Health Reform 2007: Impact on the Valley

Provides a summary of California's health reform debate, background information on recent legislative action, and an overview of the major healthcare proposals pending in the state

Evaluation of options for a UK electronic thesis service: study report

The British Library (BL), JISC, UK HE institutions and CURL have funded an 18-month project to develop a national framework for the provision, preservation and open access to electronic theses produced in UK HE institutions. The project, called EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service) was developed in response to a competitive tender invitation released by the JISC and proposes a service set up and run by the British Library. The British Library’s current service, the British Thesis Service, offers access to around 180,000 doctoral theses, predominantly from 1970 onwards, though it is estimated that overall some half million theses dating from the 1600s are in existence in the UK. Around 80% of requests are for theses published within the last 13 years and almost all of these exist only in hardcopy. Through this service, theses are acquired ‘on demand’ and delivered on microfilm at a cost of just over £60 to the user (and at this price the service runs at a loss). Whilst this service, coupled with the Index to Theses (Expert Information), enables the location of and access to relatively recent British theses by the determined seeker, no one could argue that the process is optimised. As a result, usage of theses is much lower than it might be and much research is going unnoticed and unused as a result. Conversely, it has been shown that when theses are easy to locate and access, usage is high: at Virginia Tech, a pioneer site in the provision of a formal, systematised ETD (electronic theses and dissertations) service, downloads have been shown to increase over 30-fold when a thesis is available free online and easily located. A national service for the UK that provides discovery and access to theses in electronic form via the Web will increase the utility of doctoral scholarship. A single interface that directs users to theses wherever they are held, and which addresses the issues of intellectual property, permissions, royalties, preservation, discovery, and other matters associated with the public provision of theses in electronic form, will be of great benefit to the scholarly community in the UK and across the world. The EThOS project (Electronic Theses Online Service) was commissioned to develop a model for a workable, sustainable and acceptable national service for the provision of open access to electronic doctoral theses. The EThOS project team have completed the task and UCL Library Services in partnership with Key Perspectives Ltd have been asked to undertake a consultative study to assess the acceptability of the proposed model to the UK higher education community in the context of other potential models. This document reports the results of this consultative study, including a set of recommendations to JISC and other stakeholders for setting up a UK national e-theses service. The stakeholders other than JISC are: The British Library University administrators (registrars) Graduate students and recent PhDs Librarians Institutional repository managers Other e-theses services including: DART-Europe DiVA DissOnline Australasian Digital Theses Theses Canada Networked Digital Library for Theses and Dissertations The EThOS tea

Selling to a No-Regret Buyer

We consider the problem of a single seller repeatedly selling a single item to a single buyer (specifically, the buyer has a value drawn fresh from known distribution $D$ in every round). Prior work assumes that the buyer is fully rational and will perfectly reason about how their bids today affect the seller's decisions tomorrow. In this work we initiate a different direction: the buyer simply runs a no-regret learning algorithm over possible bids. We provide a fairly complete characterization of optimal auctions for the seller in this domain. Specifically: - If the buyer bids according to EXP3 (or any "mean-based" learning algorithm), then the seller can extract expected revenue arbitrarily close to the expected welfare. This auction is independent of the buyer's valuation $D$, but somewhat unnatural as it is sometimes in the buyer's interest to overbid. - There exists a learning algorithm $\mathcal{A}$ such that if the buyer bids according to $\mathcal{A}$ then the optimal strategy for the seller is simply to post the Myerson reserve for $D$ every round. - If the buyer bids according to EXP3 (or any "mean-based" learning algorithm), but the seller is restricted to "natural" auction formats where overbidding is dominated (e.g. Generalized First-Price or Generalized Second-Price), then the optimal strategy for the seller is a pay-your-bid format with decreasing reserves over time. Moreover, the seller's optimal achievable revenue is characterized by a linear program, and can be unboundedly better than the best truthful auction yet simultaneously unboundedly worse than the expected welfare

Role of Intellectual Peoperty Rights in the Benefit Sharing Arrangements: The Case of Bio-resources Development and Conservation Program in Nigeria

The subject of this case study is the role of intellectual property rights in the benefit-sharing arrangements surrounding the work of the Bio-resources Development and Conservation Programme (BDCP) as a part of the International Cooperative Biodiversity Group (ICBG) in the field of traditional medicine. In particular the role of patents, trade secrets and trademarks are discussed. The case examines, inter alia, a national patent and an "international" patent application under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), with claims over TK-based pharmaceutical inventions related to the work of the ICBG. Copies of these patents are attached in Annexes 3.4.3 and 3.4.4. Based on these examples, the availability of patent protection is identified as a key requisite for generating benefits to be shared with local practitioners of traditional medicine from pharmaceutical research based on their knowledge. The central role of a Trust Fund established by BDCP for sharing these benefits in monetary and non-monetary form is highlighted. The case study also illustrates the difficulty of balancing the input of various local stakeholders of TK and biological resources, such as traditional healers associations vis-�-vis local community representatives. This is a part of WIPO sponsored study on the role of intellectual property rights in the sharing of benefits arising from the use of biological resources and associated traditional knowledge.

Imperial Systems of Power, Colonial Forces, and the Making of Modern Southeast Asia

Why do colonial subjects choose to enlist and to court death under the command of officers who come from thousands of miles away? Under what conditions do they stay loyal? When, why and with what results do they revolt? Questions such as these can be answered only with the greatest diffculuty. In part this is because comparative work on colonial forces is rare, restricted to a few short introductions to edited volumes, whose collections of articles at first seem to invite contrast, rather than comparison. This is compounded by a second problem: the careless use of concepts. the terms colonial armies, colonialism and imperialism have been employed so loosely as to spread confusion. For this reason, we must begin by examining the terminology surrounding "colonial armies" and what we call "imperial systems of power"

Spartan Daily, September 23, 1975

Volume 65, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/5995/thumbnail.jp