15,297 research outputs found
The Logic & Limits of the Exceptional Circumstances Test in Magill and IMS Health
In this Article, we show that, in contrast to the Commission\u27s balancing approach in Microsoft, the ECJ\u27s narrow construction of the obligation to license IP under Article 82 of the EC Treaty is based on sound economics and constitutes appropriate public policy. The set of “exceptional circumstances” listed in Magill and IMS Health constitutes a reasonable implementation of the optimal legal standard for the assessment of refusals to licence IP: modified per se legality. In the IP context, an obligation to make property available is a requirement for compulsory licensing. The ECJ test limits compulsory licensing to those situations in which the prospective social benefits of licensing are large, while the negative effects of reducing the incentives to innovate are small. The ECJ test ensures that intervention is restricted to cases where the intervention is still likely to increase social welfare. The Commission\u27s test in Microsoft, being a balancing test, does not. As noted by Professor Gerardin, “balancing ex ante vs. ex post efficiencies is obviously a very difficult process, which even the most sophisticated economists may find daunting. The risk of mistaken decisions is therefore high.
The current situation for the water sources in the Maltese Islands
This commentary addresses issues related to the
scarcity of water in the Maltese Islands and its main causes.
Some basic metrics related to the abstraction of freshwater,
contamination of groundwater by nitrate and the limitations
and challenges of the water sources in the Maltese Islands are
highlighted. Hereafter, the relation between water scarcity,
rainfall and population density, as well as the resultant effects
on the sustainability of the freshwater sources of the Maltese
Islands are presented. The current focus is on the production of
good quality water based on a number of Reverse Osmosis (RO)
plants that are found around the Maltese Islands. The significant
energy requirements of this technology are compared with those
for groundwater and wastewater treatment production. Current
practices in the Maltese Islands regarding the treatment and
use of sewage effluent by Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs) are
described. The use of treated sewage effluent as an alternative
source of water to RO water and of groundwater for second class
uses is discussed. This paper concludes that the technology
needed to employ treated effluents for unrestricted agricultural
use and also for aquifer recharge is now in existence.peer-reviewe
Coherent back and forward scattering peaks in the quantum kicked rotor
We propose and analyze an experimental scheme using the quantum kicked rotor
to observe the newly-predicted coherent forward scattering peak together with
its long-known twin brother, the coherent backscattering peak. Contrary to
coherent backscattering, which arises already under weak-localization
conditions, coherent forward scattering is only triggered by Anderson or strong
localization. So far, coherent forward scattering has not been observed in
conservative systems with elastic scattering by spatial disorder. We propose to
turn to the quantum kicked rotor, which has a long and succesful history as an
accurate experimental platform to observe dynamical localization, i.e.,
Anderson localization in momentum space. We analyze the coherent forward
scattering effect for the quantum kicked rotor by extensive numerical
simulations, both in the orthogonal and unitary class of disordered quantum
systems, and show that an experimental realization involving phase-space
rotation techniques is within reach of state-of-the-art cold-atom experiments.Comment: 26 pages, 11 figure
Variational Sequential Monte Carlo
Many recent advances in large scale probabilistic inference rely on
variational methods. The success of variational approaches depends on (i)
formulating a flexible parametric family of distributions, and (ii) optimizing
the parameters to find the member of this family that most closely approximates
the exact posterior. In this paper we present a new approximating family of
distributions, the variational sequential Monte Carlo (VSMC) family, and show
how to optimize it in variational inference. VSMC melds variational inference
(VI) and sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), providing practitioners with flexible,
accurate, and powerful Bayesian inference. The VSMC family is a variational
family that can approximate the posterior arbitrarily well, while still
allowing for efficient optimization of its parameters. We demonstrate its
utility on state space models, stochastic volatility models for financial data,
and deep Markov models of brain neural circuits
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