Licensed to Kill: The Battle between Patent and Antitrust in Monopoly Leveraging Cases

This note puts a new spin on a longstanding subject of scholarship and controversy in the law: the conflict between the patent and antitrust laws in the United States. The author examines this conflict in the context of monopoly leveraging cases. Since patents are a unique and powerful tool that companies use to gain advantage in the marketplace, they seem to allow the owner to engage in behavior which amounts to monopoly leveraging. However, such conduct is prohibited under the antitrust laws, specifically by Section 2 of the Sherman Act. If a patent exists to give its owner certain commercial rights and advantages, how can the owner\u27s use of these powers be simultaneously proscribed by another body of law? This note looks at this inherent conflict and how courts have sought to deal with it. Looking at the Ninth Circuit\u27s treatment of this very problem in the Kodak II case, the note argues that although there is a facial conflict between patent and antitrust, a meaningful look at the policies and goal underlying the two bodies of law allows for a reconciliation between the two

Human Processing of Behaviorally Relevant and Irrelevant Absence of Expected Rewards: A High-Resolution ERP Study

Acute lesions of the posterior medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) in humans may induce a state of reality confusion marked by confabulation, disorientation, and currently inappropriate actions. This clinical state is strongly associated with an inability to abandon previously valid anticipations, that is, extinction capacity. In healthy subjects, the filtering of memories according to their relation with ongoing reality is associated with activity in posterior medial OFC (area 13) and electrophysiologically expressed at 220–300 ms. These observations indicate that the human OFC also functions as a generic reality monitoring system. For this function, it is presumably more important for the OFC to evaluate the current behavioral appropriateness of anticipations rather than their hedonic value. In the present study, we put this hypothesis to the test. Participants performed a reversal learning task with intermittent absence of reward delivery. High-density evoked potential analysis showed that the omission of expected reward induced a specific electrocortical response in trials signaling the necessity to abandon the hitherto reward predicting choice, but not when omission of reward had no such connotation. This processing difference occurred at 200–300 ms. Source estimation using inverse solution analysis indicated that it emanated from the posterior medial OFC. We suggest that the human brain uses this signal from the OFC to keep thought and behavior in phase with reality

17-jähriger Mann mit akuten Bauchschmerzen, Hämatochezie und Exanthem

Zusammenfassung: Ein 17-jähriger Patient stellte sich mit kolikartigen abdominellen Schmerzen und Diarrhö vor. Als weitere Symptome traten Petechien, Arthralgien und eine Hämatochezie auf. Sonographisch bestand eine auffällige Ileozökalregion. Endoskopisch fand sich eine Ileitis terminalis, und histologisch zeigte sich hier eine leukozytoklastische Vaskulitis mit IgA-Ablagerungen. Die Kasuistik zeigt exemplarisch die mehrzeitige klinische Manifestation der Purpura Schönlein-Henoch und deren Verlau

Do Irrelevant Sounds Impair the Maintenance of All Characteristics of Speech in Memory?

Several studies have shown that maintaining in memory some attributes of speech, such as the content or pitch of an interlocutor's message, is markedly reduced in the presence of background sounds made of spectrotemporal variations. However, experimental paradigms showing this interference have only focused on one attribute of speech at a time, and thus differ from real-life situations in which several attributes have to be memorized and maintained simultaneously. It is possible that the interference is even greater in such a case and can occur for a broader range of background sounds. We developed a paradigm in which participants had to maintain the content, pitch and speaker size of auditorily presented speech information and used various auditory distractors to generate interference. We found that only distractors with spectrotemporal variations impaired the detection, which shows that similar interference mechanisms occur whether there are one or more speech attributes to maintain in memory. A high percentage of false alarms was observed with these distractors, suggesting that spectrotemporal variations not only weaken but also modify the information maintained in memory. Lastly, we found that participants were unaware of the interference. These results are similar to those observed in the visual modalit

Spatio-Temporal Pattern of Saturn's Equatorial Oscillation

Recent ground-based and Cassini CIRS thermal-infrared data have characterized the spatial and temporal characteristics of an equatorial oscillation in the middle atmosphere of Saturn above the 100-mbar level. The CIRS data [I] indicated a pattern of warm and cold anomalies near the equator, stacked vertically in alternating fashion. The ground-based observations s2, although not having the altitude range or vertical resolution of the CIRS observations, covered several years and indicated an oscillation cycle of approx.15 years, roughly half of Saturn's year. In Earth's middle atmosphere, both the quasi-biennial (approx.26 months) and semi-annual equatorial oscillations have been extensively observed and studied (see e.g., [3]), These exhibit a pattern of alternating warmer and cooler zonal-mean temperatures with altitude, relative to those at subtropical latitudes. Consistent with the thermal wind equation, this is also associated with an alternating pattern of westerly and easterly zonal winds. Moreover, the pattern of winds and temperatures descends with time. Momentum deposition by damped vertically propagating waves is thought to play a key role m forcing both types of oscillation, and it can plausibly account for the descent. Here we report the direct observation of this descent in Saturn's equatorial atmosphere from Cassini radio occultation soundings in 2005 and 2009. The retrieved temperatures are consistent with a descent of 0.7 x the pressure scale height. The descent rate is related to the magnitude of the wave forcing, radiative damping, and induced meridional circulations. We discuss possible implications

From Quantum Universal Enveloping Algebras to Quantum Algebras

The ``local'' structure of a quantum group G_q is currently considered to be an infinite-dimensional object: the corresponding quantum universal enveloping algebra U_q(g), which is a Hopf algebra deformation of the universal enveloping algebra of a n-dimensional Lie algebra g=Lie(G). However, we show how, by starting from the generators of the underlying Lie bialgebra (g,\delta), the analyticity in the deformation parameter(s) allows us to determine in a unique way a set of n ``almost primitive'' basic objects in U_q(g), that could be properly called the ``quantum algebra generators''. So, the analytical prolongation (g_q,\Delta) of the Lie bialgebra (g,\delta) is proposed as the appropriate local structure of G_q. Besides, as in this way (g,\delta) and U_q(g) are shown to be in one-to-one correspondence, the classification of quantum groups is reduced to the classification of Lie bialgebras. The su_q(2) and su_q(3) cases are explicitly elaborated.Comment: 16 pages, 0 figures, LaTeX fil

Localization of cortico-peripheral coherence with electroencephalography.

Background The analysis of coherent networks from continuous recordings of neural activity with functional MRI or magnetoencephalography has provided important new insights into brain physiology and pathology. Here we assess whether valid localizations of coherent cortical networks can also be obtained from high-resolution electroencephalography (EEG) recordings. Methods EEG was recorded from healthy subjects and from patients with ischemic brain lesions during a tonic hand muscle contraction task and during continuous visual stimulation with an alternating checkerboard. These tasks induce oscillations in the primary hand motor area or in the primary visual cortex, respectively, which are coherent with extracerebral signals (hand muscle electromyogram or visual stimulation frequency). Cortical oscillations were reconstructed with different inverse solutions and the coherence between oscillations at each cortical voxel and the extracerebral signals was calculated. Moreover, simulations of coherent point sources were performed. Results Cortico-muscular coherence was correctly localized to the primary hand motor area and the steady-state visual evoked potentials to the primary visual cortex in all subjects and patients. Sophisticated head models tended to yield better localization accuracy than a single sphere model. A Minimum Variance Beamformer (MVBF) provided more accurate and focal localizations of simulated point sources than an L2 Minimum Norm (MN) inverse solution. In the real datasets, the MN maps had less localization error but were less focal than MVBF maps. Conclusions EEG can localize coherent cortical networks with sufficient accuracy

Three dimensional quantum algebras: a Cartan-like point of view

A perturbative quantization procedure for Lie bialgebras is introduced and used to classify all three dimensional complex quantum algebras compatible with a given coproduct. The role of elements of the quantum universal enveloping algebra that, analogously to generators in Lie algebras, have a distinguished type of coproduct is discussed, and the relevance of a symmetrical basis in the universal enveloping algebra stressed. New quantizations of three dimensional solvable algebras, relevant for possible physical applications for their simplicity, are obtained and all already known related results recovered. Our results give a quantization of all existing three dimensional Lie algebras and reproduce, in the classical limit, the most relevant sector of the complete classification for real three dimensional Lie bialgebra structures given by X. Gomez in J. Math. Phys. Vol. 41. (2000) 4939.Comment: LaTeX, 15 page