The “25% Rule” for Patent Infringement Damages After Uniloc

The 2011 decision by the Federal Circuit in Uniloc v. Microsoft properly condemned the “25% Rule,” which bases a reasonable royalty on 25% of an infringer’s profits. Nonetheless, at least one proponent of the Rule continues to argue that the Rule is fundamentally valid and should remain in use. This article analyzes the historical development of the Rule, its conceptual basis, its application in actual cases, and relevant insights from other recent Federal Circuit cases. Each analysis shows fundamental problems and contradictions that demonstrate the Rule can never be a reliable patent damages methodology. There is no reason to change the conclusion in Uniloc

Merger Simulation: A Simplified Approach with New Applications

Merger simulation is growing in importance as a tool to evaluate the unilateral competitive effects of mergers. This paper offers a relatively non-technical description of the principles of merger simulation. In addition, it introduces PCAIDS, a new and highly flexible "calibrated-demand" merger simulation methodology that is based on a simplified version of AIDS. PCAIDS can be implemented using market shares and two price elasticities; scanner or transaction-level data are not required. The paper offers some applications of merger simulation with PCAIDS that include comparisons with other simulation models. It also shows how PCAIDS can be applied to the analysis of efficiencies, divestiture, and product repositioning/entry. Finally, the paper offers an analysis of the Merger Guidelines safeharbors. A detailed mathematical appendix is included.

Merger Simulation with Brand-Level Margin: Extending PCAIDS with Nests

We present a method to calibrate empirically the demand parameters in a merger simulation model by using brand-level profit margin data. While the approach can be generalized, we develop these ideas within a particular framework the PCAIDS (proportionality- calibrated AIDS) model. We show that the brand-level margins effectively define product "nests" (products that are especially close substitutes) and substantially increase the flexibility of PCAIDS for modeling critical own- and cross-price elasticities. The model is particularly valuable for transactions at the wholesale level (where scanner data do not exist) and for geographic markets that span national borders (where comparable data may not be available), since other methods to derive elasticities, particularly those based on econometric estimation, may not be possible or may not be reliable.

System average rates of U.S. investor-owned electric utilities : a statistical benchmark study

Using multiple regression methods, we have undertaken a statistical "benchmark" study comparing system average electricity rates charged by three California utilities with 96 other US utilities over the 1984-93 time period. Although system average electricity rates are much higher in California than for the national average, we conclude that use of such unadjusted prices provides no meaningful information on how one evaluates the performance of utility management. Rather, we find that average electricity prices are affected to a large extent by a number of factors outside direct and immediate management control, such as local costs of doing business, the availability of low-cost generation sources (e.g., hydro and coal), customer and service territory characteristics such as customer density, use per customer, and a number of regulatory and environmental factors. Once one controls for these various factors, the remaining impact of utility management on system average rates is rather modest, and for the California utilities the impact of utility management (relative to the national average) is insignificantly different from zero. This finding of no difference in prices, holding constant the effects of factors outside of California utilities' control, is robust, being sustained in a large number of alternative models and estimation methods.Financial support from San Diego Gas & Electric Company

Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction with Structured Memory Hierarchies

This paper presents a novel framework for human trajectory prediction based on multimodal data (video and radar). Motivated by recent neuroscience discoveries, we propose incorporating a structured memory component in the human trajectory prediction pipeline to capture historical information to improve performance. We introduce structured LSTM cells for modelling the memory content hierarchically, preserving the spatiotemporal structure of the information and enabling us to capture both short-term and long-term context. We demonstrate how this architecture can be extended to integrate salient information from multiple modalities to automatically store and retrieve important information for decision making without any supervision. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed models on a novel multimodal dataset that we introduce, consisting of 40,000 pedestrian trajectories, acquired jointly from a radar system and a CCTV camera system installed in a public place. The performance is also evaluated on the publicly available New York Grand Central pedestrian database. In both settings, the proposed models demonstrate their capability to better anticipate future pedestrian motion compared to existing state of the art.Comment: To appear in ECML-PKDD 201

The low-LET radiation contribution to the tumor dose in diffusing alpha-emitters radiation therapy

Diffusing alpha-emitters Radiation Therapy (Alpha DaRT) enables the use of alpha particles for the treatment of solid tumors. It employs interstitial sources carrying a few uCi of Ra-224, designed to release its short-lived progeny, which emit alpha particles, beta, Auger, and conversion electrons, x- and gamma rays. These atoms diffuse around the source and create a lethal high-dose region, measuring a few mm in diameter. Previous studies focused on the alpha dose alone. This work addresses the electron and photon contributed by the diffusing atoms and by the atoms on the source surface, for both a single source and multi-source lattices. This allows to evaluate the low-LET contribution to the dose and demonstrate the sparing of surrounding healthy tissue. The dose is calculated using Monte Carlo codes. We compare the results of a simple line-source to those of a full simulation, which implements a realistic source geometry and the spread of the diffusing atoms. We consider two extreme scenarios: low diffusion and high Pb-212 leakage, and high diffusion and low leakage. The low-LET dose in source lattices is calculated by superposition of single-source contributions. We found that for sources carrying 3 uCi/cm Ra-224 arranged in a hexagonal lattice with 4 mm spacing, the minimal low-LET dose between sources is 18-30 Gy for the two scenarios and is dominated by the beta contribution. The low-LET dose drops below 5 Gy 3 mm away from the lattice. The accuracy of the line-source approximation is 15% for the total low-LET dose over clinically relevant distances (2-4 mm). For 3 uCi/cm Ra-224 sources, the contribution of the low-LET dose can reduce cell survival by up to 2-3 orders of magnitude. Increasing source activities by a factor of 5 can bring the low-LET dose to therapeutic levels leading to a self-boosted configuration, and potentially allowing to increase the lattice spacing.Comment: Submitted to Medical Physic

Displaced and Squeezed Number States

After beginning with a short historical review of the concept of displaced (coherent) and squeezed states, we discuss previous (often forgotten) work on displaced and squeezed number states. Next, we obtain the most general displaced and squeezed number states. We do this in both the functional and operator (Fock) formalisms, thereby demonstrating the necessary equivalence. We then obtain the time-dependent expectation values, uncertainties, wave-functions, and probability densities. In conclusion, there is a discussion on the possibility of experimentally observing these states.Comment: 16 pages, LaTeX, plus 4 figure