Sports consumption behaviour among generation Y in mainland China

The Chinese Government has relaxed its tight control over sport (Stensholt 2004), the country is set to host the 2008 Olympic Games and every major sport franchise in the world is making plans for a full assault on the Chinese market. The game is on in mainland China, however despite the excitement about the market there is little understanding of sport consumption in China or the attitudes and behaviours of potential sport consumers. The bulk of the literature in consumer behaviour within sports relates specifically to developed industrialised nations, specifically USA, Canada, Europe and Australia. Of particular interest to academics and practitioners alike should be the potential of the huge generation Y market in China. Generation Y (those born after 1978) represent not only a current lucrative market but also represent the future development of sport and sport consumption in China. This exploratory study has revealed that generation Y consumers in China exhibit sports consumption behaviours which differ in numerous respects from their counterparts in the USA and deserve deeper study

Cybersquatting: The Latest Challenge in Federal Trademark Protection

The explosion in Internet technology in the past decade has drawn the Lanham Act into the realm of electronic commerce. Trademark owners seeking to register domain names have recently found themselves entwined in a number of disputes, such as disputes involving claims to multiple domain names and disputes over whether the domain name registration system is fairly administered. One important legal issue that has recently come to the fore is over the practice of cybersquatting. Today, courts must contend with the cybersquatter, a speculator who reserves trademarks as Internet domain names for the sole purpose of selling or licensing them back to trademark owners willing to pay a considerable price for their use. Complicating matters, the most potent weapons in the Government\u27s anticybersquatting arsenal--the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) and Federal Trademark Dilution Act (FTDA)--each give rise to grave constitutional concerns

The Casimir Effect for Fermions in One Dimension

We study the Casimir problem for a fermion coupled to a static background field in one space dimension. We examine the relationship between interactions and boundary conditions for the Dirac field. In the limit that the background becomes concentrated at a point (a ``Dirac spike'') and couples strongly, it implements a confining boundary condition. We compute the Casimir energy for a masslike background and show that it is finite for a stepwise continuous background field. However the total Casimir energy diverges for the Dirac spike. The divergence cannot be removed by standard renormalization methods. We compute the Casimir energy density of configurations where the background field consists of one or two sharp spikes and show that the energy density is finite except at the spikes. Finally we define and compute an interaction energy density and the force between two Dirac spikes as a function of the strength and separation of the spikes.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figure

Dark Matter Searches with Astroparticle Data

The existence of dark matter (DM) was first noticed by Zwicky in the 1930s, but its nature remains one of the great unsolved problems of physics. A variety of observations indicate that it is non-baryonic and non-relativistic. One of the preferred candidates for non-baryonic DM is a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) that in most models is stable. WIMP self-annihilation can produce cosmic rays, gamma rays, and other particles with signatures that may be detectable. Hints of anomalous cosmic-ray spectra found by recent experiments, such as PAMELA, have motivated interesting interpretations in terms of DM annihilation and/or decay. However, these signatures also have standard astrophysical interpretations, so additional evidence is needed in order to make a case for detection of DM annihilation or decay. Searches by the Fermi Large Area Telescope for gamma-ray signals from clumps, nearby dwarf spheroidal galaxies, and galaxy clusters have also been performed, along with measurements of the diffuse Galactic and extragalactic gamma-ray emission. In addition, imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes like HESS, MAGIC, and VERITAS have reported on searches for gamma-ray emission from dwarf galaxies. In this review, we examine the status of searches for particle DM by these instruments and discuss the interpretations and resulting DM limits.Comment: Solicited review article to appear in Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics. 52 pages, 10 figures (higher resolution figures will appear in the journal article

Cybersquatting: The Latest Challenge in Federal Trademark Protection

The explosion in Internet technology in the past decade has drawn the Lanham Act into the realm of electronic commerce. Trademark owners seeking to register domain names have recently found themselves entwined in a number of disputes, such as disputes involving claims to multiple domain names and disputes over whether the domain name registration system is fairly administered. One important legal issue that has recently come to the fore is over the practice of cybersquatting. Today, courts must contend with the cybersquatter, a speculator who reserves trademarks as Internet domain names for the sole purpose of selling or licensing them back to trademark owners willing to pay a considerable price for their use. Complicating matters, the most potent weapons in the Government\u27s anticybersquatting arsenal--the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) and Federal Trademark Dilution Act (FTDA)--each give rise to grave constitutional concerns