Interview with Velma S. Polk

In her July 15, 2013 interview with Martha Manning, Velma Polk describes her two years at Winthrop until 1951. Addressed are rules and regulations, the Blue Line, and dorm life. This interview was conducted for inclusion into the Louise Pettus Archives and Special Collections Oral History Program.https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/oralhistoryprogram/1193/thumbnail.jp

Insurance

This article focuses on recent legislative changes and judicial interpretations in the area of automobile insurance. Amendments to the Financial Responsibility Laws of Florida have, inter alia, lowered the requisite amount of insurance coverage, shifted the primary insurance burden from the automobile lessor to the lessee\u27s insurer, and disallowed joinder of the liability carrier as a party to the litigation. Florida\u27s no-fault statute has undergone its most severe changes to date. The authors note that the amendments are intended to limit victims\u27 rights to recover damages from tortfeasors, the size of awards that victims may recover, and the number of fraudulent claims. Uninsured motorist coverage has been limited by the elimination of stacking, but broadened by including underinsured motorists within its provisions. Attention is also given to developments in medical malpractice insurance and the new statutory mandate for readable insurance policies

Poisoning the Next Apple? The America Invents Act and Individual Inventors

The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, the most significant patent law reform effort in two generations, has a dark side: It seems likely to decrease the patenting behavior of small inventors, a category which occupies special significance in American innovation history. In this paper we empirically predict the effects of the major change in the law: a shift in the patent priority rules from the United States’ traditional “first-to-invent” system to the predominant “first-to-file” system. While there has been some theoretical work on this topic, we use the Canadian experience with a similar change as a natural experiment to shed the first empirical light on the question. Our analysis uses a difference-in-difference framework to estimate the impact of the Canadian law change on small inventors. Using data on all patents granted by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and the US Patent and Trademark Office, we find a significant drop in the fraction of patents granted to small inventors in Canada coincident with the implementation of first-to-file. We also find no measurable changes in patent quality and perform several additional analyses to rule out alternative explanations. While the net welfare impact that can be expected from a shift to first-to-file is unclear, our results do reveal that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the March 2013 implementation of a first-to-file rule in the U.S. is likely to result in reduced patenting behavior by individual inventors

Poisoning the Next Apple? The America Invents Act and Individual Inventors

The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, the most significant patent law reform effort in two generations, has a dark side: It seems likely to decrease the patenting behavior of small inventors, a category which occupies special significance in American innovation history. In this paper we empirically predict the effects of the major change in the law: a shift in the patent priority rules from the United States’ traditional “first-to-invent” system to the predominant “first-to-file” system. While there has been some theoretical work on this topic, we use the Canadian experience with a similar change as a natural experiment to shed the first empirical light on the question. Our analysis uses a difference-in-difference framework to estimate the impact of the Canadian law change on small inventors. Using data on all patents granted by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and the US Patent and Trademark Office, we find a significant drop in the fraction of patents granted to small inventors in Canada coincident with the implementation of first-to-file. We also find no measurable changes in patent quality and perform several additional analyses to rule out alternative explanations. While the net welfare impact that can be expected from a shift to first-to-file is unclear, our results do reveal that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the March 2013 implementation of a first-to-file rule in the U.S. is likely to result in reduced patenting behavior by individual inventors

Longitudinal Study of Water Quality in Jennings Creek, Bowling Green, Kentucky: Urbanization Impacts on Karst Groundwater

Karst groundwater systems, which occur in areas where caves, sinkholes, and underground rivers dominate the landscape, are vulnerable to pollution from surface contaminants. In urban areas, like Bowling Green, Kentucky, which is home to extensive caves and groundwater supplies, the immediate transport of heavy metals, organic waste, chemicals, and other pollutants from surface activities into groundwater poses a serious threat. This research project was done to examine the water quality of urban karst sites in Bowling Green, Kentucky at Jennings Creek, which is a local river primarily fed from springs; the water quality of Jennings Creek was never tested before this project, although it is an input to the Barren River, the area’s primary drinking water source. Weekly water samples were taken at five sites for six weeks over the summer. Each sample site was selected based on its proximity downstream from a primary spring input with a known drainage area and land use. The samples were tested each week for forty-three different parameters related to water quality, which included alkalinity, total organic carbon (TOC), cations, anions, metal concentrations, dissolved oxygen, total chlorine, and E. coli, among others. The results of the data collected indicate different pollutant concentrations based on land use in the area surrounding the spring inputs, with major detrimental changes occurring at the largest spring inputs. The sites in mixed land use areas (agricultural and residential) had more nitrates and phosphate, while urban areas suffered from more industrial waste and metal contamination. Overall, nearly every site exceeded the EPA drinking water quality standard for several parameters, including nitrates, E. coli bacteria, and several metals, indicating that more research is needed to address the primary causes of these contaminants and better practices to mitigate their input into the groundwater system

Reliability of quantitative multiparameter maps is high for magnetization transfer and proton density but attenuated for R1 and R2* in healthy young adults

We investigate the reliability of individual differences of four quantities measured by magnetic resonance imaging-based multiparameter mapping (MPM): magnetization transfer saturation (MT), proton density (PD), longitudinal relaxation rate (R1 ), and effective transverse relaxation rate (R2 *). Four MPM datasets, two on each of two consecutive days, were acquired in healthy young adults. On Day 1, no repositioning occurred and on Day 2, participants were repositioned between MPM datasets. Using intraclass correlation effect decomposition (ICED), we assessed the contributions of session-specific, day-specific, and residual sources of measurement error. For whole-brain gray and white matter, all four MPM parameters showed high reproducibility and high reliability, as indexed by the coefficient of variation (CoV) and the intraclass correlation (ICC). However, MT, PD, R1 , and R2 * differed markedly in the extent to which reliability varied across brain regions. MT and PD showed high reliability in almost all regions. In contrast, R1 and R2 * showed low reliability in some regions outside the basal ganglia, such that the sum of the measurement error estimates in our structural equation model was higher than estimates of between-person differences. In addition, in this sample of healthy young adults, the four MPM parameters showed very little variability over four measurements but differed in how well they could assess between-person differences. We conclude that R1 and R2 * might carry only limited person-specific information in some regions of the brain in healthy young adults, and, by implication, might be of restricted utility for studying associations to between-person differences in behavior in those regions