Competition, Innovation and Racing for Priority at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office resolves patent priority disputes in patent interference cases. Using a random sample of cases declared between 1988 and 1994, we establish a connection between patent interferences and patent races, and then use the data to consider some key issues in dynamic competition and innovation. We look at the incidence and distribution of patent races by technology, evidence for strategic delay of innovation by incumbent firms, and evidence that patent races moderate incentives to delay. Our results have implications for patent policy in general and for evaluating the U.S. “first to invent†patent priority rule.Patent race, Patent interference, US Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences, Patent litigation; Innovation; Research and development

A study of the portability of an Ada system in the software engineering laboratory (SEL)

A particular porting effort is discussed, and various statistics on analyzing the portability of Ada and the total staff months (overall and by phase) required to accomplish the rehost, are given. This effort is compared to past experiments on the rehosting of FORTRAN systems. The discussion includes an analysis of the types of errors encountered during the rehosting, the changes required to rehost the system, experiences with the Alsys IBM Ada compiler, the impediments encountered, and the lessons learned during this study

C++ Coding Standards and Style Guide

This document is based on the "C Style Guide" (SEL-94-003). It contains recommendations for C++ implementations that build on, or in some cases replace, the style described in the C style guide. Style guidelines on any topics that are not covered in this document can be found in the "C Style Guide." An attempt has been made to indicate when these recommendations are just guidelines or suggestions versus when they are more strongly encouraged. Using coding standards makes code easier to read and maintain. General principles that maximize the readability and maintainability of C++ are: (1) Organize classes using encapsulation and information hiding techniques. (2) Enhance readability through the use of indentation and blank lines. (3) Add comments to header files to help users of classes. (4) Add comments to implementation files to help maintainers of classes. (5) Create names that are meaningful and readable

The shift in manufacturing employment in China

Chinese manufacturers, in particular in labour-intensive industries, are striving hard for ways to withstand pressures such as slowing economic growth, labour force shortages and rising factor costs. Light manufacturing offers growth solutions for under-developed regions and economies as it is driven by low factor costs and an abundant workforce. Using data from multiple official sources, this report aims to identify the pattern of current manufacturing employment shifts within China and focus on regional and industrial disparities – primarily through the study of four manufacturing sub-sectors

Integrin Signaling Regulates Blastocyst Adhesion to Fibronectin at Implantation: Intracellular Calcium Transients and Vesicle Trafficking in Primary Trophoblast Cells

AbstractAccumulating evidence indicates that the endometrial extracellular matrix (ECM) modulates trophoblast adhesion during mouse blastocyst implantation. In previous studies of adhesion-competent mouse blastocysts, we have demonstrated that integrin-mediated fibronectin (FN)-binding activity on the apical surface of trophoblast cells is initially low, but becomes strengthened after embryos are exposed to FN. In the present study, we have examined whether the ligand-induced upregulation of trophoblast adhesion to FN is mediated by integrin signaling. The strengthening of adhesion to FN required integrin ligation, which rapidly elevated cytoplasmic-free Ca2+. Chelation of intracellular Ca2+ using BAPTA-AM, or inhibition of the Ca2+-dependent proteins, protein kinase C or calmodulin, significantly attenuated the effect of FN on binding activity. Furthermore, direct elevation of cytoplasmic Ca2+ levels with ionomycin upregulated FN-binding activity, demonstrating that Ca2+ signaling is required and sufficient for strong adhesion to FN. Ca2+ signaling may induce protein trafficking, a known requirement for ligand-induced upregulation of FN-binding activity. Indeed, intracellular vesicles accumulated in adhesion-competent blastocysts, but were absent after exposure to either FN or ionomycin. These findings suggest that, during implantation, contact between peri-implantation blastocysts and FN elevates intracellular Ca2+, which strengthens trophoblast adhesion to ECM through protein redistribution

Competition, Innovation and Racing for Priority at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

When two inventors file patent applications with overlapping, or "interfering" claims, the U.S. patent rights are awarded to the applicant who establishes priority of invention. Patent interference cases are litigated at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences. The cases offer a unique window into competition between firms in research and innovation. This paper analyzes a random sample of interferences to investigate the impact of patent policies on innovation strategies. Our results contribute to the policy debate over the appropriate scope of patents and the revision of the U.S. patent priority structure. We find that while interference cases are in general rare, they are highly concentrated among chemical and biomedical firms. Biotechnology patent applications are so likely to be subject to interference litigation that a question arises about their character: a high rate of interfering means that multiple researchers are chasing a large patent prize associated with a well-defined research topic. This in turn suggests that either the scope of biotechnology patents is too broad or the bar for obviousness has been set too low. Alternatively, the benefits of competition and patent racing to innovation are clear in the patent filing behavior of incumbent and challenger firms. Our empirical results suggest that incumbent firms delay filing patent applications relative to challengers, consistent with the hypothesis that incumbents attempt to delay the introduction of new technologies. But competition from an interference challenge leads incumbents to accelerate filing their patent applications, and thus both the commercialization of new technology and the diffusion of technological information. Strategic filing is exacerbated by the unique U.S. priority structure, which awards disputed patent rights to an inventor who proves that he or she is first-to-invent rather than first to file. Reforming the priority structure, a goal of current efforts to harmonize U.S. patent policies with other countries, has been controversial because of its alleged benefits to entrepreneurs. We find no evidence for the claim that the system benefits small firms or individual inventors over large organizations with patent filing expertise. Instead, we find that the system empowers incumbent firms who seek to delay filing their patent applications, knowing that if they lose the race to the patent office they can still obtain the intellectual property rights with a first-to-invent showing.

Redundancy of information: lowering dimension

Let At denote the set of infinite sequences of effective dimension t. We determine both how close and how far an infinite sequence of dimension s can be from one of dimension t, measured using the Besicovitch pseudometric. We also identify classes of sequences for which these infima and suprema are realized as minima and maxima. When t < s, we find d(X,At) is minimized when X is a Bernoulli p-random, where H(p)=s, and maximized when X belongs to a class of infinite sequences that we call s-codewords. When s < t, the situation is reversed.Comment: 28 pages, 3 figure

Reducing Round Complexity of Byzantine Broadcast

Byzantine Broadcast is an important topic in distributed systems and improving its round complexity has long been a focused challenge. Under honest majority, the state of the art for Byzantine Broadcast is 10 rounds for a static adversary and 16 rounds for an adaptive adversary. In this paper, we present a Byzantine Broadcast protocol with expected 8 rounds under a static adversary and expected 10 rounds under an adaptive adversary. We also generalize our idea to the dishonest majority setting and achieve an improvement over existing protocols