Packalen and Bhattacharya indexed every one-word, two-word, and three-word phrase that appeared in more than 4 million patent texts in the last 175 years. To focus their search on truly new concepts, they recorded the year those phrases first appeared in a patent. Finally, they ranked each concept's popularity based on how many times it reappeared in later patents. Essentially, they trawled the billion-word literature of patents to document the birth-year and the lifespan of American concepts, from "plastic" to "world wide web" and "instant messaging."

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Peterk
Dallas, Tx
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"The problems of our economy have occurred not as an outgrowth of laissez-faire, unbridled competition. 
They have occurred under the guidance of federal agencies, and under the umbrella of federal regulations."
Senator Ted Kennedy, in defending trucking deregulation in 1978.
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