An Introduction to the Patstat Database with Example Queries

This paper provides an introduction to the Patstat patent database. It offers guided examples of ten popular queries that are relevant for research purposes and that cover the most important data tables. It is targeted at academic researchers and practitioners willing to learn the basics of the database.Comment: To appear in the Australian Economic Revie

Text and Time: A Theory of Testamentary Obsolescence

Events may occur after a will is executed that ordinarily give rise to changes of intent regarding the estate plan — yet the testator may take no action to revoke or amend the original will. Should such a will be given literal effect? When, if ever, should lawmakers intervene to update a will on the testator\u27s behalf? This is the problem of testamentary obsolescence. It reflects a fundamental, structural problem in law that can also crop up with regard to constitutions, statutes, and other performative texts, any one of which may become timeworn. This Article develops a theoretical framework for determining when lawmakers should — and should not — step in to revise wills that testators have left unaltered and endeavors to locate this framework in the context of other forms of textual obsolescence. The Article focuses on a variable denoted “friction” — that is, the extent of difficulty text makers face in revising texts on their own. Some testators become incapable of amending their wills, and some events display the dual property of altering testamentary intent while simultaneously disabling the testator from executing a new estate plan. In such instances, legal intervention to effectuate intent is warranted. Where testators remain at liberty to amend their wills following a change of circumstance, however, the case for legal intervention becomes uneasy. Nevertheless, lesser forms of friction may continue to operate, affording testators less practical opportunity to redo their wills, and hence again giving cause for lawmakers to interpret wills dynamically. When they do act to reinterpret a will in light of changed circumstances, lawmakers should ordinarily follow the course that a majority of testators would choose, as default rule theory dictates. Yet, legal intervention to effectuate probable intent could implicate error costs, if testators believe a different rule is in effect. By matching default rules of will interpretation with common assumptions about what rules apply, lawmakers minimize error costs. As this Article demonstrates in the Appendix, under certain conditions an error-minimizing default is more efficient than a majoritarian default, a contribution to default rule theory

Redundancy in a community corrections network : testing the role of service-provider redundancy in Missouri's community correction implementation network

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on April 1, 2011).The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file.Thesis advisor: Dr. Sean Nicholson-Crotty.M.A. University of Missouri--Columbia 2010.Implementation networks are composed of policy service providers that are continually changing in the winds of differing implementation adjustments. Service provider redundancy has been observed by scholars as a possible solution to improving the effectiveness and reliability of the services provided. This research provides new insights into implementation, network, and corrections literatures by illuminating evidence that suggests a re-appraisal of the limitation of the benefits redundant services can provide.Includes bibliographical reference

Charter School Quality and Parental Decision Making With School Choice

Charter schools have become a very popular instrument for reforming public schools, because they expand choices, facilitate local innovation, and provide incentives for the regular public schools while remaining under public control. Despite their conceptual appeal, evaluating their performance has been hindered by the selective nature of their student populations. This paper investigates the quality of charter schools in Texas in terms of mathematics and reading achievement and finds that, after an initial start-up period, average school quality in the charter sector is not significantly different from that in regular public schools. Perhaps most important, the parental decision to exit a charter school is much more sensitive to education quality than the decision to exit a regular public school, consistent with the notion that the introduction of charter schools substantially reduces the transactions costs of switching schools. Low income charter school families are, however, less sensitive to school quality than higher income families.

Health Care’s Other “Big Deal”: Direct Primary Care Regulation in Contemporary American Health Law

Direct primary care is a promising, market-based alternative to the fee-for-service payment structure that shapes doctor–patient relationships in America. Instead of billing patients and insurers service by service, direct primary care doctors charge their patients a periodic, prenegotiated fee in exchange for providing a wide range of healthcare services and increased availability compared to traditional practices. This “subscription” model is intended to eliminate the administrative burdens associated with insurer interaction, which, in theory, allows doctors to spend more time with their patients and less time doing paperwork. Direct practices have become increasingly popular since Congress passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This growth has been driven by legislation in several states that resolves a number of legal questions that slowed the model’s growth and by the ACA’s recognition of the model as a permissible way to cover primary care in “approved” health plans. Yet legal scholars have hardly focused on direct primary care. Given the model’s growth, however, the time is ripe for a more focused legal inquiry. This Note begins that inquiry. After tracing the model’s evolution and its core components, this Note substantively examines the laws in states that regulate direct practices and analyzes how those laws address a number of potential policy concerns. It then analyzes direct primary care’s broader role in the contemporary American healthcare marketplace. Based upon that analysis, this Note concludes that direct primary care is a beneficial innovation that harmonizes well with a cooperative-federalism-based healthcare policy model

SpotLight: An Information Service for the Cloud

Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud platforms are incredibly complex: they rent hundreds of different types of servers across multiple geographical regions under a wide range of contract types that offer varying tradeoffs between risk and cost. Unfortunately, the internal dynamics of cloud platforms are opaque in several dimensions. For example, while the risk of servers not being available when requested is critical in optimizing these risk-cost tradeoffs, it is not typically made visible to users. Thus, inspired by prior work on Internet bandwidth probing, we propose actively probing cloud platforms to explicitly learn such information, where each probe\u27\u27 is a request for a particular type of server. We model the relationships between different contracts types to develop a market-based probing policy, which leverages the insight that real-time prices in cloud spot markets loosely correlate with the supply (and availability) of fixed-price on-demand servers. That is, the higher the spot price for a server, the more likely the corresponding fixed-price on-demand server is not available. We incorporate market-based probing into SpotLight, an information service that enables cloud applications to query this and other data, and use it to monitor the availability of more than 4500 distinct server types across 9 geographical regions in Amazon\u27s Elastic Compute Cloud over a 3 month period. We analyze this data to reveal interesting observations about the platform\u27s internal dynamics. We then show how SpotLight enables two recently proposed derivative cloud services to select a better mix of servers to host applications, which improves their availability from 70-90% to near 100% in practice

Integrity Verification of Distributed Nodes in Critical Infrastructures

The accuracy and reliability of time synchronization and distribution are essential requirements for many critical infrastructures, including telecommunication networks, where 5G technologies place increasingly stringent conditions in terms of maintaining highly accurate time. A lack of synchronization between the clocks causes a malfunction of the 5G network, preventing it from providing a high quality of service; this makes the time distribution network a very viable target for attacks. Various solutions have been analyzed to mitigate attacks on the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) radio-frequency spectrum and the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) used for time distribution over the network. This paper highlights the significance of monitoring the integrity of the software and configurations of the infrastructural nodes of a time distribution network. Moreover, this work proposes an attestation scheme, based on the Trusted Computing principles, capable of detecting both software violations on the nodes and hardware attacks aimed at tampering with the configuration of the GNSS receivers. The proposed solution has been implemented and validated on a testbed representing a typical synchronization distribution network. The results, simulating various types of adversaries, emphasize the effectiveness of the proposed approach in a wide range of typical attacks and the certain limitations that need to be addressed to enhance the security of the current GNSS receivers