How Nike’s Trademark Infringement Lawsuit Against Kool Kiy & Omi May Benefit From China’s Wuhan Intermediate People’s Court’s Approach to Mediation

In November 2022, Nike filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Kool Kiy, Omi, and China-based manufacturer Xiamen Wandering Planet, garnering nationwide media attention. Particularly, Wandering Planet was accused of playing an integral role in the infringement by providing the sources to produce knockoff sneakers using Nike’s registered Air Jordan 1 and Dunk trade dress for Kiy and Omi. The manufacturer allegedly “knowingly participate[d] in a scheme to intentionally create confusion in the market place and capitalize on it.” Indeed, some confused consumers could not tell the difference between Kool Kiy’s products and Jordan’s. Nike’s staunch commitment to proceeding with litigation is clear: “Nike must protect its design and intellectual property from bad actors who undermine the very DNA of authentic sneaker culture by promoting, copying, and selling Nike’s designs as their own.” This post was originally published on the Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution website on April 29, 2023. The original post can be accessed via the Archived Link button above

Equity-Based Compensation To Outside Directors And Accounting Conservatism

This paper examines the relationship between equity-based compensation to outside directors and accounting conservatism. Equity-based compensation to outside directors can strengthen the firm’s corporate governance structure. Since this strong governance reduces the information asymmetry between managers and shareholders, it is also possible that firms with strong governance use more conservative accounting. To test this prediction, we investigate whether the proportion of the equity-based compensation to total compensation to outside directors has an effect on the level of conservatism and the various measures that are used. We find that there is a positive relationship between the proportion of equity-based compensation and the level of conservatism. The results are robust to additional tests using alternative measures of the equity-based compensation (the amount of the equity-based compensation) and the equity-based compensation to audit committee members instead of the full board of directors. According to our findings, we can conclude that equity-based compensation to outside directors encourages directors to put more effort into reducing the information asymmetry using conservative accounting

Discovering and Generating Hard Examples for Training a Red Tide Detector

Currently, accurate detection of natural phenomena, such as red tide, that adversely affect wildlife and human, using satellite images has been increasingly utilized. However, red tide detection on satellite images still remains a very hard task due to unpredictable nature of red tide occurrence, extreme sparsity of red tide samples, difficulties in accurate groundtruthing, etc. In this paper, we aim to tackle both the data sparsity and groundtruthing issues by primarily addressing two challenges: i) significant lack of hard examples of non-red tide that can enhance detection performance and ii) extreme data imbalance between red tide and non-red tide examples. In the proposed work, we devise a 9-layer fully convolutional network jointly optimized with two plug-in modules tailored to overcoming the two challenges: i) a hard negative example generator (HNG) to supplement the hard negative (non-red tide) examples and ii) cascaded online hard example mining (cOHEM) to ease the data imbalance. Our proposed network jointly trained with HNG and cOHEM provides state-of-the-art red tide detection accuracy on GOCI satellite images.Comment: 10 page

Equity-Based Compensation For Outside Directors And Cost Of Equity Capital

This study provides evidence on the association between equity-based compensation for outside directors and the implied cost of equity capital. Based on the premise that equity-based compensation for outside directors better aligns the interests of the directors with those of shareholders, we investigate whether the more equity-based compensation is granted to outside directors, the lower cost of equity capital firms enjoy. We find a negative relationship between the proportion of equity-based compensation to total compensation for outside directors and the cost of equity capital. Our findings suggest that equity-based compensation for outside directors, by motivating the directors to play their monitoring role more faithfully, reduces agency risks resulting in the lower cost of equity capital

A Cross National Comparison on the Awareness of Adopting FOSS4G to NSDI in Developing Countries

In this study, we constructed an assessment framework that was consisted of 9 indicators about functional, economic and public value for FOSS4G adoption to NSDI and alternatives such as data sharing, data management, utilization and construction and derived relative weights using AHP method. For the AHP, we conducted a survey to developing countries’ 10 respondents from 9 Asian and Latin American countries. Firstly, result of the survey showed that economic value indicator came in the highest weight with 0.425, followed by functional value indicator with 0.345 and public value indicator with 0.230. Secondly, result of the alternatives analysis showed that data sharing alternative came in the highest adoption rate with 0.824, followed by data management with 0.780, data utilization with 0.778. This means that developing countries want to introduce FOSS4G to their NSDI from economic motivation. This study focused on the comprehensive aspect for adopting FOSS4G to NSDI that is different from the previous researches that were focused on the software engineering aspect to the adoption

Chemical Property-Guided Neural Networks for Naphtha Composition Prediction

The naphtha cracking process heavily relies on the composition of naphtha, which is a complex blend of different hydrocarbons. Predicting the naphtha composition accurately is crucial for efficiently controlling the cracking process and achieving maximum performance. Traditional methods, such as gas chromatography and true boiling curve, are not feasible due to the need for pilot-plant-scale experiments or cost constraints. In this paper, we propose a neural network framework that utilizes chemical property information to improve the performance of naphtha composition prediction. Our proposed framework comprises two parts: a Watson K factor estimation network and a naphtha composition prediction network. Both networks share a feature extraction network based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture, while the output layers use Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) based networks to generate two different outputs - Watson K factor and naphtha composition. The naphtha composition is expressed in percentages, and its sum should be 100%. To enhance the naphtha composition prediction, we utilize a distillation simulator to obtain the distillation curve from the naphtha composition, which is dependent on its chemical properties. By designing a loss function between the estimated and simulated Watson K factors, we improve the performance of both Watson K estimation and naphtha composition prediction. The experimental results show that our proposed framework can predict the naphtha composition accurately while reflecting real naphtha chemical properties.Comment: Accepted at IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics 2023(INDIN 2023

eCDT: Event Clustering for Simultaneous Feature Detection and Tracking-

Contrary to other standard cameras, event cameras interpret the world in an entirely different manner; as a collection of asynchronous events. Despite event camera's unique data output, many event feature detection and tracking algorithms have shown significant progress by making detours to frame-based data representations. This paper questions the need to do so and proposes a novel event data-friendly method that achieve simultaneous feature detection and tracking, called event Clustering-based Detection and Tracking (eCDT). Our method employs a novel clustering method, named as k-NN Classifier-based Spatial Clustering and Applications with Noise (KCSCAN), to cluster adjacent polarity events to retrieve event trajectories.With the aid of a Head and Tail Descriptor Matching process, event clusters that reappear in a different polarity are continually tracked, elongating the feature tracks. Thanks to our clustering approach in spatio-temporal space, our method automatically solves feature detection and feature tracking simultaneously. Also, eCDT can extract feature tracks at any frequency with an adjustable time window, which does not corrupt the high temporal resolution of the original event data. Our method achieves 30% better feature tracking ages compared with the state-of-the-art approach while also having a low error approximately equal to it.Comment: IROS2022 accepted pape

The first generation of a BAC-based physical map of Brassica rapa

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The genus <it>Brassica </it>includes the most extensively cultivated vegetable crops worldwide. Investigation of the <it>Brassica </it>genome presents excellent challenges to study plant genome evolution and divergence of gene function associated with polyploidy and genome hybridization. A physical map of the <it>B. rapa </it>genome is a fundamental tool for analysis of <it>Brassica </it>"A" genome structure. Integration of a physical map with an existing genetic map by linking genetic markers and BAC clones in the sequencing pipeline provides a crucial resource for the ongoing genome sequencing effort and assembly of whole genome sequences.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A genome-wide physical map of the <it>B. rapa </it>genome was constructed by the capillary electrophoresis-based fingerprinting of 67,468 Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) clones using the five restriction enzyme SNaPshot technique. The clones were assembled into contigs by means of FPC v8.5.3. After contig validation and manual editing, the resulting contig assembly consists of 1,428 contigs and is estimated to span 717 Mb in physical length. This map provides 242 anchored contigs on 10 linkage groups to be served as seed points from which to continue bidirectional chromosome extension for genome sequencing.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The map reported here is the first physical map for <it>Brassica </it>"A" genome based on the High Information Content Fingerprinting (HICF) technique. This physical map will serve as a fundamental genomic resource for accelerating genome sequencing, assembly of BAC sequences, and comparative genomics between <it>Brassica </it>genomes. The current build of the <it>B. rapa </it>physical map is available at the <it>B. rapa </it>Genome Project website for the user community.</p