Patenting Living Matter in the European Community: Diriment of the Draft Directive

This article attempts to disentangle the mire of European patent authority and provide some picture of how the ultimate resolution of the proposed EC Directive will appear. Part I contains introductory and background materials on the biotech industry and the importance of patent protection to the future proliferation of technological innovation. Part I exposes current issues in the scientific and political realms of biotech patent law as well as the standard justifications for recognizing inventors rights, considerations that are presently shaping the debate in Europe. Part II attempts to ground the reader in the fundamentals of biotechnology patent laws as developed in the United States in order to provide a basic conceptual foundation for comparing and evaluating the bodies of European law. This section begins by introducing the basic statutory terminology before turning to a discussion of the landmark United States Supreme Court opinion in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, where the Court held that genetically altered living matter may be patented.8 The remainder of the section traces the legal developments spawned by the Chakrabarty decision. Part III begins with an introduction of the various bodies purporting to govern patent rights in Europe and attempts to resolve the supremacy issues among them. Attention then shifts to the proposed Council Directive on biotech patents: the procedures for its adoption, the political forces shaping the debate of life patents in Europe, and the important proposals for amending the original draft. Finally, this article will speculate on the ultimate resolution of the Draft Directive as a united system of patent laws for the European Community Member States

Low Hubble Constant from Type Ia Supernovae by van den Bergh's Method

An interesting way to calibrate the absolute magnitudes of remote Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) that are well out in the Hubble flow, and thus determine the value of the Hubble constant, H_0, has been introduced by van den Bergh. His approach relies on calculations of the peak absolute magnitudes and broad--band colors for SN Ia explosion models. It does not require any corrections for extinction by interstellar dust, and no SNe Ia are excluded on grounds of peculiarity. Within the last few years distances have been determined to the parent galaxies of six SNe Ia by means of Cepheid variables. Cepheid--based distances also have become available for three other SNe Ia if one is willing to use the distance to a galaxy in the same group in lieu of the distance to the parent galaxy itself. Here we determine the value of H_0 in a way that is analogous to that of van den Bergh, but now using Cepheid--based distances instead of calculated light curves. We obtain H_0 = 55 km/s/Mpc. This value, with Lambda=0 and Omega=1, corresponds to a cosmic expansion time of 12 Gyr, which is consistent with several recent determinations of the ages of globular clusters.Comment: Latex, 4 pages, 1 table, 1 figure, Submitted to Nature March 28, 1996. PostScript version available at http://www.nhn.ou.edu/~nugent

Reformed theology, modernity and the environment crisis

Bibliography: p. 307-341.The prospect of global ecological disaster fundamental challenge to modernity as the poses a dominant contemporary socio-cultural matrix. This challenge can only be responded to through a radical socio-cultural transformation which favours those, human and otherkind, who have been marginalised and oppressed by modernity. This will include a change of human consciousness, and. the development of an alternative vision of society in which all humans live in community with each other and with otherkind. It thus has a profoundly religious character. The thesis argues that the central truth claims of the Christian gospel, particularly as they have been understood in the Reformed tradition, require the church to commit itself to working for such a socio-cultural transformation. However, the Reformed tradition can only contribute to this transformation once it is recognised that it has been deeply intertwined with modernity since its emergence, and has contributed to the legitimation of a culture which has degraded the environment. The thesis provides a self-critical exposition of the tradition in the light of the environmental crisis; in dialogue with other Christian traditions, and making use of insights from contemporary biblical scholarship. First, the socio-historical relationship between the Reformed tradition and the rise of modernity is examined. It is argued that, under particular social and economic conditions, the influence of the Reformed tradition accelerated the emergence of modernity. In this interaction with early modernity important components of the tradition were suppressed. Second, the tradition is re-examined to develop a Reformed ecotheology centred on the motifs of the Trinity, the covenant and the glory of God. This ecotheology makes a critical use of the theologies of important figures in the Reformed tradition, including John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Abraham Kuyper and Karl Barth. Third, a proposal is developed as to how this ecotheology can contribute to socio-cultural transformation. It does so by using insights gained from the role played by the South African church in the struggle against Apartheid. It argues that the environmental crisis ought to be understood as a kairos for the earth which must lead to a new way of being the church in the contemporary world

Legislating Morality: The Effects Of Tax Law Complexity On Taxpayers Attitudes

This paper addresses the effects of tax law complexity on the behavior of taxpayers. A particular focus is the effect of tax law complexity on taxpayers perceptions of the morality of taking deductions that might be disallowed. The topic of taxpayer morality is addressed in terms of the broader concept of deterrence theory, which suggests that deterrence factors include formal punishment, informal social punishment and the guilt that would be felt if a behavior were perceived to be immoral. Tax law complexity may give rise to the perception that taking a questionable deduction would be socially acceptable tax avoidance rather than socially unacceptable tax evasion, and that taking a questionable deduction is morally acceptable. It is hypothesized that greater tax law complexity is associated with less perception that taking questionable deductions is immoral, and that less perception that taking questionable deductions is immoral is associated with greater inclination to take questionable deductions. Accordingly, it is hypothesized that greater tax law complexity is associated with greater inclination to take questionable deductions. The study entailed an experimental survey in which subjects evaluated hypothetical scenarios in which the opportunity existed to save taxes by taking a deduction that might be disallowed. ANOVA and Regression results were consistent with the hypotheses

The Effect of Interstellar Absorption on Measurements of the Baryon Acoustic Peak in the Lyman-{\alpha} Forest

In recent years, the autocorrelation of the hydrogen Lyman-{\alpha} forest has been used to observe the baryon acoustic peak at redshift 2 < z < 3.5 using tens of thousands of QSO spectra from the BOSS survey. However, the interstellar medium of the Milky-Way introduces absorption lines into the spectrum of any extragalactic source. These lines, while weak and undetectable in a single BOSS spectrum, could potentially bias the cosmological signal. In order to examine this, we generate absorption line maps by stacking over a million spectra of galaxies and QSOs. We find that the systematics introduced are too small to affect the current accuracy of the baryon acoustic peak, but might be relevant to future surveys such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). We outline a method to account for this with future datasets.Comment: MNRAS accepted. Minor change

Possible Effects Of Government Action To Curb Global Warming On Stock Market Performance

In recent years the stock market has experienced two steep declines. Between March 23, 2000 and October 9, 2002, the S &amp; P 500 index fell from 1,527.35 to 776.76. After rising to an intraday high of 1,576.09 on October 11, 2007, the S &amp; P 500 index fell to 676.53 on March 9, 2009 (GSPC Historical Prices S&amp;P 500 Stock). Although the stock market has recovered in the years since, the double decline may make investors wonder if the stock market will decline again and what might cause any future decline. Finance theory (Block, 2010) suggests that corporate stock value is affected by investors’ expectations of economic growth. The theory of global warming (Brown, 2007) suggests that the production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases causes global temperatures to rise and that the remedy would be the reduction of the production of greenhouse gases. If investors were to perceive that action to reduce greenhouse gases would also reduce economic growth, the result could be declines in stock market returns. This paper presents a theoretical discussion of the possibility that stock market declines may arise if investors were to expect that politicians could take drastic action to curb global warming

Pattern avoidance in forests of binary shrubs

We investigate pattern avoidance in permutations satisfying some additional restrictions. These are naturally considered in terms of avoiding patterns in linear extensions of certain forest-like partially ordered sets, which we call binary shrub forests. In this context, we enumerate forests avoiding patterns of length three. In four of the five non-equivalent cases, we present explicit enumerations by exhibiting bijections with certain lattice paths bounded above by the line y = lx, for some l in Q+, one of these being the celebrated Duchon’s club paths with l = 2/3. In the remaining case, we use the machinery of analytic combinatorics to determine the minimal polynomial of its generating function, and deduce its growth rate

Quantitative Spectroscopy of Supernovae for Dark Energy Studies

Detailed quantitative spectroscopy of Type Ia supernovae (SNe~Ia) provides crucial information needed to minimize systematic effects in both ongoing SNe Ia observational programs such as the Nearby Supernova Factory, ESSENCE, and the SuperNova Legacy Survey (SNLS) and in proposed JDEM missions such as SNAP, JEDI, and DESTINY. Quantitative spectroscopy is mandatory to quantify and understand the observational strategy of comparing ``like versus like''. It allows us to explore evolutionary effects, from variations in progenitor metallicity to variations in progenitor age, to variations in dust with cosmological epoch. It also allows us to interpret and quantify the effects of asphericity, as well as different amounts of mixing in the thermonuclear explosion.Comment: White paper submitted to the Dark Energy Task Force, 13 pages, 5 figure