Who\u27s Afraid of the Patent Trolls? Assessing the Market Impact of Landmark Patent Troll Litigation Outcomes

Patent trolls have changed the innovation and patent policy landscape. This thesis is an empirical event study that focuses on two landmark cases of patent troll litigation, RIM v. NTP and eBay v. Mercexchange, to determine whether pro-troll litigation outcomes significantly impact the market values of the firms in the high-tech industries they target. I find that the Supreme Court ruling in eBay v. Mercexchange did seem to significantly impact a proportion of firms in the market. The decisive factors in distinguishing affected vs. unaffected firms include a firm\u27s R&D to Sales ratio, market value, and NAICS code specification

Reasoning about Cardinal Directions between Extended Objects

Direction relations between extended spatial objects are important commonsense knowledge. Recently, Goyal and Egenhofer proposed a formal model, known as Cardinal Direction Calculus (CDC), for representing direction relations between connected plane regions. CDC is perhaps the most expressive qualitative calculus for directional information, and has attracted increasing interest from areas such as artificial intelligence, geographical information science, and image retrieval. Given a network of CDC constraints, the consistency problem is deciding if the network is realizable by connected regions in the real plane. This paper provides a cubic algorithm for checking consistency of basic CDC constraint networks, and proves that reasoning with CDC is in general an NP-Complete problem. For a consistent network of basic CDC constraints, our algorithm also returns a 'canonical' solution in cubic time. This cubic algorithm is also adapted to cope with cardinal directions between possibly disconnected regions, in which case currently the best algorithm is of time complexity O(n^5)

A Comparative Analysis of the Causes of the Heroine's Tragedy in Tess of the D'Urbervilles and A Rose for Emily

From the perspective of feminist theory, this paper absorbs and inherits the existing research results, makes a deep interpretation of the two works, and makes a richer comparison and exploration of the tragic causes of Tess and Emily, which is conducive to a better understanding of the value of the works, revealing the significance of the works, and hoping to provide a new perspective to think for the study of their works and calling on the society to recognize the female subject status and self-identity, then to get rid of the shackles of traditional thoughts and to master the fate of themselves

On the Robotic Uncertainty of Fully Autonomous Traffic

Recent transportation research suggests that autonomous vehicles (AVs) have the potential to improve traffic flow efficiency as they are able to maintain smaller car-following distances. Nevertheless, being a unique class of ground robots, AVs are susceptible to robotic errors, particularly in their perception module, leading to uncertainties in their movements and an increased risk of collisions. Consequently, conservative operational strategies, such as larger headway and slower speeds, are implemented to prioritize safety over traffic capacity in real-world operations. To reconcile the inconsistency, this paper proposes an analytical model framework that delineates the endogenous reciprocity between traffic safety and efficiency that arises from robotic uncertainty in AVs. Car-following scenarios are extensively examined, with uncertain headway as the key parameter for bridging the single-lane capacity and the collision probability. A Markov chain is then introduced to describe the dynamics of the lane capacity, and the resulting expected collision-inclusive capacity is adopted as the ultimate performance measure for fully autonomous traffic. With the help of this analytical model, it is possible to support the settings of critical parameters in AV operations and incorporate optimization techniques to assist traffic management strategies for autonomous traffic

Identification two novel nacrein-like proteins involved in the shell formation of the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas

Nacrein-like proteins have carbonic anhydrase (CA)-like domains, but their coding regions are flanked by inserted repeat sequence, such as Gly-X-Asn. Reportedly, nacrein-like proteins show the highest similarity to human carbonic anhydrase 1(α-CA1), possess CA catalytic functions, and play a key role in shell biomineralization. In the present study, two novel nacrein-like proteins were firstly identified from the shell-forming mantle of the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas. With numerous analyses, it was identified and characterized that both the nacrein-like proteins F1 and F2 were secreted and most closely related to the nacrein-like protein of California mussel Mytilus californianus via phylogenetic analysis. RT-PCR analysis showed that the nacrein-like proteins F1 and F2 were expressed in multiple tissues and the expression levels remarkably rose after entering the spat stage, which were basically consistent with the increase of calcite fractions in the total shell volume. Surprisingly, the Gly-X-Asn repeat domain, which is distinctive in most nacrein-like proteins, was absent in the two newly identified nacrein-like proteins in C. gigas and replaced with a series of acidic amino acids (D/E). Regardless, nacrein-like proteins in mollusks seem to be vital to the deposition of calcium carbonate and likely perform diverse functions. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11033-014-3298-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

The semi-implicit Euler-Maruyama method for nonlinear non-autonomous stochastic differential equations driven by a class of L\'evy processes

The strong convergence of the semi-implicit Euler-Maruyama (EM) method for stochastic differential equations with non-linear coefficients driven by a class of L\'evy processes is investigated. The dependence of the convergence order of the numerical scheme on the parameters of the class of L\'evy processes is discovered, which is different from existing results. In addition, the existence and uniqueness of numerical invariant measure of the semi-implicit EM method is studied and its convergence to the underlying invariant measure is also proved. Numerical examples are provided to confirm our theoretical results.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figure