Are We Legislating Away Our Scientific Future? The Database Debate

The ambiguity of the present copyright laws governing the protection of databases creates a situation where database owners, unsure of how IP laws safeguard their information, overprotect their data with oppressive licenses and technological mechanisms (condoned by the DMCA) that impede interoperation. Databases are fundamental to scientific research, yet the lack of interoperability between databases and limited access inhibits this research. The US Congress, spurred by the European Database Directive, and heavily lobbied by the commercial database industry, is presently considering ways to legislate database protections; most of the present suggestions for legislation will be detrimental to scientific progress. The author agrees that new legislation is necessary, but not to provide extra-copyright protections, as database owners would like, but to create an environment wherein data is easily accessible to academic research and interoperability is encouraged; yet simultaneously providing database owners with incentives to produce new databases. One possibility would be to introduce standardized compulsory licensing of databases to academics following an embargo period where databases could be sold at free-market prices (to recoup costs). Databases would be given some sort of intellectual property protection both during and after this embargo in return for a limiting of technical safeguards and conforming to interoperability standards

Development of limited water resources : historical and technological aspects

This review describes how the constraints of limited water resources and an arid and semi-arid environment were overcome by a leadership capable of defining future needs and identifying and implementing appropriate solutions. Advanced technologies proved indispensable in this process. Yet, in recent years, the continuously increasing demand for water, mainly for domestic use, has created a chronic situation in which all available water from natural sources is being used up. The only solution to ensuring a dependable supply of water for both domestic and agricultural use requires that several steps be taken concurrently to implement regulations and measures for saving water and to construct immediately large-scale plants for desalination of seawater and reclamation of urban effluents

The Equational Approach to CF2 Semantics

We introduce a family of new equational semantics for argumentation networks which can handle odd and even loops in a uniform manner. We offer one version of equational semantics which is equivalent to CF2 semantics, and a better version which gives the same results as traditional Dung semantics for even loops but can still handle odd loops.Comment: 36 pages, version dated 15 February 201

What if Achilles and the tortoise were to bargain? An argument against interim agreements

Zeno's paradoxes of motion, which claim that moving from one point to another cannot be accomplished in finite time, seem to be of serious concern when moving towards an agreement is concerned. Parkinson's Law of Triviality implies that such an agreement cannot be reached in finite time. By explicitly modeling dynamic processes of reaching interim agreements and using arguments similar to Zeno's, we show that if utilities are von Neumann-Morgenstern, then no such process can bring about an agreement in finite time in linear bargaining problems. To extend this result for all bargaining problems, we characterize a particular path illustrated by \cite{ra}, and show that no agreement is reached along this path in finite time.Zeno's paradox, bargaining problems, interim agreements, vNM utility