Defining Fair Use in the Digital Era

The increasing prevalence of technology, and the ease with which the public and companies can reproduce, recombine, and reuse copyrighted works, has rendered the once-confusing fair use doctrine a virtual uncertainty. Given limited congressional guidance, courts have relied heavily on the secondary use’s potential effect on the market for the original work. While this reliance is based on the valid concern of maintaining adequate creative incentives, the enormous growth of licensing markets has resulted in an overemphasis on economic concerns. Recent court decisions indicate that fair use now turns not on the protection of creative incentives, but rather the preservation of a maximum revenue stream for authors. Yet fair use, along with the copyright system, was designed for public, not private, benefit. Excessive concern for private gain will cause a chilling on the development of new technologies. Therefore, the author concludes when the social value of a secondary use is high, and its impact on the market is not only de minimis, but unlikely to diminish an author’s creative aspirations, the secondary use must be permitted for the public good

Detection of Buried Inhomogeneous Elliptic Cylinders by a Memetic Algorithm

The application of a global optimization procedure to the detection of buried inhomogeneities is studied in the present paper. The object inhomogeneities are schematized as multilayer infinite dielectric cylinders with elliptic cross sections. An efficient recursive analytical procedure is used for the forward scattering computation. A functional is constructed in which the field is expressed in series solution of Mathieu functions. Starting by the input scattered data, the iterative minimization of the functional is performed by a new optimization method called memetic algorithm. (c) 2003 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works

Existence, uniqueness and finite element approximation of solution of time-harmonic electromagnetic boundary value problems involving metamaterials

Existence and uniqueness of the solution of time-harmonic electromagnetic boundary value problems is analyzed together with the convergence of Galerkin finite element approximations. Sufficient conditions based on the presence of different types of losses and on the properties of the hermitian symmetric parts of the effective dielectric permittivity and the effective magnetic permeability are provided. Metamaterials such as double-negative, epsilon-negative and mu-negative substances are covered by our analysis since any hypothesis on the positive definiteness of the aforementioned hermitian symmetric parts is avoided on purpose

Sex in the Bible: A Poetic Female Retelling

In my poetic analysis, I tease out the differences between Biblical and modern conceptions of rape. Many of my ‘episodes’ feature rape narratives between a husband and wife or concubine/slave; in the Biblical narrative, these relations were not considered rape, because rape only constituted relationships outside of legal bounds. In this way, I attempt to diversify preexisting stories in the Biblical narrative, making monsters out of praised patriarchs; even God is not safe from becoming the villain. In this way, I paint the patriarchal system in the Bible as a gothic house disguised in tradition and spirituality that women must escape. In stories that originally assumed female perspectives, such as Leah’s and Bathsheba’s, I decided to re-envision their stories—because why should we assume consent when we never hear their thoughts or words

Lillian\u27s Reflection

Going abroad for me has absolutely changed my life but not in any of the ways I had imagined

Response and Associative Learning in Warmup

Improvement in learning successive lists has been found in both serial and paired-associate verbal learning tasks. Both intrasession and intersession effects have been observed, although it is well established that intrasession effects are greater in magnitude. Intrasession improvement in learning successive verbal tasks has been called warmup. Earlier investigators (e.g., Heron, 1929; Irion, 1949; Thune, 1950) favored an explanation of warmup similar to that used in motor skills learning. They viewed warmup as postural and attentive changes taking place within a learning session. These changes were seen as nonassociative and temporary. Warmup was regarded as separate from intersession improvement, usually called learning to learn, the latter being taken as a relatively permanent associative process. The conventional view of warmup seems particularly inappropriate when applied to free recall verbal learning. A number of investigators have failed to find warmup in free recall of words. In a free recall study, Raffetto and Koeppel (1968) verified the fact that warmup does not occur with words, but demonstrated that warmup occurs with trigrams. An associative process, response integration, was suggested to explain the occurrence of warmup in the free recall learning of trigrams. In a subsequent study (Koeppel & Raffetto, 1969) the response integration interpretation was tested in a two-stage analysis of paired-associate learning of word pairs. As predicted, no warmup was found in the response learning stage and a significant warmup effect was observed in the associative learning stage of the task. From these studies it was hypothesized that if either the task or the materials required associative integration, warmup would occur. Three experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis. In Experiment I a paired-associate task and trigrams were used. The paradigm involves two stages of learning (response and associative) and with trigrams both stages would require integration; therefore, a warmup effect was predicted for both stages of learning. Experiment II consisted of a serial learning task with trigrams. Since the associative characteristics of this experiment were identical to those of Experiment I a warmup effect was predicted for both response and associative stages. Experiment III involved serial learning of words. Since words necessitate little integration, no warmup effect was predicted for the response learning stage, although warmup was expected in the associative learning stage. For all three experiments the data clearly support the predictions. Warmup is not a phenomenon that always occurs in verbal learning. That its occurrence can be predicted knox^ing the integrative characteristics of task and materials indicates that the warmup process is associative in nature. It is concluded that postural and attentive wTarmup changes are unimportant in verbal learning and that warmup and learning to learn are probably the same process. An alternative way of categorizing nonspecific transfer, based on the temporal spacing of learning sessions, is suggested

Improving the Perception Students with Learning Disabilities have of Students with Mental Retardation through Peer Tutoring

A quasi-experimental design was used to test two hypotheses : that peer tutoring would alter the perception that students with learning disabilities held of students with mental retardation and that the peer tutoring program would improve the spelling scores of both the tutors and the tutees . Two classes of 17 students with learning disabilities and students with mental retardation served as the participants. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to calculate the significance of the program. The analysis of the results showed a trend towards improvement in perception that the tutors held of students with mental retardation, but because a chi analysis revealed that the tutors and nontutors pre-­ test scores were not equal no conclusions could be made. The peer tutoring program produced significant results in improving the spelling scores of the tutees. There was also a increase in the tutors spelling, but it was not significant

Why Venous Leg Ulcers Have Difficulty Healing: Overview on Pathophysiology, Clinical Consequences, and Treatment

none5sìVenous leg ulcers (VLUs) are one of the most common ulcers of the lower extremity. VLU affects many individuals worldwide, could pose a significant socioeconomic burden to the healthcare system, and has major psychological and physical impacts on the affected individual. VLU often occurs in association with post-thrombotic syndrome, advanced chronic venous disease, varicose veins, and venous hypertension. Several demographic, genetic, and environmental factors could trigger chronic venous disease with venous dilation, incompetent valves, venous reflux, and venous hypertension. Endothelial cell injury and changes in the glycocalyx, venous shear-stress, and adhesion molecules could be initiating events in VLU. Increased endothelial cell permeability and leukocyte infiltration, and increases in inflammatory cytokines, matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs), reactive oxygen and nitrogen species, iron deposition, and tissue metabolites also contribute to the pathogenesis of VLU. Treatment of VLU includes compression therapy and endovenous ablation to occlude the axial reflux. Other interventional approaches such as subfascial endoscopic perforator surgery and iliac venous stent have shown mixed results. With good wound care and compression therapy, VLU usually heals within 6 months. VLU healing involves orchestrated processes including hemostasis, inflammation, proliferation, and remodeling and the contribution of different cells including leukocytes, platelets, fibroblasts, vascular smooth muscle cells, endothelial cells, and keratinocytes as well as the release of various biomolecules including transforming growth factor-β, cytokines, chemokines, MMPs, tissue inhibitors of MMPs (TIMPs), elastase, urokinase plasminogen activator, fibrin, collagen, and albumin. Alterations in any of these physiological wound closure processes could delay VLU healing. Also, these histological and soluble biomarkers can be used for VLU diagnosis and assessment of its progression, responsiveness to healing, and prognosis. If not treated adequately, VLU could progress to non-healed or granulating VLU, causing physical immobility, reduced quality of life, cellulitis, severe infections, osteomyelitis, and neoplastic transformation. Recalcitrant VLU shows prolonged healing time with advanced age, obesity, nutritional deficiencies, colder temperature, preexisting venous disease, deep venous thrombosis, and larger wound area. VLU also has a high, 50-70% recurrence rate, likely due to noncompliance with compression therapy, failure of surgical procedures, incorrect ulcer diagnosis, progression of venous disease, and poorly understood pathophysiology. Understanding the molecular pathways underlying VLU has led to new lines of therapy with significant promise including biologics such as bilayer living skin construct, fibroblast derivatives, and extracellular matrices and non-biologic products such as poly-N-acetyl glucosamine, human placental membranes amnion/chorion allografts, ACT1 peptide inhibitor of connexin 43, sulodexide, growth factors, silver dressings, MMP inhibitors, and modulators of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species, the immune response and tissue metabolites. Preventive measures including compression therapy and venotonics could also reduce the risk of progression to chronic venous insufficiency and VLU in susceptible individuals.openRaffetto, Joseph D; Ligi, Daniela; Maniscalco, Rosanna; Khalil, Raouf A; Mannello, FerdinandoRaffetto, Joseph D; Ligi, Daniela; Maniscalco, Rosanna; Khalil, Raouf A; Mannello, Ferdinand