about the abysmal "prior search" submitted with most patents? It's a joke, with 66% of patents citing no non-patent literature at all. Across all patents, the average is two citations. IBM doesn't even cite its own literature (or its own prior patents), which surely invalidates the 80% statistic. Most software patents come from corporate research, not publicly funded basic research. (PATNEWS, 14May97, commenting on a NY Times article of 13May97.) Any analysis is pointless. But if you want funding from Congress, go ahead and repeat that "the cited papers are from the mainstream of modern science; they are overwhelmingly basic, they come from the top university and government labs, they have been published in the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals and were supported by NSF, NIH and other federal agencies.")

Robert Park also points out that university research sponsored directly by companies is sometimes suppressed if the results are unfavorable, whereas public funding and open publication offer less chance for conflict of interest. "Scientists must stress that pure research having no identifiable link to commerce is a vital part of the intellectual ferment that creates progress." Maybe so, but I'd be wary of decoupling science from commercial interest. NSF works hard to build bridges to industry, in the interest of basic science funding as well as technology and commerce. Inventions such as the photocopier and fiber optics had commercial potential as their driving force. MIT can sustain ivory tower research -- plus applied research -- and still produce the world's 24th largest economy, but few other schools could do so. The chief result of increased government funding for basic research will be a bumper crop of graduate students, all competing for a few tenured positions. Lets not breed more scientists than we know how to employ, unless we can steer them toward entrepreneurship.