New Concepts in Customer and Territorial Restrictions—The Schwinn and Sealy Doctrines

Recent Supreme Court decisions in United States v. Arnold, Schwinn & Company and United States v. Sealy, Incorporated have raised new questions concerning the legality of customer and territorial restrictions imposed on dealers, distributors, franchisees, and licensees by manufacturers. In this article the author analyzes these cases and concludes that attacks on customer and territorial restrictions will be more effective in the future and, to avoid government prosecution and treble damage actions by private litigants, businessmen and lawyers should be cautious in the use of such restraints

Eleutherodactylus thorectes

Number of Pages: 2Integrative BiologyGeological Science

The psychosocial consequences of the 1992-5 war in Bosnia & Herzegovina

a) The research carried out: eight different samples of citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina were assessed in 1998 and 1999, two to four years after the end of the 1992-5 war, covering a wide range of variables including traumatic and stressful experiences and various measures of psychosocial adaptation including PTSD. b) Main results and conclusion: the results were published in nine papers which are described in this Context Statement, and which are also included as Appendices. Taken together, the specific (and sometimes tragic) features of the conflict in B&H, and some strengths of the research design, enabled the papers to make a significant contribution to three key psychological themes. The first theme was PTSD concept and measurement. The psychometric performance of measures of PTSD in B&H were found to be similar to other published results, suggesting that the construct is as valid for the B&H population as for the comparison populations on which the instrument was developed. The case is also made for dropping Criterion A from the DSM PTSD diagnosis altogether, on the grounds of overwhelming practical and conceptual problems with assessing it using populations with multiple stressors. The second theme was epidemiology and aetiology of PTSD and other symptom groups. Quite apart from PTSD, the war had a very significant impact on general mental health across the population. Current PTSD prevalences in the non-treatment samples ranged from 11% amongst returned refugees to 36% amongst internally displaced persons (IDPs) in camps, which are in line with the literature. Beyond PTSD, impact was concentrated in particularly high levels of somatisation, paranoid ideation, and aggression. PTSD prevalences amongst returned refugees are clearly lower than those of their peers who stayed in host countries, and much lower than all known reports in refugee samples abroad. Analysis of persons in treatment suggests that those who seek treatment for PTSD (as opposed to other medical problems) do have high levels of PTSD symptoms specifically, but not necessarily because they experienced a larger number of traumatic events. The third theme looked beyond psychopathology. Findings suggest that the concept of post-traumatic growth can be validly extended to this population, but levels were considerably lower than reported in most other studies on other kinds of traumatic event. Finally PTSD and the PTSD diagnosis are discussed in a broader social context and it is concluded that while the war had many different kinds of consequences beyond the purely clinical, this should not divert attention from the fact that individual, clinically-relevant suffering was prevalent in the population at levels warranting urgent attention from public health care

An LFT/SDP approach to the uncertainty analysis for state

A state estimator is an algorithm that computes the current state of a time-varying system from on-line measurements. Physical quantities such as measurements and parameters are characterised by uncertainty. Understanding how uncertainty affects the accuracy of state estimates is therefore a pre-requisite to the application of such techniques to real systems. In this paper we develop a method of uncertainty analysis based on linear fractional transformations (LFT) and obtain ellipsoid-of-confidence bounds by recasting the LFT problem into a semidefinite programming problem (SDP). The ideas are illustrated by applying them to a simple water distribution network

Derivation of near-optimal pump schedules for water distribution by simulated annealing

The scheduling of pumps for clean water distribution is a partially discrete non-linear problem with many variables. The scheduling method described in this paper typically produces costs within 1% of a linear program-based solution, and can incorporate realistic non-linear costs that may be hard to incorporate in linear programming formulations. These costs include pump switching and maximum demand charges. A simplified model is derived from a standard hydraulic simulator. An initial schedule is produced by a descent method. Two-stage simulated annealing then produces solutions in a few minutes. Iterative recalibration ensures that the solution agrees closely with the results from a full hydraulic simulation

Eleutherodactylus amadeus

Number of Pages: 2Integrative BiologyGeological Science

Calibration and comparison of chlorine decay models for a test water distribution system

This paper investigates the kinetics of monochloramine as disinfectant in a 1.3 km water pipe. A novel procedure for the correction of chlorine meter errors is introduced and applied. Parameter estimation using nonlinear optimisation procedures is used to identify decay coefficients for monochloramine models with a single coefficient or two coefficients as used in EPANET. Important difficulties in fitting these parameters which come about because of the model structure are highlighted. Finally, results of decay coefficients are presented and investigated for flow, inlet chlorine concentration and temperature dependence

Excited state spectra at the superfluid-insulator transition out of paired condensates

We describe gapped single-particle and collective excitations across a superfluid to insulator quantum phase transition of particles (bosons or fermions) in a periodic potential, with an even number of particles per unit cell. We demonstrate that the dynamics is controlled by a quantum impurity problem of a localized particle interacting with the bulk critical modes. Critical exponents are determined by a renormalization group analysis. We discuss applications to spin oscillations of ultracold atoms in optical lattices, and to the electronic phases in the cuprate and related compounds.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure; fixed referenc