Law and economics scholarship has contributed much to our understanding of both the nature of intellectual property rights generally and the features of individual intellectual property regimes. Indeed it is hard to imagine a field other than antitrust law that is so explicitly governed by economic thinking. In authorizing the copyright and patent systems, Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution expressly incorporates a social welfare imperative as the basis for its grant of power.1 Certainly economists and economically oriented legal academics have given the field the attention it is due. I am far from being a sophisticated economic thinker, although I admire those who are and the insights they have brought to my understanding of what is at stake in intellectual property. My comments are more practical in nature. They involve the tension that arises throughout the law of intellectual property and unfair competition between protection of intellectual achievement and public access to intellectual products. This tension is reflected in the central questions: When are intellectual property rights appropriate and what is their proper scope? Economics seems to provide an apt description but an inadequate basis for answering these questions. And there lies, in my view, one of the reasons for the trend throughout intellectual property to enlarge property rights at the expense of access. For those of us who deem this trend problematic, economic analysis seems increasingly unhelpful in formulating a response protective of the public domain. The tension between protection and access pervades intellectual property and unfair competition law. The casebook Ed Kitch and I coauthored uses it as one of the themes that tie the disparate chapters of the book together.2 Protection or access is at issue whether the case involves a local barber who wants an exclusive property interest in the barbering business of Howard Lake, Minnesota,3 or the promisee of a contract who claims to have a property interest in the future performance of the promissor,4 or the firm that claims a property interest in the firm's investment in the human capital of its workers,5 or the trademark owner who asserts a property right over portions of the English language,6 or the celebrity who seeks to capture gains from his or her celebrity status,7 or the more traditional cases involving constitutionally recognized authors and inventors. There should be little doubt that the trend throughout intellectual property and unfair competition is toward greater protection and diminished access.8 The Digital Millennium Copyright Act9 is a notorious example of a protectionist advance, as is the apparent willingness of the Patent and Trademark Office and the Federal Circuit to expand the realm of patent protection.10 But the trend is noticeable elsewhere as well. The adoption of the trademark dilution cause of action11 and the expanding protection against cybersquatters12 have refocused trademark law away from its traditional function of prevention of consumer confusion toward one that confers substantial property rights on trademark owners. 13 The protection of trade dress without proof of secondary meaning also favors property rights over rights of access.14 A similar rule applied to product designs and configurations would have created an even more damaging effect on competition, but the Supreme Court happily required proof of actual distinctiveness. 15 The classic misappropriation doctrine announced in International News Service v. Associated Press represents the power of the protectionist rhetoric over substance.16 The Restatement (Third) of Unfair Competition recognizes that the case offers little in terms of a coherent principle and has been of only marginal significance.17 Proponents of access may take heart from the doctrine's limited application, and yet it is currently asserted as an appropriate model in defense of data base protection18 and it continues to attract judicial adherents. …
Recent comparative education policy studies show that even though there seems to be similar patterns and trends in higher education reforms in East Asian societies, the recently initiated higher education reforms have had very diverse agendas. Thus, the considerable convergence of policy rhetoric and general policy objectives may not satisfactorily explain the complicated processes of changes and the dynamic interactions between global, regional and local forces that shape education policy-making in individual countries. This article discusses globalization effects on national policy, with particular reference to how the higher education sector in Taiwan has transformed itself under the global tide of marketization and decentralization. There are a lot of changes similar to both higher education in Taiwan and that of elsewhere, which suggests that Taiwan's higher education has been affected by the trends of globalization. But before we jump to this conclusion, maybe we should also bear in mind an alternative hypothesis that local factors are crucial and determining factors for change. The core of the article is to examine the ways and strategies the Taiwan Government has adopted to reform its higher education systems in response to the changing local socio-economic political context and regional-global environments, with a particular focus on provision, regulation and financing.
OBJECTIVE: The results of an evaluative longitudinal study, which identified the effects of health care decentralization on health financing in Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru are presented in this article. METHODS: The methodology had two main phases. In the first, secondary sources of data and documents were analyzed with the following variables: type of decentralization implemented, source of financing, funds for financing, providers, final use of resources, mechanisms for resource allocation. In the second phase, primary data were collected by a survey of key personnel in the health sector. RESULTS: Results of the comparative analysis are presented, showing the changes implemented in the three countries, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each country in matters of financing and decentralization. CONCLUSIONS: The main financing changes implemented and quantitative trends with respect to the five financing indicators are presented as a methodological tool to implement corrections and adjustments in health financing.
The international character of today’s most pressing environmental problems has become a key challenge for environmental policy making. As regulation by a supranational authority is not a realistic option at present, policymakers have to rely on decentralized approaches to the management of international environmental resources. This study combines two core dimensions of international environmental policy: the traditional search for cost-effective policy instruments and the creation of incentives for voluntary cooperation among sovereign nations. The analysis offers some clear-cut policy recommendations for the design of environmental treaties and for the further development of existing international institutions to protect the global environment.
In 1798, there appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society a paper by James Wood, purporting to prove the fundamental theorem of algebra, to the effect that every non-constant polynomial with real coefficients has at least one real or complex zero. Since the first generally accepted proof of this result was given by Gauss in 1799, Wood's paper deserves careful examination. After giving a brief outline of Wood's career, I describe the argument of his paper. His proof turns out to be incomplete as it stands, but it contains an original idea, which was to be used later, in the same context, by von Staudt, Gordan and others, without knowledge of Wood's work. After putting Wood's work in context, I conclude by showing how his idea can be used to prove the complex form of the fundamental theorem of algebra, stating that every non-constant polynomial with complex coefficients has at least one zero in the complex field.
The cult of Joan of Arc has its roots in the political and social upheavals of fin de siecle France, during the same time period when film as a medium is birthed in Lyon by the Lumiere brothers. (1) The events themselves are coincidental, though film will quickly be used at the service of myth-making. Hailed by the French Right as the embodiment of the true French state, Joan of Arc's recreated legend galvanized a generation of artists who joined the growing chorus of Catholics demanding the canonization of Joan. Called Blessed by 1909, Joan became Saint Joan in 1920, a year after the end of the Great War and the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and almost five hundred years after her death. This study examines the role of literature and film in determining Joan's place in history and popular culture. Until the nineteenth century when the Joan explosion manifested itself relatively few writers had chosen Joan as their subject. In 1429, two years before Joan's death at the stake, Christine de Pizan celebrated her life and exploits in her Ditie de Jehanne d,Arc. (2) As Maureen Quilligan points out, hers is the only signed poem written during Jehanne d'Arc's lifetime explicitly to celebrate her miraculous deliverance of France. Christine herself saw Jehanne as proof of the rightness of her programmatic argument for the divine favor God had shown to women. (3) Quilligan argues that Christine's prophetic portrait of Joan accorded the Maid of Orleans with a legitimate female authority: It cannot be entirely an accident then that the unique and singular female writer in late medieval France should so overlap the advent of a singular female warrior; although it is not possible to prove such things it does make sense to suppose that Christine's arguments, so highly visible to all court members, may have helped prepare them to accept a woman's authority. Her constant retelling of the Amazon myth, arguing for their legitimate domain in a martial realm in text after text, could very well have prepared the culture at court to see a woman warrior as something other than a monster. And this preparation would not have hurt Jehanne's chances for being well received by that court. (280) (4) A less flattering British portrait was presented on the stage in 1590 in Shakespeare's Henry VI, in which Joan's dialogue is replete with double entendres and in which there is no doubt that Joan's exploits are the result of a satanic pact. (5) Almost one hundred and fifty years would elapse before Voltaire would take up Joan's story for his poem La Pucelle d'Orleans (1762). Voltaire's pen puts Joan's story at the service of his anticlericalism, and reduces her to a rustic incarnation with all too human lusts that must be sublimated for the cause of the state. Paradoxically, with the exception of Voltaire and a play Jeanne d'Arc a Orleans by Rodolphe Kreutzer performed at the Theatre des Italiens in Paris in 1790, the century of revolution is almost silent in its evocation of Joan, and completely silent in its evocation of Joan as a symbol for the creation of the new French state, preferring instead to identify Liberty with the image of Marianne. Joan's transformation into the Romantic imagination began with Friedrich Schiller's 1801 La Pucelle d'Orleans, in which a tormented Joan struggles with her love for the British general Lionel and her duties to the mission given to her by the Virgin Mary. Schiller presents a conflicted Joan whose femininity is renounced at the expense of political triumph, but not without bitterness. It would this version of the Joan story that Tchaikovsky would later select for his 1881 opera La Pucelle d'Orleans, first presented at the Theatre Marie in Saint Petersburg. Jules Quicherat's monumental five-volume compilation (1841-1845) of the complete texts of Joan's trial of Condemnation and Nullification written in Latin and Old French appeared at a time when France was once again in search of its political soul. …
In this paper, a model of the automatic control of trains was researched. To research the problem, fuzzy control, predictive control and computer simulation technology were applied. The speed of the train and the comfort level were defined as evaluation functions, and the tactic used was rolling optimization.
Industrial Technology and Control Systems
Power Systems and Technologies
Advanced Computational Techniques and Applications
Stefan G. Koeberle, Lars M. Sondergaard, Jamie Vazquez-Caro, Bill McLeary · 5 authors
The report assesses the performance of Thailand's fiscal institutions, in responding to the pressures of the economic crisis, and its likely performance in meeting the challenges of the new Constitution, and in modernizing the public sector. It builds on the analysis conducted to design the Government's Public Sector Management Reform Program, and lays the foundation for reform options. By examining policy responses, identifying institutional shortcomings, and reviewing challenges for fiscal policy and administration during the economic crisis, lessons are drawn from its experience, focusing attention on selective issues, such as human resource management, and tax policy reforms, while serving as a practical compendium of reforms currently underway, and suggesting priorities for further reform. The country's public expenditures and development outcomes are examined, with special attention on expenditure planning and fiscal risk management, identifying the foundation for fiscal decentralization, and its reform strategy.
This article describes problems of education efficiency, finance, and management in the Kyrgyz Republic. It concentrates on the process of decentralization which has been used as a common tactic of central! authorities to offload many fiscal and managerial responsible onto local authorities. It describes how the diversification of finance has created many new problems and new distortions. And it describes the impact on equity from the managerial and governance changes.
We consider the semilinear heat equation in a bounded domain of ℝ^d , with control on a subdomain and homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. We prove that the system is null-controllable at any time provided a globally defined and bounded trajectory exists and the nonlinear term f(y) is such that |f(s)| grows slower than |s|\log 3/2(1+|s|) as |s|→∞ . For instance, this condition is fulfilled by any function f growing at infinity like |s|\log p(1+|s|) with 1 (in this case, in the absence of control, blow-up occurs). We also prove that, for some functions f that behave at infinite like |s|\log p(1+|s|) with p>2 , null controllability does not hold. The problem remains open when f behaves at infinity like |s|\log p(1+|s|) , with 3/2≤p≤2 . Results of the same kind are proved in the context of approximate controllability. Résumé On considère l’équation de la chaleur semilinéaire dans un domaine borné de ℝ^d , avec un contrôle à support dans un sous-domaine et avec des conditions de Dirichlet au bord. On démontre que, s’il existe une trajectoire bornée et globalement définie et le terme non linéaire f(y) est tel que |f(s)| croı̂t moins vite que |s|\log 3/2(1+|s|) quand |s|→∞ , alors le système est exactement contrôlable à zéro dans un temps arbitrairement petit. Par exemple, cette condition sur f est satisfaite si f(s) croı̂t à l’infini comme |s|\log 3/2(1+|s|) avec 1 (dans ce cas, en absence de contrôle, on a explosion en temps fini). On démontre aussi que, pour tout p>2 , on n’a pas la contrôlabilité exacte à zéro pour certaines fonctions f dont le comportement à l’infini est comme celui de |s|\log p(1+|s|) . Cette question reste ouverte lorsque 3/2≤p≤2 . Finalement, on démontre des résultats du même type dans le contexte de la contrôlabilité approchée.