The Elm City resident card: New Haven reaches out to immigrants

Cities with sizable immigrant populations are responding to the issue of illegal immigration in different ways. In 2004, the City of New Haven began to actively collaborate with its immigrant population for the purpose of finding ways to increase public safety and integrate immigrant residents into the civic life of the community. This article describes some of the policy choices made by the city in recent years.Immigrants - Connecticut ; Identification cards ; Unbanked

High-quality patents for emerging science and technology through external actors: community scientific experts and knowledge societies

This article explores one type of administrative mechanism to achieve high-quality patents: Article 115 of the European Patent Convention, which permits the inclusion of third parties to provide input to the prior art search and to communicate relevant information to the examiner in charge. Our empirical research analyzes the field of human genetic inventions. The empirical findings here show that third parties usually participate only after patents have been granted. Between 1999 and 2009, only a limited number of human gene patent cases made use of third-party, pre-grant interventions. There is thus an imbalance between third-party participation in the pre- and post-grant phase of patent prosecution, and we urge for greater participation of knowledge communities in the search and examination process. Europe should create a funnel for participation through advisory bodies and learned societies, which would allow judicious consideration of the search and examination, with a resultant improvement in patent quality

Perceptions of Marriage and Human Relationships in Jane Austen’s Novel Emma

Emma is a novel written by Jane Austen, which is based on real- life situations of the eighteenth century England. Austen depicts her novels to show clearly the customs and traditions that people had to use in order to get married; her dissatisfaction towards all these conditions; male dominance and also the consideration of women as weak human beings with limited rights. Based on all these issues, Austen chooses different kinds of marriages, mainly based on economical interest. Most of the people in her novels see the marriage as an obligation which had to be fulfilled; most of the girls got involved into a marriage market where parents decided what was good or bad for them. This paper describes the conditions of unmarried and married women Emma; the ways how the unmarried women chose the partners; the ways how Austen compared the conditions of women with the real life situations of the eighteenth century Britain; how she used irony to show her dissatisfaction towards the traditions of that time, and also the real message she conveys to the world

The European Patent System: Dealing with emerging technologies.

In light of recent controversial patent decisions in biotechnology, this article argues that the current European patent examination and opposition procedures do not suffice to balance the patent system These procedures do not provide sufficient guidance for patent examiners to deal effectively with the emerging life science technologies. The European Patent Office needs to instill more self-reflection into the patent system and foster interaction between the Office and patent stakeholders. In this respect, we propose that the EPO should establish an ex-ante, patent-granting advisory body that would consist of multidisciplinary staff drawn from various technical fields, and collaborate closely with the scientific community and other national bodies. It is expected that such an advisory body would provide an input to the existing patent system, since it would anticipate, control and reduce the possibility that patent examiners would issue low-quality patents with huge socio-economic consequences

The Governance of European Intellectual Property Rights: Toward a\ud Differentiated Community Approach

In this article we argue that the regulation of Intellectual Property (IP) protection should go beyond the traditional regulatory models and follow a more flexible regulatory framework. Considering the range of industrial needs and developments, the article develops a differentiated Community IP protection model that could stimulate growth and innovation, alter the behavior of patent users, and improve the quality of patents through spontaneous harmonization and convergence. To explain the model better, we distinguish two key elements: differentiated framework directives and epistemic patent communities. Differentiated framework directives dictate the establishment of general patentability standards at the EU level but allow national patent systems to set up stricter patent standards for particular subject matters at the national level. In this way, differentiated framework directives should lead to an appropriate balance between the principles of the IP protection regime and the ideals of economic integration. However, given the current diversity in innovation developments and industrial operations, we recognize the risk that not all IP stakeholders would agree to a differentiated Community IP protection model. To overcome the risk of deadlock within model negotiations, and to encourage the integration of countries that want to move forward and advance certain innovation developments, we propose the creation of epistemic patent communities. In this article, epistemic patent communities are perceived as strong mechanisms for establishing an inclusive patent protection environment that encourages various stakeholders to agree on certain patentability principles and to acquire better IP protection at the EU level

Bacterial Keratitis - Empirical Treatment or Therapy According to Antibiotic Sensitivity Report

Bakterijski keratitis je i uz širok spektar dostupnih antibiotika jo. uvijek jedan od vodećih uzroka sljepoće u svijetu. Cilj ovoga rada je prikazati broj bolesnika od bakterijskog keratitisa kojima je modificirana početna antibiotska terapija prema nalazu antibiograma. Za razdoblje 2005.-2006. godine analizirane su povijesti bolesti 44 bolesnika s kliničkom dijagnozom keratitisa. Nađena su 32 bolesnika s kliničkom slikom bakterijskog keratitisa, 3 bolesnika s kliničkom slikom gljivičnog keratitisa i 9 bolesnika s kliničkom slikom virusnog keratitisa. Bris rožnice uzet je u 28 bolesnika, ali je samo u 5 zabilježen pozitivan nalaz. Početna antbiotska terapija modificirana je u 3 bolesnika s gljivičnom etiologijom.Despite a wide spectrum of antibiotics available, bacterial keratitis remains one of the leading causes of blindness in the world. The aim of this report is to give an account of patients with initial treatment modification according to antibiotic sensitivity report. Records of 44 keratitis patients treated during the 2005-2006 period were retrospectively analyzed. There were 32, three and nine patients with a clinical picture bacterial, fungal and viral keratitis, respectively. Corneal scrapings were obtained in 28 patients, and positive results were recorded in only five cases. The initial antibiotic therapy was modified in three patients with fungal agents identified

Conceptualizing throughput legitimacy: procedural mechanisms of accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness in EU governance

This symposium demonstrates the potential for throughput legitimacy as a concept for shedding empirical light on the strengths and weaknesses of multi-level governance, as well as challenging the concept theoretically. This article introduces the symposium by conceptualizing throughput legitimacy as an ‘umbrella concept’, encompassing a constellation of normative criteria not necessarily empirically interrelated. It argues that in order to interrogate multi-level governance processes in all their complexity, it makes sense for us to develop normative standards that are not naïve about the empirical realities of how power is exercised within multilevel governance, or how it may interact with legitimacy. We argue that while throughput legitimacy has its normative limits, it can be substantively useful for these purposes. While being no replacement for input and output legitimacy, throughput legitimacy offers distinctive normative criteria— accountability, transparency, inclusiveness and openness— and points towards substantive institutional reforms.Published versio