Extraterritorial Intellectual Property Enforcement in the European Union

This paper was prepared for the 2011 ABILA International Law Weekend – West volume of the Southwestern Journal of International Law. It addresses extraterritorial enforcement of intellectual property rights in the European Union. The maximum length of the paper was set by the Journal. The problems associated with extraterritorial enforcement of intellectual property rights in the European Union (the “EU”) may be divided into three categories: enforcement of unitary EU-wide rights, enforcement of multiple national rights, and enforcement of rights based on one national law with extraterritorial effects on activities in other countries. Although these are three distinct categories of problems, they are interconnected; problems in one category may exacerbate problems in another category, and solutions developed in one category may contribute to the resolution of problems in another category. This article briefly reviews the three categories of problems and demonstrates the interrelatedness of solutions that have been developed or will have to be developed to address the problems

Interferometry meets the third and fourth dimensions in galaxies

Radio astronomy began with one array (Jansky's) and one paraboloid of revolution (Reber's) as collecting areas and has now reached the point where a large number of facilities are arrays of paraboloids, each of which would have looked enormous to Reber in 1932. In the process, interferometry has contributed to the counting of radio sources, establishing superluminal velocities in AGN jets, mapping of sources from the bipolar cow shape on up to full grey-scale and colored images, determining spectral energy distributions requiring non-thermal emission processes, and much else. The process has not been free of competition and controversy, at least partly because it is just a little difficult to understand how earth-rotation, aperture-synthesis interferometry works. Some very important results, for instance the mapping of HI in the Milky Way to reveal spiral arms, warping, and flaring, actually came from single moderate-sized paraboloids. The entry of China into the radio astronomy community has given large (40-110 meter) paraboloids a new lease on life.Comment: Virginia Trimble 2014, in IAU Symp. 309 "Galaxy in 3D across the Universe", B.L. Ziegler, F. Combes, H. Dannerbauer, M. Verdugo, Eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni. Press) in press NOTE - Should be "Galaxies" not "Galaxy

Creating and Sustaining a Maintenance Strategy: A Practical Guide

Manufacturing companies should create maintenance strategy and link it to the manufacturing and business goals but recent research in the North East of England suggested that few companies do this. It is unclear why this inertia existed but it could have been due to the complexity and variety of the advice on offer in relation to the formulation and implementation of strategy. The purpose of this paper was to provide a simple generic guide or roadmap for practitioners to follow. It began by highlighting the importance and benefits of a maintenance strategy and then considered literature appropriate to the topic. A key point arising from this review was that the three elements; process, content, context, need to be considered over the lifecycle of a strategy. Moreover, most strategic models converged to simple sequential models affording a generic functional process to be developed. This involved the integration of the “corporate hard systems” model and the “Plan, do, check, act, cycle“, forming a suitable maintenance strategy process. Accordingly, further guidance on policy assured the right “content”. The paper concluded with a short questionnaire used to audit the effect of “contextual factors” on maintenance strategy. The result was a comprehensive guide on how to formulate and implement maintenance strategy

Measuring the alignment of Maintenance and Manufacturing Strategies – The development of a new model and diagnostic tool

Purpose - To outline the development of a new conceptual model and diagnostic tool which assesses the strategic processes and links involved between maintenance and manufacturing strategies and the effect on manufacturing performance. Methodology - The new model was developed in two stages. Firstly a conceptual framework was produced and then a holistic diagram. From this theoretical model a diagnostic tool was generated. This tool was then verified and tested during an empirical research phase which produced four extensive and detailed case studies. A brief overview of one of the case studies is provided in this article. Findings - It was found that the conceptual model provided an accurate representation of the strategic processes and links which should exist in a manufacturing plant. Moreover the diagnostic tool proved to be a valid and reliable test instrument to measure and display this information. Practical implications - The diagnostic tool provides a snapshot of the status of manufacturing and maintenance strategies which then can be used to benchmark improvements over time. If required the individual questions from the questionnaire can be “reverse engineered” to provide detailed information for senior managers to carry out corrective action. Originality/value – This theoretical and empirical research closes a gap in the literature relating to the linkage between maintenance and manufacturing strategies. It does so by providing a unique and holistic model showing the strategic processes and links which should exist within a manufacturing plant. Moreover the diagnostic tool produced from the model is a convenient audit facility which enables companies to move toward functional coherence

"Almost-stable" matchings in the Hospitals / Residents problem with Couples

The Hospitals / Residents problem with Couples (hrc) models the allocation of intending junior doctors to hospitals where couples are allowed to submit joint preference lists over pairs of (typically geographically close) hospitals. It is known that a stable matching need not exist, so we consider min bp hrc, the problem of finding a matching that admits the minimum number of blocking pairs (i.e., is “as stable as possible”). We show that this problem is NP-hard and difficult to approximate even in the highly restricted case that each couple finds only one hospital pair acceptable. However if we further assume that the preference list of each single resident and hospital is of length at most 2, we give a polynomial-time algorithm for this case. We then present the first Integer Programming (IP) and Constraint Programming (CP) models for min bp hrc. Finally, we discuss an empirical evaluation of these models applied to randomly-generated instances of min bp hrc. We find that on average, the CP model is about 1.15 times faster than the IP model, and when presolving is applied to the CP model, it is on average 8.14 times faster. We further observe that the number of blocking pairs admitted by a solution is very small, i.e., usually at most 1, and never more than 2, for the (28,000) instances considered

ictus/curiad/ignis/prog

Poetry by Rhys Trimbl