Diffusive Boundary Layers in the Free-Surface Excitable Medium Spiral

Spiral waves are a ubiquitous feature of the nonequilibrium dynamics of a great variety of excitable systems. In the limit of a large separation in timescale between fast excitation and slow recovery, one can reduce the spiral problem to one involving the motion of a free surface separating the excited and quiescent phases. In this work, we study the free surface problem in the limit of small diffusivity for the slow field variable. Specifically, we show that a previously found spiral solution in the diffusionless limit can be extended to finite diffusivity, without significant alteration. This extension involves the creation of a variety of boundary layers which cure all the undesirable singularities of the aforementioned solution. The implications of our results for the study of spiral stability are briefly discussed.Comment: 6 pages, submitted to PRE Rapid Com

The People\u27s Trade Secrets

The content of administered public school exams, modifications made by a government to its voting machines, and the business strategies of government corporations should be of interest to the public. At a minimum, they are the kinds of information that a government should allow its citizens to see and examine. After all, the public might have some legitimate questions for its government: Is that public school examination fair and accurate? Is that voting machine working so that my vote gets counted? To whom or what is that government agency marketing and are kickbacks involved? One would think that the government should have to publicly answer such questions, at least in a democracy. While initially the above does not sound too controversial, state law has made it problematic. Getting access to the information that would answer the above questions may not be easy because the person requesting the information may have to show that the information is not a government trade secret before it can be disclosed. Today, the government of the people can keep information from the people by way of the commercial, intellectual property law of trade secrecy. Strangely, the people--citizens of states and the United States--apparently have trade secrets that they themselves cannot see. In other words, there is information that the government itself creates on its own (a government trade secret ) and that courts and attorneys general have found meet the applicable definition of a trade secret. This Article examines whether a government trade secret should be allowed to exist and, if so, whether governments should be allowed to shield government trade secrets from public disclosure. Importantly, I am not focusing here on trade secrets shared with government by private industry or created by private industry on the public\u27s dime. That topic was the focus of an earlier article, Secrecy and Unaccountability: Trade Secrets in Our Public Infrastructure ( Secrecy ). In Secrecy, I examined the question of whether private entities engaged in the provision of public infrastructure, like voting machines and public Wi-Fi Internet access, should be allowed to shield information regarding their products and services from public disclosure by way of trade secrecy. This is a question of applying democratic values like transparency and accountability to private entities, the practical effect of which is in direct conflict with the purpose of trade secrecy, namely, keeping commercial information private. I concluded that, as applied to public infrastructure, trade secrecy should not be utilized by private entities engaged in its provision. While the conflict here is similar--transparency versus secrecy--the policy considerations are quite different. For example: do we need to incentivize innovation in government by way of trade secrecy? Should the government be in the business of leveraging competitive advantage in order to generate revenue or, much worse, for an unstated ulterior motive like avoiding public scrutiny? If the government is allowed to consider cost-effectiveness in its operations, should trade secrecy be the mechanism that allows for this consideration? As the application of trade secrecy by government is a very recent development (at least in the United States) and there are very few reported decisions dealing with the issue, its ramifications have yet to be explored in detail. I examine these questions and issues by explaining how trade secrecy and freedom of information laws interact, emphasizing the theoretically discordant nature of the government trade secret. In Part I, I examine the basic issues involved in finding and maintaining a trade secret. In Part II, I discuss several scenarios where government trade secrets have been asserted with questionable basis in the law, such as a county\u27s modification of voting machines, or where government trade secrecy has prevented the public from accessing valuable information, such as a public school system\u27s examinations and the minutes of public corporation board meetings. Additionally, I posit reasons why the problem of government trade secrets may be growing. In Part III, I outline the basic principles of transparency, accountability, and democratic governance. In Part IV I discuss possible solutions to the problems discussed, and conclude that trade secrecy is a poor fit in government for two primary reasons: (a) the utilitarian basis for trade secrecy does not fit well when applied to government, and (b) transparency and accountability, two core democratic values, are severely undermined when trade secrecy is used to prevent disclosure of otherwise public information

Transparency Soup: The ACTA Negotiating Process and Black Box Lawmaking

The negotiations of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) have been marred by a level of attempted secrecy heretofore unseen in international intellectual property lawmaking. Simultaneously, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has been used in several significant national contexts to prevent the disclosure of data and information in ways that call into question its efficacy as an effective regulation of governmental knowledge. This paper seeks to tie together these two recent developments in order to (a) prevent future international intellectual property law negotiations from being unduly secret and (b) encourage Congress to consider reforming FOIA in light of current public expectations and technological capabilities for transparency and accountability

The People\u27s Trade Secrets

The content of administered public school exams, modifications made by a government to its voting machines, and the business strategies of government corporations should be of interest to the public. At a minimum, they are the kinds of information that a government should allow its citizens to see and examine. After all, the public might have some legitimate questions for its government: Is that public school examination fair and accurate? Is that voting machine working so that my vote gets counted? To whom or what is that government agency marketing and are kickbacks involved? One would think that the government should have to publicly answer such questions, at least in a democracy. While initially the above does not sound too controversial, state law has made it problematic. Getting access to the information that would answer the above questions may not be easy because the person requesting the information may have to show that the information is not a government trade secret before it can be disclosed. Today, the government of the people can keep information from the people by way of the commercial, intellectual property law of trade secrecy. Strangely, the people--citizens of states and the United States--apparently have trade secrets that they themselves cannot see. In other words, there is information that the government itself creates on its own (a government trade secret ) and that courts and attorneys general have found meet the applicable definition of a trade secret. This Article examines whether a government trade secret should be allowed to exist and, if so, whether governments should be allowed to shield government trade secrets from public disclosure. Importantly, I am not focusing here on trade secrets shared with government by private industry or created by private industry on the public\u27s dime. That topic was the focus of an earlier article, Secrecy and Unaccountability: Trade Secrets in Our Public Infrastructure ( Secrecy ). In Secrecy, I examined the question of whether private entities engaged in the provision of public infrastructure, like voting machines and public Wi-Fi Internet access, should be allowed to shield information regarding their products and services from public disclosure by way of trade secrecy. This is a question of applying democratic values like transparency and accountability to private entities, the practical effect of which is in direct conflict with the purpose of trade secrecy, namely, keeping commercial information private. I concluded that, as applied to public infrastructure, trade secrecy should not be utilized by private entities engaged in its provision. While the conflict here is similar--transparency versus secrecy--the policy considerations are quite different. For example: do we need to incentivize innovation in government by way of trade secrecy? Should the government be in the business of leveraging competitive advantage in order to generate revenue or, much worse, for an unstated ulterior motive like avoiding public scrutiny? If the government is allowed to consider cost-effectiveness in its operations, should trade secrecy be the mechanism that allows for this consideration? As the application of trade secrecy by government is a very recent development (at least in the United States) and there are very few reported decisions dealing with the issue, its ramifications have yet to be explored in detail. I examine these questions and issues by explaining how trade secrecy and freedom of information laws interact, emphasizing the theoretically discordant nature of the government trade secret. In Part I, I examine the basic issues involved in finding and maintaining a trade secret. In Part II, I discuss several scenarios where government trade secrets have been asserted with questionable basis in the law, such as a county\u27s modification of voting machines, or where government trade secrecy has prevented the public from accessing valuable information, such as a public school system\u27s examinations and the minutes of public corporation board meetings. Additionally, I posit reasons why the problem of government trade secrets may be growing. In Part III, I outline the basic principles of transparency, accountability, and democratic governance. In Part IV I discuss possible solutions to the problems discussed, and conclude that trade secrecy is a poor fit in government for two primary reasons: (a) the utilitarian basis for trade secrecy does not fit well when applied to government, and (b) transparency and accountability, two core democratic values, are severely undermined when trade secrecy is used to prevent disclosure of otherwise public information