Prolific inventors: who are they and where do they locate? Evidence from a five countries US patenting data se

The prolific (serial) inventors set up the core of the paper. Prolific inventors tend to have a high productivity in terms of inventions (patents) having in general more economic value. The capacity to produce a lot of inventions (patents) is termed “prolificness”. We want to deepen our knowledge about the size of their population, some of their main characteristics, the factors that explain the number patents applied. We exploit a rich data set built onto information available released by the US Patent and Trade Mark Office (USPTO) for the five more important countries as far as technological activities are concerned: Great-Britain, France, USA, Germany, Japan over a long time period (1975-2002). We give insights upon the size of the population of prolific inventors and provide new information about some of their characteristics. We carry out an empirical study in order to explain the prolific inventor patents distribution. We suggest models for estimating the effects of the main variable explaining their productivity. Binomial regressions explaining the inventor productivity after controlling for patent duration and time concentration (among others factors) show that interfirm and international mobility and technological variety (at the inventor level) affects positively the inventor productivity. But there is simultaneity. The overall results suggest that the same factors impact positively productivity with no difference across countries (with exceptions).

"Interregional mobility, productivity and the value of patents for prolific inventors in France, Germany and the U.K"

Regional creative resources include inventors. Policies conducive to inventors’ productivity or attracting productive inventors promote regional development. We build on prior work on inventor mobility and productivity, analyzing German, French and British patents filed in the US by 7,500 “prolific” inventors (fifteen or more inventions). We measure inventor mobility across regions, companies and technologies. We analyze the relationships among mobility, productivity and value. We find geographic mobility increases inventor productivity in the UK and France but not in Germany and geographic mobility is not related to the value of inventions except in Germany where it has a negative effect.Patents, inventor mobility, prolific inventors

Towards a Semantic-based Approach for Modeling Regulatory Documents in Building Industry

Regulations in the Building Industry are becoming increasingly complex and involve more than one technical area. They cover products, components and project implementation. They also play an important role to ensure the quality of a building, and to minimize its environmental impact. In this paper, we are particularly interested in the modeling of the regulatory constraints derived from the Technical Guides issued by CSTB and used to validate Technical Assessments. We first describe our approach for modeling regulatory constraints in the SBVR language, and formalizing them in the SPARQL language. Second, we describe how we model the processes of compliance checking described in the CSTB Technical Guides. Third, we show how we implement these processes to assist industrials in drafting Technical Documents in order to acquire a Technical Assessment; a compliance report is automatically generated to explain the compliance or noncompliance of this Technical Documents

Towards a Semantic-based Approach for Modeling Regulatory Documents in Building Industry

International audienceRegulations in the Building Industry are becoming increasingly complex and involve more than one technical area. They cover products, components and project implementation. They also play an important role to ensure the quality of a building, and to minimize its environmental impact. In this paper, we are particularly interested in the modeling of the regulatory constraints derived from the Technical Guides issued by CSTB and used to validate Technical Assessments. We first describe our approach for modeling regulatory constraints in the SBVR language, and formalizing them in the SPARQL language. Second, we describe how we model the processes of compliance checking described in the CSTB Technical Guides. Third, we show how we implement these processes to assist industrials in drafting Technical Documents in order to acquire a Technical Assessment; a compliance report is automatically generated to explain the compliance or noncompliance of this Technical Documents

An Ontology for Modelling and Supporting the Process of Authoring Technical Assessments

International audienceIn this paper, we present a semantic web approach for modelling the process of creating new technical and regulatory documents related to the Building sector. This industry, among other industries, is currently experiencing a phenomenal growth in its technical and regulatory texts. Therefore, it is urgent and crucial to improve the process of creating regulations by automating it as much as possible. We focus on the creation of particular technical documents issued by the French Scientific and Technical Centre for Building (CSTB), called Technical Assessments, and we propose services based on Semantic Web models and techniques for modelling the process of their creation

Modélisation de documents réglementaires dans le domaine du bâtiment

International audienceThis paper gives an overview of a formal semantics-based approach to support the process of modeling new regulations. We focus on technical advices based on technical guides issued by the French Scientific and Technical Centre for Building (CSTB) capturing both regulations and expert knowledge of CSTB experts on how using regulations when producing a technical advice. The knowledge contained in guides is represented into SBVR rules, based on a controlled vocabulary derived from an OWL domain ontology and these rules are implemented into SPARQL queries. The know-how knowledge of CSTB experts is viewed as workflows of SPARQL queries and declaratively represented into RDF annotations. These workflows of queries are executed to assist the expert when producing technical advices by automating the compliance checking of technical documents to regulations

Noncommutative Black-Body Radiation: Implications On Cosmic Microwave Background

Including loop corrections, black-body radiation in noncommutative space is anisotropic. A direct implication of possible space noncommutativity on the Cosmic Microwave Background map is argued.Comment: 11 pages, no figs., LaTeX, accepted for Europhys. Let

Mitochondrionopathy Phenotype in Doxorubicin-Treated Wistar Rats Depends on Treatment Protocol and Is Cardiac-Specific

Although doxorubicin (DOX) is a very effective antineoplastic agent, its clinical use is limited by a dose-dependent, persistent and cumulative cardiotoxicity, whose mechanism remains to be elucidated. Previous works in animal models have failed to use a multi-organ approach to demonstrate that DOX-associated toxicity is selective to the cardiac tissue. In this context, the present work aims to investigate in vivo DOX cardiac, hepatic and renal toxicity in the same animal model, with special relevance on alterations of mitochondrial bioenergetics. To this end, male Wistar rats were sub-chronically (7 wks, 2 mg/Kg) or acutely (20 mg/Kg) treated with DOX and sacrificed one week or 24 hours after the last injection, respectively. Alterations of mitochondrial bioenergetics showed treatment-dependent differences between tissues. No alterations were observed for cardiac mitochondria in the acute model but decreased ADP-stimulated respiration was detected in the sub-chronic treatment. In the acute treatment model, ADP-stimulated respiration was increased in liver and decreased in kidney mitochondria. Aconitase activity, a marker of oxidative stress, was decreased in renal mitochondria in the acute and in heart in the sub-chronic model. Interestingly, alterations of cardiac mitochondrial bioenergetics co-existed with an absence of echocardiograph, histopathological or ultra-structural alterations. Besides, no plasma markers of cardiac injury were found in any of the time points studied. The results confirm that alterations of mitochondrial function, which are more evident in the heart, are an early marker of DOX-induced toxicity, existing even in the absence of cardiac functional alterations

Microglial Interactions with Synapses Are Modulated by Visual Experience

Microglia, the brain's immune cells, show unique interactions with nearby synaptic elements under non-pathological conditions that are sensitive to changes in sensory experience

Heterodimerization of serotonin receptors 5-HT1A and 5-HT7 differentially regulates receptor signalling and trafficking

Serotonin receptors 5-HT1A and 5-HT7 are highly coexpressed in brain regions implicated in depression. However, their functional interaction has not been established. In the present study we show that 5-HT1A and 5-HT7 receptors form heterodimers both in vitro and in vivo. Foerster resonance energy transfer-based assays revealed that, in addition to heterodimers, homodimers composed either of 5-HT1A or 5-HT7 receptors together with monomers coexist in cells. The highest affinity for complex formation was obtained for the 5-HT7–5-HT7 homodimers, followed by the 5-HT7–5-HT1A heterodimers and 5-HT1A–5-HT1A homodimers. Functionally, heterodimerization decreases 5-HT1A-receptor-mediated activation of Gi protein without affecting 5-HT7-receptor-mediated signalling. Moreover, heterodimerization markedly decreases the ability of the 5-HT1A receptor to activate G-protein-gated inwardly rectifying potassium channels in a heterologous system. The inhibitory effect on such channels was also preserved in hippocampal neurons, demonstrating a physiological relevance of heteromerization in vivo. In addition, heterodimerization is crucially involved in initiation of the serotonin-mediated 5-HT1A receptor internalization and also enhances the ability of the 5-HT1A receptor to activate the mitogen-activated protein kinases. Finally, we found that production of 5-HT7 receptors in the hippocampus continuously decreases during postnatal development, indicating that the relative concentration of 5-HT1A–5-HT7 heterodimers and, consequently, their functional importance undergoes pronounced developmental changes