Fair Trade-mark: Proposing an Affirmative Duty on Licensors to Enforce Their Corporate Social Responsibility Codes

Modern consumers are increasingly interested in seeing the brands they love commit to corporate social responsibility (CSR), including fair labor practices and environmental sustainability throughout their supply chains. Many corporations capitalize on this demand through branding strategies that highlight their commitment to CSR. Branding of CSR can include publishing codes of conduct on corporate websites, incorporating a value of doing good while doing well in print and video advertisements, or even publicly partnering with nonprofit organizations. The Lanham Act, the primary federal trademark statute in the United States, articulates federal laws pertaining to branding and advertising, and is rooted in a significant policy interest to keep consumers informed and to prevent consumer deception. Two doctrines of law that stem from the Lanham Act substantiate this policy consideration: the naked licensing doctrine, which imposes an affirmative duty on trademark licensors to supervise their licensees’ quality control standards, and false advertising law, which prevents corporations from espousing false or misleading advertising in connection with their trademarks or brands. An analysis of each of these bodies of law, along with the overall policy underpinnings of the Lanham Act, poses the concern that corporations who incorporate CSR into their branding strategies run the risk of deceiving consumers if in reality they do not supervise their supply chain sufficiently to ensure the truth of their public CSR statements. This Note analyzes the naked licensing doctrine and false advertising laws, and proposes an affirmative duty on corporations to monitor and enforce their CSR codes, in compliance with the Lanham Act

Deterministic Modularity Optimization

We study community structure of networks. We have developed a scheme for maximizing the modularity Q based on mean field methods. Further, we have defined a simple family of random networks with community structure; we understand the behavior of these networks analytically. Using these networks, we show how the mean field methods display better performance than previously known deterministic methods for optimization of Q.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, minor change

Drift of Riffle Beetles (Coleoptera: Elmidae) in a Small Illinois Stream

The daily and seasonal periodicities of drift of riffle beetles were examined in Polecat Creek. Illinois. during the spring and summer of 1978. Drift samples were collected from a single site over four 24-h periods. Dubiraphia vittata adults comprised 72% of the total numerical sample and exhibited greatest mean daily drift density in September. Macronychus glabratus adults were also common in drift collections, with highest densities re- corded during .\u27.lay and August. The drift of D. vittata and M. glabratus exhibited distinct patterns of die! periodicity with peaks occurring in the early hours of darkness. Substantial differences in drift densities between adult and larval stages were evident for D. vittata and M. glabratus. in both cases the adults were more prone to drift

Measuring and Monitoring Cognition in the Postoperative Period

It is common for patients of all ages to experience some degree of cognitive disturbance following surgery. In most cases, impairment appears mild and is restricted to the acute post-operative period, resolving steadily and speedily. In a small number of cases, however, deficits may be more pronounced and/or endure for longer periods, significantly delaying recovery and increasing the risk of serious clinical complications. The ability to accurately measure postoperative cognition, and track recovery of function, is an important clinical task. This review explores practical and methodological issues that may confound this process, examining how best to obtain reliable and meaningful measures of cognition before and after surgery. It considers neuropsychological test selection, administration, analysis and interpretation and offers evidence-based practice points for clinicians and researchers

Are There Incongruent Ground States in 2D Edwards-Anderson Spin Glasses?

We present a detailed proof of a previously announced result (C.M. Newman and D.L. Stein, Phys. Rev. Lett. v. 84, pp. 3966--3969 (2000)) supporting the absence of multiple (incongruent) ground state pairs for 2D Edwards-Anderson spin glasses (with zero external field and, e.g., Gaussian couplings): if two ground state pairs (chosen from metastates with, e.g., periodic boundary conditions) on the infinite square lattice are distinct, then the dual bonds where they differ form a single doubly-infinite, positive-density domain wall. It is an open problem to prove that such a situation cannot occur (or else to show --- much less likely in our opinion --- that it indeed does happen) in these models. Our proof involves an analysis of how (infinite-volume) ground states change as (finitely many) couplings vary, which leads us to a notion of zero-temperature excitation metastates, that may be of independent interest.Comment: 18 pages (LaTeX); 1 figure; minor revisions; to appear in Commun. Math. Phy