The uninvited guest: patents on Wall Street

For at least the past twenty-five years, financial services industries have been creating innovative products and services without the help of patents. The 1998 State Street Bank case changed all this, making patents freely available in these industries. Will patents help or hurt financial services innovation in the long run? This article sheds some light on this issue. ; Before the advent of patents, several “appropriability” mechanisms protected financial services innovation: “first mover” advantages, complementary or “cospecific” assets, and trade secrecy. Evidence suggests that, in the immediate post-patent era, financial firms’ first order of business was to protect these traditional appropriability practices. This attitude explains the early push to secure a “prior use rights” defense to protect established firms against patent claims by upstart outsiders. From a historical perspective, this reaction to the “patent threat” tracks that of other industries: in particular, nineteenth-century railroads and the software industry of the 1980s. ; In the end, the author argues, patents are not likely to cause any real and lasting problems. Although patents may increase the costs of interchanging innovative ideas, they may bring some unintended benefits as well—by fostering spin-offs and facilitating entry by start-ups, for example. Like random shocks in the natural world, the new patent regime provides a shakeup that could bring some good but unpredictable consequences.Patents ; Financial services industry

Vision-based toddler tracking at home

This paper presents a vision-based toddler tracking system for detecting risk factors of a toddler's fall within the home environment. The risk factors have environmental and behavioral aspects and the research in this paper focuses on the behavioral aspects. Apart from common image processing tasks such as background subtraction, the vision-based toddler tracking involves human classification, acquisition of motion and position information, and handling of regional merges and splits. The human classification is based on dynamic motion vectors of the human body. The center of mass of each contour is detected and connected with the closest center of mass in the next frame to obtain position, speed, and directional information. This tracking system is further enhanced by dealing with regional merges and splits due to multiple object occlusions. In order to identify the merges and splits, two directional detections of closest region centers are conducted between every two successive frames. Merges and splits of a single object due to errors in the background subtraction are also handled. The tracking algorithms have been developed, implemented and tested

The MetaInvert soil invertebrate genome resource provides insights into below-ground biodiversity and evolution

Soil invertebrates are among the least understood metazoans on Earth. Thus far, the lack of taxonomically broad and dense genomic resources has made it hard to thoroughly investigate their evolution and ecology. With MetaInvert we provide draft genome assemblies for 232 soil invertebrate species, representing 14 common groups and 94 families. We show that this data substantially extends the taxonomic scope of DNA- or RNA-based taxonomic identification. Moreover, we confirm that theories of genome evolution cannot be generalised across evolutionarily distinct invertebrate groups. The soil invertebrate genomes presented here will support the management of soil biodiversity through molecular monitoring of community composition and function, and the discovery of evolutionary adaptations to the challenges of soil conditions.The MetaInvert database provides draft genome assemblies for 232 soil invertebrate species, representing 14 common groups and 94 families, that will aid in the discovery and management of soil biodiversity

After the Trolls: Patent Litigation as Ex Post Market-Making

Patent policy has been dominated lately by efforts to reduce rent-seeking patent troll litigation. As recent reforms begin to take effect, it is timely to consider the more constructive aspects of patent litigation. This Article contends that the lag between product development and patent litigation, which pushes the problem of patent valuation into the ex post (after product development) period, serves just such a positive function. Re-search, development, and product roll-out can all take place first. Then, at a later stage, patent litigation sorts out the relative merits and contributions of the various inventors and competitors who contributed to the new product or technology. In the time between early commercialization and litigation, a good deal of helpful information comes to light about the product and its market. This makes valuation more tractable, especially as compared with the early (ex ante) development period, when uncertainty is high. Litigation also serves as a structured process that promotes party settlement, adding another dimension to its potentially positive role

A Note on Longitudinally Matching Current Population Survey (CPS) Respondents

In this paper, we propose an approach for evaluating the trade-offs inherent in different approaches used to match Current Population Survey (CPS) respondents across various CPS surveys. Because there is some measurement error in both the variables used to identify individuals over time and in the characteristics of individuals at any point in time, any procedure used to match CPS respondents has the possibility of both generating incorrect matches and failing to generate potentially valid matches. We propose using the information contained in the variable on whether an individual lived in the same house on March 1 of the previous year as a way to gauge these trade-offs. We find that as measured by reported residence one year ago, increasing the fraction of 'invalid' merges that are rejected usually comes at a cost of decreasing the fraction of 'valid' merges that are retained. However, there are clearly some approaches that are superior to others in the sense that they result in both a higher fraction of 'invalid' merges being rejected and a higher fraction of 'valid' merges being retained. The programs to implement CPS matching across years in this paper are available .

136— Predation on Microbivalves by Juvenile Naticid Gastropods on San Salvador Island, The Bahamas

Predator-prey interactions, where snails eat clams, evolutionarily has been a key interaction within marine molluscan communities. There is evidence of molluscan extinctions in the fossil record that are marked by changes in predation ratios. In this study, we will investigate predation of microbivalves by juvenile naticid gastropods in a shallow marine setting on San Salvador Island in the Bahamas. We propose to test predation density within different environments (facies) of a lagoonal setting. Significantly different ratios between these facies in one time period can indicate that predator-prey interactions can change over time from one environment to another. It is more efficient to test this with juvenile microbivalves, due to a greater abundance and less bias in preservation in microfauna than macrofauna. Our null hypothesis is that there will be no significant variation in predation densities between the different facies. When comparing our data to other time periods, we could determine the presence of a molluscan extinction event