Harnessing and Sharing the Benefits of State Sponsored Research

In recent years data-sharing has been a recurring focus of struggle within the scientific research community as improvements in information technology and digital networks have expanded the ways that data can be produced, disseminated, and used. Information technology makes it easier to share data in publicly accessible archives that aggregate data from multiple sources. Such sharing and aggregation facilitate observations that would otherwise be impossible. But data disclosure poses a dilemma for scientists. Data have long been the stock in trade of working scientists, lending credibility to their claims while highlighting new questions that are worthy of future research funding. Some disclosure is necessary in order to claim these benefits, but data disclosure may also benefit one\u27s research competitors. Scientists who share their data promptly and freely may find themselves at a competitive disadvantage relative to free riders in the race to make future observations and thereby to earn further recognition and funding. The possibility of commercial gain further raises the competitive stakes. This article discusses data sharing in California\u27s stem cell initiative against the background of other data sharing efforts and in light of the competing interests that the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) is directed to balance. We begin by considering how IP law affects data-sharing. We then assess the strategic considerations that guide the IP and data policies and strategies of federal, state, and private research sponsors. With this background, we discuss four specific sets of issues that public sponsors of data-rich research, including CIRM, are likely to confront: (1) how to motivate researchers to contribute data; (2) who may have access to the data and on what conditions; (3) what data get deposited and when do they get deposited; and (4) how to establish database architecture and curate and maintain the database

Policing the Danger Narrative

The clamor for police reform in the United States has reached a fever pitch. The current debate has mainly centered around questions of police function: What functions should police perform, and how should they perform them to avoid injustice and unnecessary harm? This Article, in contrast, focuses on a central aspect of police culture—namely, how police envision their relationship to those policed. It exposes the vast reach of a deeply engrained “danger narrative” and demonstrates the disastrous consequences that this narrative has helped to bring about. Reinforced by police training, codified by courts, and broadly deployed, the danger narrative is an “us-versus-them” ideology that envisions “them”—all persons whom police are observing, investigating, detaining—as a lethal danger to “us”—law enforcement personnel. Structural and functional reforms have little hope of succeeding unless this toxic narrative can be displaced. The Article first explains the content of the danger narrative and its centrality both to policing and the law of policing. It then scrutinizes the narrative, finding that its core claims about the perils of policing are substantially exaggerated. The Article further explains how, ironically, these exaggerated claims actually create danger that could otherwise be avoided, and thus serve as an illegitimate “bootstrapping” argument for uses of excessive force. More troublingly still, the purportedly empirical danger narrative embeds a previously unexamined and entirely untenable normative proposition: Namely, that it is better for scores of suspects to be unjustifiably injured or killed by police than for any police officer to be injured. The Article concludes with a call for a new narrative frame to address both the empirical and normative pitfalls of the danger narrative and to permit meaningful police reform to take root. Drawing on insights from communitarian theory, and from such fields as medicine and aviation, it proposes institutional reforms that would promote core values of professionalism, including the adoption of data-driven, evidence-based practices, while also undermining the danger narrative’s pernicious us-versus-them ideology by cultivating empathy and reimagining police-community partnerships. Ultimately, the prospect of better and safer policing hinges on the adoption of these and other measures to inculcate in police departments a more accurate depiction of the real risks of in-the-line-of-duty violence

Giant magnetoresistance in Co/Cu multilayers sputtered with Kr

This paper presents some results of magnetoresistance measurements on Kr-sputter-deposited Co/Cu multilayers. We find that Co/Cu MLs sputtered with Kr gas show a larger GMR effect than those sputtered with Ar gas

Criminal Infliction of Emotional Distress

This Article identifies and critiques a trend to criminalize the infliction of emotional harm independent of any physical injury or threat. The Article defines a new category of criminal infliction of emotional distress (“CIED”) statutes, which include laws designed to combat behaviors such as harassing, stalking, and bullying. In contrast to tort liability for emotional harm, which is cabined by statutes and the common law, CIED statutes allow states to regulate and punish the infliction of emotional harm in an increasingly expansive way. In assessing harm and devising punishment, the law has always taken nonphysical harm seriously, but traditionally it has only implicitly accounted for emotional harm; it has not made emotional harm an element of criminal liability. CIED statutes represent a break in this narrative. The Article uses these statutes as an entry point to examine the role that victim emotion does and should play in substantive criminal law, and it finds that CIED statutes may endanger free expression and equality and provide insufficient notice to defendants. These statutes thus offer a cautionary tale, illustrating problems that can arise when victim emotion plays an explicit role in criminal culpability. CIED statutes also reveal the comparative benefits of the implicit approach, which acknowledges the significance of nonphysical harm yet does not predicate criminal liability on the existence of emotional harm

Regular expressions as violin bowing patterns

String players spend a significant amount of practice time creating and learning bowings. These may be indicated in the music using up-bow and down-bow symbols, but those traditional notations do not capture the complex bowing patterns that are latent within the music. Regular expressions, a mathematical notation for a simple class of formal languages, can describe precisely the bowing patterns that commonly arise in string music. A software tool based on regular expressions enables performers to search for passages that can be handled with similar bowings, and to edit them consistently. A computer-based music editor incorporating bowing patterns has been implemented, using Lilypond to typeset the music. Our approach has been evaluated by using the editor to study ten movements from six violin sonatas by W. A. Mozart. Our experience shows that the editor is successful at finding passages and inserting bowings; that relatively complex patterns occur a number of times; and that the bowings can be inserted automatically and consistently

Standing Waves in a Non-linear 1D Lattice : Floquet Multipliers, Krein Signatures, and Stability

We construct a class of exact commensurate and incommensurate standing wave (SW) solutions in a piecewise smooth analogue of the discrete non-linear Schr\"{o}dinger (DNLS) model and present their linear stability analysis. In the case of the commensurate SW solutions the analysis reduces to the eigenvalue problem of a transfer matrix depending parametrically on the eigenfrequency. The spectrum of eigenfrequencies and the corresponding eigenmodes can thereby be determined exactly. The spatial periodicity of a commensurate SW implies that the eigenmodes are of the Bloch form, characterised by an even number of Floquet multipliers. The spectrum is made up of bands that, in general, include a number of transition points corresponding to changes in the disposition of the Floquet multipliers. The latter characterise the different band segments. An alternative characterisation of the segments is in terms of the Krein signatures associated with the eigenfrequencies. When one or more parameters characterising the SW solution is made to vary, one occasionally encounters collisions between the band-edges or the intra-band transition points and, depending on the the Krein signatures of the colliding bands or segments, the spectrum may stretch out in the complex plane, leading to the onset of instability. We elucidate the correlation between the disposition of Floquet multipliers and the Krein signatures, presenting two specific examples where the SW possesses a definite window of stability, as distinct from the SW's obtained close to the anticontinuous and linear limits of the DNLS model.Comment: 31 pages, 11 figure

Solution of the Bohr hamiltonian for soft triaxial nuclei

The Bohr-Mottelson model is solved for a generic soft triaxial nucleus, separating the Bohr hamiltonian exactly and using a number of different model-potentials: a displaced harmonic oscillator in $\gamma$, which is solved with an approximated algebraic technique, and Coulomb/Kratzer, harmonic/Davidson and infinite square well potentials in $\beta$, which are solved exactly. In each case we derive analytic expressions for the eigenenergies which are then used to calculate energy spectra. Here we study the chain of osmium isotopes and we compare our results with experimental information and previous calculations.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figure

Density reorganization in hot nuclei

The density profile of a hot nuclear system produced in intermediate energy heavy ion collisions is studied in a microcanonical formulation with a momentum and density dependent finite range interaction. The caloric curve and the density evolution with excitation are calculated for a number of systems for the equilibrium mononuclear configuration; they compare favorably with the recent experimental data. The studied density fluctuations are seen to build up rapidly beyond an excitation energy of 8 MeV/u indicating the instability of the system towards nuclear disassembly. Explicit introduction of deformation in the expansion path of the heated nucleus, however, shows that the system might fragment even earlier. We also explore the effects of the nuclear equation of state and of the mass and isospin asymmetry on the nuclear equilibrium configuration and the relevant experimental observables.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figures, revtex

Accountability in patenting of federally funded research

Bayh-Dole allows academic grantees to patent federally-funded research for purposes of promoting the commercialization of this research. To ensure commercialization goals are achieved, the Act requires grantees to report to funding agencies not only the existence of federally-funded patents but also utilization efforts they and their licensees/assignees are making. Although reporting is a cornerstone of accountability under Bayh-Dole, information about grantee compliance with reporting requirements is incomplete and dated. In fact, the last significant study of the question dates back to the late 1990s and analyzes only 633 patents. Since that time, concerns have emerged that federally-funded university patents are being asserted improperly against independent commercializers or even assigned to so-called “patent trolls.” This article provides fresh evidence indicating substantial under-reporting of the existence of federal funding in over 30,000 academic biomedical patents issued between 1980 to 2007. The article finds substantial under-reporting of federal funding even in the case of patents on FDA-approved drugs, which should presumably receive significant attention from universities. Grantees’ failure to report federal funding suggests similar, or even more significant, noncompliance with requirements to report utilization information. However, compliance with reporting requirements on utilization cannot be assessed because of secrecy associated with relevant government databases. Accordingly, the article makes a fresh argument that the Commerce Department, which has the requisite regulatory authority, work with funding agencies, to improve transparency. Greater transparency would not only motivate grantees to improve reporting but would also allow assessment of whether grantee patent management is actually achieving Bayh-Dole\u27s utilization goals