Biotechnology and the Law: A Consideration of Intellectual Property Rights and Related Social Issues

[Excerpt] “Recent advances in biotechnology are expected by many to improve crop yield, reduce reliance on agricultural inputs like pesticides and herbicides, alleviate world hunger, improve the safety and effectiveness of pharmaceuticals, assist in the discovery of genes that trigger diseases like cancer, and make more efficient our legal institutions through DNA testing. Clearly, innovations in biotechnology are a powerful force for social change, and they pose unique challenges and opportunities for legal scholars and institutions. This section of the Pierce Law Review focuses on the interface between law and technology by examining how innovations in biotechnology accelerate debates about social justice (on a global scale), the role of science, and the patenting of intellectual property. Since biotechnology, and the actors involved in the debates over intellectual property rights, are involved in a form of “high drama” that plays itself out in the social world, it is necessary to understand that technology does not exist in a vacuum. All technologies generate social change and affect, in varying degrees individuals, groups, institutions, etc. For example, the introduction of the pen changed how information is recorded. A pen is portable, relatively inexpensive and creates semi-permanent markings. The pen, however, represented a shift away from orality, created a note-taking culture and lessened our reliance on short-term memory. The pen also helped consolidate the power of bureaucracies where a reliance on efficiency and order was paramount. Legal documents are generally signed in ink. The pen plays a prominent role in our society and can be found in almost all institutions, including those where information/communication technology dominate. If these transformations can occur when a relatively simple technology is introduced, what can be said about the introduction of innovations arising from the science of biotechnology

Risk Assessment and Sustainable Development: Towards a Concept of Sustainable Risk

Dr. Mehta examines two dominant approaches for managing health and environmental risks and suggests that they would better serve if integrated

Public Perceptions of Food Safety: Assessing the Risks Posed by Genetic Modification, Irradiation, Pesticides, Microbiological Contamination and High Fat/High Calorie Foods

[Excerpt] In general, people in the developed world have access to a safe and varied supply of food. Instead of systemic hunger, many developed countries have problems with obesity and other kinds of eating disorders among their citizenry. It is within this context that some find public concerns about the safety of food both paradoxical and misplaced. Nevertheless, understanding how people perceive the risk associated with food is an important exercise in demonstrating accountability and in setting priorities for regulation. With the advent of technologies for producing genetically modified foods, and the development of fat blockers like Olestra, the public is increasingly being asked to judge the social acceptability of various kinds of food modifications. In addition to interpreting the risks and benefits associated with these newer innovations, the public is also balancing the risks and benefits of more familiar food interventions. Not only must consumers of food assess the merits of genetic modification and food irradiation, they still must consider exposure to pesticide residues and microbiological contaminants like Salmonella, Listeria, Escherichia coli, and Campylobacter. Additionally, with high rates of cardiovascular disease and elevated concerns about developing diseases like diabetes, many people seriously consider the fat and sugar content of the foods they consume. This exploratory study examines how the public perceives food risks by employing a ranking exercise, a scale for assessing food safety practices, a scale for combining elements from the psychometric paradigm (e.g., voluntary exposure, perceived benefit, and perceived risk) across five potential food hazards, and demographic variables (sex, age, and level of education) most commonly linked to the perception of food risks

Public Perceptions of Genetically Engineered Foods: Playing God or Trusting Science

The author considers whether levels of religiosity or scientism affect public perceptions of genetically engineered foods

Rural buyers' perception about mosquito repellants

Mosquito repellants prevent mosquito bites and prevention of "man-mosquito contact" is a critical factor in transmission and spread of any disease through mosquitoes particularly in rural area. There has been a long standing 'bias' towards rural buyers. The rural markets are considered rigid in the nature but it is not the case in real sense. Marketing to rural buyers is not only a challenge to the marketers but to the manufacturers, communicators, national planners and economists as well. That is why it has been necessary to understand the various aspects of selected rural areas and consumption pattern for such a fast growing market i.e. mosquito repellants and rural buyers’ perception towards such urban products. The present paper aims to find out the factors influencing the purchase decisions of rural buyers for mosquito repellants and to study the perceptions of present and potential rural buyers' of selected mosquito repellant brands.mosquito, repellent, malaria, rural market, buyers

Overcoming Recession through Effective Business Communication Approaches (A Study in Indian Scenario)

No business activity can be completed without effective business communication network. The stage of economic turmoil is the most important time for any organization to regroup its strategy. At this juncture, strong, transparent and constant internal and external communication networks play a vital role. The global meltdown is a blessing in disguise for the organizations to invigorate their business communication network. The present paper aims to study multifarious approaches of Business Communication applied by Indian Organizations to combat the turbulent period of recession in a successful manner.

Implicit Filter Sparsification In Convolutional Neural Networks

We show implicit filter level sparsity manifests in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) which employ Batch Normalization and ReLU activation, and are trained with adaptive gradient descent techniques and L2 regularization or weight decay. Through an extensive empirical study (Mehta et al., 2019) we hypothesize the mechanism behind the sparsification process, and find surprising links to certain filter sparsification heuristics proposed in literature. Emergence of, and the subsequent pruning of selective features is observed to be one of the contributing mechanisms, leading to feature sparsity at par or better than certain explicit sparsification / pruning approaches. In this workshop article we summarize our findings, and point out corollaries of selective-featurepenalization which could also be employed as heuristics for filter prunin

Matrices coupled in a chain. I. Eigenvalue correlations

The general correlation function for the eigenvalues of $p$ complex hermitian matrices coupled in a chain is given as a single determinant. For this we use a slight generalization of a theorem of Dyson.Comment: ftex eynmeh.tex, 2 files, 8 pages Submitted to: J. Phys.

A Tight Excess Risk Bound via a Unified PAC-Bayesian-Rademacher-Shtarkov-MDL Complexity

We present a novel notion of complexity that interpolates between and generalizes some classic existing complexity notions in learning theory: for estimators like empirical risk minimization (ERM) with arbitrary bounded losses, it is upper bounded in terms of data-independent Rademacher complexity; for generalized Bayesian estimators, it is upper bounded by the data-dependent information complexity (also known as stochastic or PAC-Bayesian, $\mathrm{KL}(\text{posterior} \operatorname{\|} \text{prior})$ complexity. For (penalized) ERM, the new complexity reduces to (generalized) normalized maximum likelihood (NML) complexity, i.e. a minimax log-loss individual-sequence regret. Our first main result bounds excess risk in terms of the new complexity. Our second main result links the new complexity via Rademacher complexity to $L_2(P)$ entropy, thereby generalizing earlier results of Opper, Haussler, Lugosi, and Cesa-Bianchi who did the log-loss case with $L_\infty$. Together, these results recover optimal bounds for VC- and large (polynomial entropy) classes, replacing localized Rademacher complexity by a simpler analysis which almost completely separates the two aspects that determine the achievable rates: 'easiness' (Bernstein) conditions and model complexity.Comment: 38 page