Prospects for Progress: The TRIPS Agreement and Developing Countries After the DOHA Conference

Intellectual property rights (IPRs) have long been the subject of contentious debate between developed and developing countries. While providing an incentive to invest in and develop new technologies, IPRs also vastly increase the cost of these new technologies to developing countries. Despite disagreement on the proper role for IPRs in the global economy, IPRs became a major element in the 1994 Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which established the World Trade Organization (WTO). Effective on January 1, 1995, the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Agreement (TRIPS Agreement) formally linked compliance with minimum protection standards with international trade. This linkage directly affects technology flows to, and the course of development in, developing countries. While the Fourth Ministerial Conference at Doha, Qatar on November 9-13, 2001 integrated the concerns of developing countries more fully than previous Ministerial Conferences, the issue of technology acquisition and development in light of the increasing technology gap between developed and developing countries was overlooked

What Law Schools Should Leave Behind

Legal education is at a crossroads, again. Perhaps the more apt transportation metaphor is that legal education is stuck in a roundabout. Crossroads require introspection and decision-making. You can’t move past a crossroad without making an affirmative choice. Roundabouts provide the illusion of movement while keeping you in one place. But don’t be fooled; staying in the roundabout is still a choice. 2020 disrupted this lull. Amid a polarizing political climate, state-sanctioned violence, and the coronavirus pandemic, students said enough.They were right: Enough. Staying in the roundabout right now, choosing the status quo, might be expedient; but it’s also the wrong answer. After thirty-some-odd years of law review articles and conferences filled with “tipping-points,” “crossroads,” and “crises,” it’s time to make significant changes. This essay argues that law schools must reimagine the pivotal 1L year. In contrast to the status quo, a reimagined 1L year would meet our students where they are now, not where they were (and who they were) one hundred years ago. To start this project, to move toward action-oriented change that actually builds an inclusive and equitable law school for all constituents, the first question isn’t what are we willing to add?—ABA requirements, trainings, book groups, committees, courses—but, what are we willing to give up? This Essay argues that to prepare future lawyers to build a more equitable, inclusive, and just profession, law schools must first relinquish three things: the faculty caste system and the distinction between doctrine and skills that it reflects; high-stakes, summative exams; and the curve

Maternal BMI as a predictor of methylation of obesity-related genes in saliva samples from preschool-age Hispanic children at-risk for obesity.

BackgroundThe study of epigenetic processes and mechanisms present a dynamic approach to assess complex individual variation in obesity susceptibility. However, few studies have examined epigenetic patterns in preschool-age children at-risk for obesity despite the relevance of this developmental stage to trajectories of weight gain. We hypothesized that salivary DNA methylation patterns of key obesogenic genes in Hispanic children would 1) correlate with maternal BMI and 2) allow for identification of pathways associated with children at-risk for obesity.ResultsGenome-wide DNA methylation was conducted on 92 saliva samples collected from Hispanic preschool children using the Infinium Illumina HumanMethylation 450 K BeadChip (Illumina, San Diego, CA, USA), which interrogates >484,000 CpG sites associated with ~24,000 genes. The analysis was limited to 936 genes that have been associated with obesity in a prior GWAS Study. Child DNA methylation at 17 CpG sites was found to be significantly associated with maternal BMI, with increased methylation at 12 CpG sites and decreased methylation at 5 CpG sites. Pathway analysis revealed methylation at these sites related to homocysteine and methionine degradation as well as cysteine biosynthesis and circadian rhythm. Furthermore, eight of the 17 CpG sites reside in genes (FSTL1, SORCS2, NRF1, DLC1, PPARGC1B, CHN2, NXPH1) that have prior known associations with obesity, diabetes, and the insulin pathway.ConclusionsOur study confirms that saliva is a practical human tissue to obtain in community settings and in pediatric populations. These salivary findings indicate potential epigenetic differences in Hispanic preschool children at risk for pediatric obesity. Identifying early biomarkers and understanding pathways that are epigenetically regulated during this critical stage of child development may present an opportunity for prevention or early intervention for addressing childhood obesity.Trial registrationThe clinical trial protocol is available at ClinicalTrials.gov ( NCT01316653 ). Registered 3 March 2011

The LCO/Palomar 10,000 km/sec Cluster Survey. I. Properties of the Tully-Fisher Relation

The first results from a Tully-Fisher (TF) survey of cluster galaxies are presented. The galaxies are drawn from fifteen Abell clusters that lie in the redshift range 9000-12,000 km/sec and are distributed uniformly around the celestial sky. The data set consists of R-band CCD photometry and long- slit H-alpha spectroscopy. The rotation curves (RCs) are characterized by a turnover radius (r_t) and an asymptotic velocity v_a, while the surface brightness profiles are characterized in terms of an effective exponential surface brightness I_e and a scale length r_e. The TF scatter is minimized when the rotation velocity is measured at 2.0 +/- 0.2 r_e; a significantly larger scatter results when the rotation velocity is measured at > 3 or < 1.5 scale lengths. This effect demonstrates that RCs do not have a universal form, as has been suggested by Persic, Salucci, and Stel. In contrast to previous studies, a modest but statistically significant surface-brightness dependence of the TF relation is found, log v = const + 0.28*log L + 0.14*log I_e. This indicates a stronger parallel between the TF relation and the FP relations of elliptical galaxies than has previously been recognized. Future papers in this series will consider the implications of this cluster sample for deviations from Hubble flow on 100-200 Mpc scales.Comment: 35 pages, 8 figures, uses aaspp4.sty. Submitted to ApJ. Also available at http://astro.stanford.edu/jeff

Nilpotent normal form for divergence-free vector fields and volume-preserving maps

We study the normal forms for incompressible flows and maps in the neighborhood of an equilibrium or fixed point with a triple eigenvalue. We prove that when a divergence free vector field in $\mathbb{R}^3$ has nilpotent linearization with maximal Jordan block then, to arbitrary degree, coordinates can be chosen so that the nonlinear terms occur as a single function of two variables in the third component. The analogue for volume-preserving diffeomorphisms gives an optimal normal form in which the truncation of the normal form at any degree gives an exactly volume-preserving map whose inverse is also polynomial inverse with the same degree.Comment: laTeX, 20 pages, 1 figur

Angular separations of the lensed QSO images

We have analyzed the observed image separations of the gravitationally lensed images of QSOs for a possible correlation with the source redshift. Contrary to the previously noted anti-correlation based on a smaller data set, no correlation is found for the currently available data. We have calculated the average image separations of the lensed QSOs as a function of source redshifts, for isothermal spheres with cores in a flat universe, taking into account the amplification bias caused by lensing. The shape of the distribution of average image separation as a function of redshift is very robust and is insensitive to most model parameters. Observations are found to be roughly consistent with the theoretical results for models which assume the lens distribution to be (i) Schechter luminosity function which, however, can not produce images with large separation and (ii) the mass condensations in a cold dark matter universe, as given by the Press-Schechter theory if an upper limit of 1-7$\times 10^{13}$ M$\odot$ is assumed on the mass of the condensations.Comment: 20 pages, 7 postscript figures, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa