Are you a Connector? Patenting Influence at the USPTO

1201tuesday.com has a posting at Claiming Under the Influence (of Bilski) referring to a "System and method of identifying individuals of influence" which was issued as U.S. Patent No. 7653568 and which is abstracted as follows:

"This invention relates to a system and method for identifying target individuals who possess certain characteristics statistically indicative of their ability to influence others in their decision making regarding consumer goods, consumer products, political issues or candidates, financial matters, investments, real estate, insurance, travel and leisure, by non-limiting example. The subject invention encompasses not only the identification of a key group of individuals in a population more likely to affect the decision making of others in the population ("Influentials" as discussed below), but also includes the identification of additional ("non-Influential") informational data common to Influential individuals, as well as the application of this additional informational data to other populations. The advantage of employing this additional informational data to ascertain Influentials is that this data can be publicly available data (such as, for example, from the U.S. Census Bureau), thus facilitating the identification of Influentials without the necessity of undertaking any surveys to identify Influentials per se instead relying on pre-existing public demographic information."

A Thirst for God : When Former Skinheads Convert to Judaism, You Know Something Big is Under Way for Religion in Europe

Dan Bilefsky at the New York Times reports on the
Changing Face in Poland [where] Skinhead Puts on Skullcap

"Hundreds of Poles, a majority of them raised as Catholics, are either converting to Judaism or discovering Jewish roots submerged for decades in the aftermath of World War II."

As written at PowerLine:

""There is something afoot in matters of faith -- in Germany as in France and other parts of the allegedly de-Christianized continent of Europe, according to Catholic and Protestant clergymen interviewed on a recent fact-finding tour. They spoke of an ever-growing 'thirst for God.'"

We think that this is a great thing as long as it means that men and women are taking their "spiritual" life more seriously.

This development should not be confused with many of the fundamentalist adherents of the world's organized religions, however, whose connection to true spirituality has often been subverted by political agendas and is no longer connected to any kind of a true God at all.

"True spirituality" is the genuine search for God.

The world's established organized or disorganized religious doctrines too often breed no more than secularized brainwashed sects totally removed from any real spiritual life - often acting directly contrary to the interests of humanity.