Modular thermoelectric cell is easily packaged in various arrays

Modular thermoelectric cells are easily packaged in various arrays to form power supplies and have desirable voltage and current output characteristics. The cells employ two pairs of thermoelectric elements, each pair being connected in parallel between two sets of aluminum plates. They can be used as solar energy conversion devices

The Theoretical System of Property Rights in China’s General Principles of Civil Law: Theoretical Controversy in the Drafting Process and Beyond

China\u27s General Principles of Civil Law ( General Principles ) is not just a piece of legislation; it represents a system of legal relations with an underlying theoretical framework. Despite any Chinese characteristics that might be found elsewhere in the General Principles , its theoretical framework is firmly rooted in the Romanist legal tradition as interpreted by the Pandectists and borrowed from them by Japan and China Before 1949. This is amply illustrated by the definition of property rights in chapter 5, section 1. Parts II and III of this article examine the theoretical tools used by Chinese civil law theorists to draft and analyze these property rights, the system and legal attributes of ownership, and five kinds of rights in things. The latter are a kind of right in rem. Four of these rights are designed to ensure that the rights to use and realize the economic potential of publicly owned property are distributed to productive economic entities, such as collective or state enterprises and individuals or household economic units. Despite an attempt by legal theorists in the 1950\u27s to shake off the mantle of bourgeois legal concepts, the theoretical system used to define these property relations is not Chinese but borrowed from Continental civil law. Sometimes the concepts borrowed from a description of bourgeois property rights, such as possession and usufruct, do not fit the socialist ideal of property relations, but Chinese theorists apply them notwithstanding. Perhaps Pashukanis was right to say that there are no socialist legal forms because law is by definition bourgeois. The General Principles must also be understood in the context of economic reform in China today. As a fundamental law regulating property relations it has an important role to play in defining the framework of property rights for commercial relations. Yet the theory which is needed to justify and explain these property rights is still the subject of controversy. The lack of a sound theoretical basis for futher legislation to implement economic reform, however, is itself an obstacle to reform. This is illustrated in Part IV of the article which examines in detail the theoretical controversy about the definition of property rights in the state enterprise which affected the drafting of the General Principles and which continues today. Chinese theories defining the property relations between the state and the state enterprise are examined in four general categories. Theoretical and ideological influences on them are traced, especially to Eastern Bloc countries, and in turn their influence on the drafting process is examined. By and large the theorists have similar ends in mind, i.e., the realization of some degree of economic autonomy for state enterprises to control and deal with their property efficiently and responsibly as their own, with state interference limited to the use of macroeconomic measures. Every school of thought has its own theoretical view of the property rights which define this autonomy. Article 82 of the General Principles represents only one such view and it may well be replaced in the future. Until there is a settled definition, however, it will be difficult for a systematic reform of the state-owned industrial sector to take place

The “25% Rule” for Patent Infringement Damages After Uniloc

The 2011 decision by the Federal Circuit in Uniloc v. Microsoft properly condemned the “25% Rule,” which bases a reasonable royalty on 25% of an infringer’s profits. Nonetheless, at least one proponent of the Rule continues to argue that the Rule is fundamentally valid and should remain in use. This article analyzes the historical development of the Rule, its conceptual basis, its application in actual cases, and relevant insights from other recent Federal Circuit cases. Each analysis shows fundamental problems and contradictions that demonstrate the Rule can never be a reliable patent damages methodology. There is no reason to change the conclusion in Uniloc

Electronic charge density in helium in the first order shielding approximation

Electronic charge density for ground state of helium as function of nuclear charg

Some Remarks on the Use of the Variational Principle for the Second Order Energy

Approximate ground state wave function used in variational principle for second order energ

Quasiconformal variation of slit domains

We use quasiconformal variations to study Riemann mappings onto variable single slit domains when the slit is the tail of an appropriately smooth Jordan arc. In the real analytic case our results answer a question of Dieter Gaier and show that the function κ in Löwner's differential equation is real analytic

On Colorful Bin Packing Games

We consider colorful bin packing games in which selfish players control a set of items which are to be packed into a minimum number of unit capacity bins. Each item has one of $m\geq 2$ colors and cannot be packed next to an item of the same color. All bins have the same unitary cost which is shared among the items it contains, so that players are interested in selecting a bin of minimum shared cost. We adopt two standard cost sharing functions: the egalitarian cost function which equally shares the cost of a bin among the items it contains, and the proportional cost function which shares the cost of a bin among the items it contains proportionally to their sizes. Although, under both cost functions, colorful bin packing games do not converge in general to a (pure) Nash equilibrium, we show that Nash equilibria are guaranteed to exist and we design an algorithm for computing a Nash equilibrium whose running time is polynomial under the egalitarian cost function and pseudo-polynomial for a constant number of colors under the proportional one. We also provide a complete characterization of the efficiency of Nash equilibria under both cost functions for general games, by showing that the prices of anarchy and stability are unbounded when $m\geq 3$ while they are equal to 3 for black and white games, where $m=2$. We finally focus on games with uniform sizes (i.e., all items have the same size) for which the two cost functions coincide. We show again a tight characterization of the efficiency of Nash equilibria and design an algorithm which returns Nash equilibria with best achievable performance