Wednesday, March 29, 2006

No Laughlin' Matter

News is percolating on the blogs that Robert Laughlin was booted out of KAIST. For all of you who did not see that coming, there's this bridge in New York I want to sell you.

Oranckay does his little postmortem, but I would like to quibble about one statement of his:

To me, the idea of undergraduate pre-law and pre-med programs at KAIST makes no sense, a good idea only in the eyes of someone who doesn’t know how law and medicine work in Korea.

I do not know about the medical end, but I cannot disagree more about the law statement. Legal reforms in Korea will soon, perhpas, make being a lawyer much easier (basically go to school thats it). Further more Korea really has a shortage of technically adept lawyers, which makes it a bitch to find a decent patent lawyer. From an Intellectual Property standpoint, I could really see where Laughlin was coming from. I wish KIPO gave him some support on that issue, since they are trying to promote a "knowledge economy" I would be the most immediate benefactors of such since they would aquire better patent examiners and not only that would only have to reach literally across the river in Daejeon (where both are located) to get them.

Oh well, its all academic now.


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