Does Domestic Intellectual Property Right Strength Affect Pharmaceutical Innovation?

From the Washington University Senior Honors Thesis Abstracts (WUSHTA), 2017. Published by the Office of Undergraduate Research. Joy Zalis Kiefer, Director of Undergraduate Research and Associate Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences; Lindsey Paunovich, Editor; Helen Human, Programs Manager and Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences Mentor: Maria Cano

CORPORATE REORGANIZATION UNDER SECTION 77B OF THE BANKRUPTCY ACT

In the closing hours of its legislative life the 73rd Congress adopted the amendment to the Bankruptcy Act providing for the reorganization of corporations, and designated as Section 77B. The Act was approved. by the President on June 7, 1934. The statute had had a long and checkered history in Congress. Such legislation barely failed of enactment in the preceding session when Congress first gave to natural persons availing themselves of bankruptcy procedure the right to call themselves debtors rather than bankrupts, and provided a substantially similar method of reorganization for railroad corporations engaged in interstate commerce. The present statute nearly foundered several times during the session of 1934; the principal difficulty was the matter of the participation of landlords\u27 claims in reorganization and in liquidation. The statute was saved from destruction only by a compromise on this question. As it finally emerged, however, it represents an important forward step in the solution of vexing and intricate problems of corporate reorganizations; it brushes aside fictions and disguises under which lawyers have heretofore proceeded in this field, and introduces by legislative fiat a welcome air of reality and substance

Considering Which Labor Terms a Debtor May Impose on its Union After Rejecting a Collective Bargaining Agreement Under § 1113

Section 1113 of the Bankruptcy Code provides courts with a comprehensive set of criteria for determining when chapter 11 debtors can reject collective bargaining agreements during bankruptcy. When courts approve rejection, however, § 1113 and the rest of the Code are silent about which labor terms debtors may unilaterally impose on their unions. On the rare occasions when courts and the National Labor Relations Board have addressed this issue, they have followed one of two approaches. The first approach limits debtors to imposing only labor terms found in their last, best offer to unions before filing a § 1113 motion. The second approach, however, permits debtors to impose any labor terms found in any pre-§ 1113 proposals, subject to court approval

Real-time Face Recognition Drone Surveillance System

Drones are becoming more relevant and could potentially become a part of everyday life. From Amazon delivering packages to light displays used in the Super Bowl half-time show, drones are taking the place of people and inefficient systems. They are being used by military forces for scouting and relaying information from a distance, and by normal people every day to get an aerial view of a park or just for the entertainment of flying. This project develops a system for identifying and recognizing faces in real-time using a drone, specifically a Parrot ‘Bebop’, which is flying autonomously. The drone company, Parrot, provides an API for independent development that we used to program an automated flight pattern and to reformat the video for optimal face recognition. The video stream is sent from the drone via its personal WIFI hotspot to the GPU server to handle the computationally expensive power required by face recognition algorithms. The video is then displayed to the user monitor and an easy-to-use interface is provided for users to add people to the recognized face database. Our final product has the potential to act as “eye in the sky” for security in crowded areas and can eliminate human error in tense life-threatening police and military situations.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/capstone/1171/thumbnail.jp

A major advance in powder metallurgy

Ultramet has developed a process which promises to significantly increase the mechanical properties of powder metallurgy (PM) parts. Current PM technology uses mixed powders of various constituents prior to compaction. The homogeneity and flaw distribution in PM parts depends on the uniformity of mixing and the maintenance of uniformity during compaction. Conventional PM fabrication processes typically result in non-uniform distribution of the matrix, flaw generation due to particle-particle contact when one of the constituents is a brittle material, and grain growth caused by high temperature, long duration compaction processes. Additionally, a significant amount of matrix material is usually necessary to fill voids and create 100 percent dense parts. In Ultramet's process, each individual particle is coated with the matrix material, and compaction is performed by solid state processing. In this program, Ultramet coated 12-micron tungsten particles with approximately 5 wt percent nickel/iron. After compaction, flexure strengths were measured 50 percent higher than those achieved in conventional liquid phase sintered parts (10 wt percent Ni/Fe). Further results and other material combinations are discussed

The Effect Of Lighting And Building Security On Crime

Changing the physical design of an area has been long understood to be an effective way to change people\u27s behavior. Within the field of criminology, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) is an approach that alters the physical environment to decrease opportunities for crime. This dissertation examines two common tools used to reduce opportunities for crime: door locks and outdoor lighting. Though these tools are ubiquitously used, there are limitations in the current research on what effect these tools have on crime. This dissertation uses three papers to extend the CPTED literature by filling in some of these gaps in knowledge. The first paper assesses the effect of installing smart locks on the exterior doors of campus buildings on a major urban university campus. Results show that there is no significant change in the number of crimes per month on buildings that install these locks relative to a comparison group. The second paper measures how the number of outdoor, nighttime crimes change as the amount of moonlight - a relatively dim source of light - changes. Results show that nights with more moonlight have more crime, a finding in contrast to much of the literature on lighting. This suggests that the effects of lighting are non-linear - that a small increase of lighting may increase crime while significant increases in lighting decrease crime. The final paper evaluates one possible mechanism for the bulk of the lighting literature\u27s finding that lighting decreases crime: that more light increases the risk of detection. This study uses the change in evening lighting when the United States transitions to (from) daylight saving time in spring (fall) which causes the evening the gain (lose) an hour of daylight. Results show that when evenings are brighter, the odds of an arrest for violent crimes - and for robbery in particular - significantly increase. Together, these studies advance the field of criminology by providing evidence on the effectiveness of two widely utilized crime control tools - door locks and outdoor lighting - to affect criminal behavior. This contribution can assist both researchers in the CPTED field as well as policy makers who must decide whether - and in which situations - to use door locks or outdoor lighting as crime control measures

Interactions of strings and D-branes from M theory

We discuss the relation between M theory and type II string theories. We show that, assuming ``natural'' interactions between membranes and fivebranes in M theory, the known interactions between strings and D-branes in type II string theories arise in appropriate limits. Our discussion of the interactions is purely at the classical level. We remark on issues associated with the M theory approach to enhanced gauge symmetries, which deserve further investigation.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figures, uses harvmac.tex and epsf.tex. Added a discussion of Kaluza-Klein monopoles and some minor change