A Tale of Sovereignty and Liberalism: The Lockean Myth of Intellectual Property

The influence of John Locke’s thought upon the general legal perception of property rights cannot be overstated. Locke’s Labor theory of property holds that property originally comes about through individual exertion upon natural objects and that legal rights in the result of this labor are in fact property rights. The Lockean theory of property has dominated the Anglo-American legal discourse and is frequently used to justify various property regulation schemes. Despite this fact, many scholars have struggled to apply the theory to the field of intellectual property, and in particular to the field of patents and copyright. Many have attempted to square the circle, but the results of these efforts are rather unpersuasive. This Note proposes to introduce a different framework of jurisprudence that better explains the underpinnings of the current intellectual property legal regime. This framework builds upon and applies the Aristocratic concepts of commutative and distributive justice to the concept of intellectual property. The Note argues that the notion of intellectual property is a legal concept that is first delineated by sovereign authorities in an act of commutative justice. Only after the ‘rules of the game’ are articulated by the sovereign, private actors can enter the legally delineated markets and engage in acts of commutative exchange. The Note demonstrates that from its inception, the field of intellectual property was fundamentally a sovereign legal endeavor and that despite Locke’s theoretical contributions to the field, at no time did the courts of England ever applied his own theory to the administration of intellectual property. Instead, the courts of England have time and again reaffirmed the fact that intellectual property is legal right that is granted by a sovereign and is founded upon the principals of distributive justice

Laser Applications

Contains research objectives.Joint Services Electronics Programs (U. S. Army, U. S. Navy, and U. S. Air Force) under Contract DA 28-043-AMC-02536(E

Gravitation Research

Contains research objectives and reports on two research projects.Joint Services Electronics Programs (U.S. Army, U. S. Navy, and U. S. Air Force) under Contract DA 36-039-AMC-03200(E

The Processing of Lexical Sequences

Psycholinguistics has traditionally been defined as the study of how we process units of language such as letters, words and sentences. But what about other units? This dissertation concerns itself with short lexical sequences called n- grams, longer than words but shorter than most sentences. N-grams can be phrases (such as the 3-gram "the great divide") or just fragments (such as the 4- gram means "nothing to a"). Words are often thought to be the universal, atomic building block of longer lexical sequences, but n-grams are equally capable of carrying meaning and being combined to create any sentence. Are n-grams more than just the sum of their parts (the sum of their words)? How do language users process n-grams when they are asked to read them or produce them? Using evidence that I have gathered, I will address these and other questions with the goal of better understanding n-gram processing

Quantum Electronics

Contains research objectives and summary of research.U. S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research (Contract F44620-71-C-0051)Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DAAB07-71-C-0300)University of California, Livermore (Subcontract No. 7877409)U. S. Army Research Office - Durham (Contract DAHC04-72-C-0044)National Science Foundation (Grant GK-37979X

Derivatives pricing in a Markov chain jump-diffusion setting.

In this work we develop a Markov Chain Jump-Diffusion (MCJD) model, where we have a financial market in which there are several possible states. Asset prices in the market follow a generalised geometric Brownian motion, with drift and volatility depending on the state of the market. So for example, one state may represent a bull market where drifts are high, whilst another state may represent a bear market where where drifts are low. The state the market is in is governed by a continuous time Markov chain. We add to this diffusion process jumps in the asset price which occur when the market changes state, and the jump sizes are dependent on the states the market is transiting to and transiting from. We also allow the market to transit to the same state, which corresponds to a jump in the asset price with no change to the drift or volatility. We will develop conditions of no arbitrage in such a market, and methods for pricing derivatives of assets whose prices follow MCJD processes. We will also consider Term-Structure models where the short rate (or forward rate) follows an MCJD process

Transdermal Delivery of Scopolamine by Natural Submicron Injectors: In-Vivo Study in Pig

Transdermal drug delivery has made a notable contribution to medical practice, but has yet to fully achieve its potential as an alternative to oral delivery and hypodermic injections. While transdermal delivery systems would appear to provide an attractive solution for local and systemic drug delivery, only a limited number of drugs can be delivered through the outer layer of the skin. The most difficult to deliver in this way are hydrophilic drugs. The aquatic phylum Cnidaria, which includes sea anemones, corals, jellyfish and hydra, is one of the most ancient multicellular phyla that possess stinging cells containing organelles (cnidocysts), comprising a sophisticated injection system. The apparatus is folded within collagenous microcapsules and upon activation injects a thin tubule that immediately penetrates the prey and delivers its contents. Here we show that this natural microscopic injection system can be adapted for systemic transdermal drug delivery once it is isolated from the cells and uploaded with the drug. Using a topically applied gel containing isolated natural sea anemone injectors and the muscarinic receptor antagonist scopolamine, we found that the formulated injectors could penetrate porcine skin and immediately deliver this hydrophilic drug. An in-vivo study in pigs demonstrated, for the first time, rapid systemic delivery of scopolamine, with Tmax of 30 minutes and Cmax 5 times higher than in controls treated topically with a scopolamine-containing gel without cnidocysts. The ability of the formulated natural injection system to penetrate a barrier as thick as the skin and systemically deliver an exogenous compound presents an intriguing and attractive alternative for hydrophilic transdermal drug delivery