Mechanical Timepieces & Intellectual Property Protection

This article is meant to give you a basic understanding of mechanical timepieces—not just what they are, but how they are different from one another and why that difference is significant. Watches themselves do not need an introduction; they are ubiquitous and have withstood the peaks and troughs of social inequality and have persisted as a commonality between the rich, the poor and the middleclass since the beginning of their mass production in the 19th century. I focus here on the history of watches within the United States because, ultimately, this is a discussion of their legal protection under United States intellectual property law and not a full history lesson on horology. If you would like to establish a foundation of knowledge for the intellectual property which this article discusses, I suggest first reading of the achievements of individuals such as Christiaan Huygens, Peter Henlein, Patek Philippe and Louis Cartier. This article will focus on two areas of intellectual property, patents and trademarks, and their application to mechanical timepieces

Non-Practicing Entities & Patent Reform

The patent system is designed to promote innovation and supply a blueprint for innovative minds to improve upon, but the behavior of some patent owners is contrary to these principles. Non-practicing entities obtain patent rights, and rather than produce the product claimed in the patent, they assert their exclusionary rights broadly and aggressively against businesses producing similar products in order to induce settlement or licensing payments. These assertions account for a significant percentage of infringement claims and threaten a potentially innocent business with expensive litigation. The actions of these entities have a substantial effect on the patent system and have been the motivation behind reform and recent Supreme Court decisions. Each of the three branches of government has significant influence over the patent system, and each has the potential to promote change to reduce the impact of non-practicing entities on the United States patent system and on the United States economy

Dynamic fluvial systems and gravel progradation in the Himalayan foreland

Although the large-scale stratigraphy of many terrestrial foreland basins is punctuated by major episodes of gravel progradation, the relationships of such facies to hinterland tectonism and climate change are often unclear. Structural reentrants provide windows into older and more proximal parts of the foreland than are usually exposed, and thus provide key insights to earlier phases of foreland evolution. Our magnetostratigraphic studies show that, although the major lithofacies preserved within the Himachal Pradesh structural reentrant in northwestern India resemble Neogene facies in Pakistan, they have a much greater temporal and spatial variability. From 11.5 to 7 Ma, major facies boundaries in Himachal Pradesh vary by as much as 2–3 m.y. across distances of 20–30 km and are controlled by the interference between a major southeastward-flowing axial river and a major southwestward-flow- ing transverse river. A thick but highly confined middle to late Miocene conglomerate facies includes the oldest extensive Siwalik conglomerates yet dated (10 Ma) and implies the development of significant erosional topography along the Main Boundary thrust prior to 11 Ma. Our studies document extensive syntectonic gravel progradation with conglomerates extending tens of kilometers into the undeformed foreland during a period of increased subsidence rate and within 1–2 m.y. of major thrust initiation. Overall, gravel progradation is modulated by the interplay among subsidence, sediment supply, and the proportion of gravels in rivers entering the foreland

The New Airport and its Urban Region: Evaluating Transport Linkages

Privatized airports are emerging as significant transportation and logistics hubs competing with traditional CBDs as activity centres with significant environmental, social and economic impacts. The major implications for transportation planning and evaluation of options have been highlighted as: the difficulty in arriving at an agreed set of relative weights to be attached to each objective; the need to undertake any interface analysis at the regional scale; the need to model the complex nature of the interaction between mixed land use activities within the emerging airport precinct and the supply, pricing and regulation of the relevant transportation links; and the relevance of 'option value' concepts when evaluating transit access to airports

Estimating the Implicit Value of Crop Stubble as a Barrier to Technology Adoption in Morocco

For mixed cereal-livestock farmers, cereal production provides a bundle of goods. Grain is consumed by the household or sold at market, and crop residues are used as livestock feed. The straw component of crop residue can be bought and sold at market and therefore has a well-established local market price. Crop stubble, the portion of the crop residue left on the ground, is generally not traded and therefore has no market price. Some agricultural technologies require farmers to forgo using crop stubble as feed, and cultivation of high value crops entails sacrificing residue production altogether. In this paper we apply a structural econometric model to household data from Morocco to estimate the implicit value of crop stubble. We use a sample splitting technique to investigate differences in the value of this resource and find that it is significantly higher for smaller farmers, who therefore face an even larger barrier to technology adoption.Mixed cereal-livestock systems, Non-market valuation, Land use, Technology adoption, No-till, International Development, Land Economics/Use, Livestock Production/Industries, O33, Q12, Q24,

Searching for Effective Forces in Laboratory Insect Swarms

Collective animal behaviour is often modeled by systems of agents that interact via effective social forces, including short-range repulsion and long-range attraction. We search for evidence of such effective forces by studying laboratory swarms of the flying midge Chironomus riparius. Using multi-camera stereoimaging and particle-tracking techniques, we record three-dimensional trajectories for all the individuals in the swarm. Acceleration measurements show a clear short-range repulsion, which we confirm by considering the spatial statistics of the midges, but no conclusive long-range interactions. Measurements of the mean free path of the insects also suggest that individuals are on average very weakly coupled, but that they are also tightly bound to the swarm itself. Our results therefore suggest that some attractive interaction maintains cohesion of the swarms, but that this interaction is not as simple as an attraction to nearest neighbours

Multi-latin squares

A multi-latin square of order $n$ and index $k$ is an $n\times n$ array of multisets, each of cardinality $k$, such that each symbol from a fixed set of size $n$ occurs $k$ times in each row and $k$ times in each column. A multi-latin square of index $k$ is also referred to as a $k$-latin square. A $1$-latin square is equivalent to a latin square, so a multi-latin square can be thought of as a generalization of a latin square. In this note we show that any partially filled-in $k$-latin square of order $m$ embeds in a $k$-latin square of order $n$, for each $n\geq 2m$, thus generalizing Evans' Theorem. Exploiting this result, we show that there exist non-separable $k$-latin squares of order $n$ for each $n\geq k+2$. We also show that for each $n\geq 1$, there exists some finite value $g(n)$ such that for all $k\geq g(n)$, every $k$-latin square of order $n$ is separable. We discuss the connection between $k$-latin squares and related combinatorial objects such as orthogonal arrays, latin parallelepipeds, semi-latin squares and $k$-latin trades. We also enumerate and classify $k$-latin squares of small orders.Comment: Final version as sent to journa

Product Life Cycles and Innovation in the US Seed Corn Industry

The purpose of this study is to evaluate potential changes in the length of product life cycles in the US seed corn industry. We use the observed survival time on the market for hybrids sold during 1997-2009 to conduct a survival analysis. Our empirical results show that the average lifetimes of conventional and biotech corn hybrids have decreased over the last twelve years at similar rates and that the rate of decline in the life cycle length increased since 2004. We also find that the shorter product life cycles are closely linked to the accelerated levels of biotech product innovation in the US seed corn industry observed over the period of the analysis.Crop Production/Industries, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,