Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Overcoming the 'Impossible Issue' of Nonobviousness in Design Patents

The United States offers legal protection for designs - the overall aesthetic appearances of objects - through the patent system. To obtain a U.S. design patent has long required something more than novelty. Just as the patentability of a utilitarian device mandates a “nonobvious” advance over earlier technology, the patentability of a new and ornamental design requires that it differ from prior designs to an extent that would not have been “obvious to a designer of ordinary skill who designs articles of the type involved. ” Ostensibly promoting progress in design, Congress in 1842 shoehorned design protection into the existing utility patent system. From that time forward, the design patent system has languished from prolonged inattention rather than benefited from any purposeful development. Even the initial imposition of a qualitative requirement for “invention” in designs (from which the modern requirement of nonobviousness derives) was likely the product of a typographical error. Failing to appreciate the fundamental distinctions between designs and utility inventions, the legislature and judiciary have repeatedly sought to assimilate these very different types of intellectual property. Nowhere in the design patent system is this assimilation more blatant and harmful than in the imposition of the nonobviousness requirement. The USPTO and courts continue to struggle with gauging the nonobviousness of designs despite repeated acknowledgement that the requirement is inapt, subjective, unworkable, and even “impossible. ” Although design protection would be more appropriately provided through a sui generis system outside the patent regime, a wholesale restructuring of U.S. design protection appears unlikely. Nonobviousness therefore continues to be imposed for design patentability. Our insight is that courts and the USPTO have previously unrecognized flexibility in how they apply the nonobviousness requirement to designs. Drawing from the industrial design literature as well as our interviews with experienced designers of differing career paths, we conclude that the current nonobviousness framework is fundamentally misaligned with the creative processes and objectives of designers. We accordingly propose a number of powerful yet practical tools for reconceptualizing the nonobviousness requirement in a manner that truly promotes innovation in design. The Federal Circuit’s recent decisions in Egyptian Goddess v. Swisa and Titan Tire v. Case New Holland signal a welcome judicial receptiveness to rethinking design nonobviousness. The time is ripe to bridge the gap between design patent standards and the reality of design. This article offers a roadmap for overcoming the supposedly “impossible issue” of applying the nonobviousness requirement to designs.
THE ROLE OF LIFE EVENTS IN SHORT TERM METABOLIC CONTROL OF NON-INSULIN DEPENDENT DIABETES MELLITUS

For present study 2 groups were first chosen, each consisting of 50 NIDDM patients with matched age, sex and social class. One group (i.e. Group A) had patients with poor metabolic control while other group i.e. Group B had patients with adequate metabolic control. Investigators found that female Group A patients had experienced higher mean number of life events in the one month period proceeding the date of study when compared with Group B females. Similar comparison in males showed increased experience of life events during the six month period. Regardless of sex, Group B patients were not found to differ from matched chronic disease patients (i.e. Group C) regarding the mean number of life events experienced during six month period. Male Group B patients, unlike females, experienced higher number of life events during past six months when compared with male matched disease free subjects (i.e. Group D). Adverse events seemed to have predominant role in diabetes control.
A model to assess organisational information privacy maturity against the Protection of Personal Information Act

The huge growth in digital data and the commercialisation of personal information has brought privacy to the forefront of world legislation. The impact and growth of the Internet, digitisation of data, network connectivity and data sharing has required a number of new threats to be addressed. As the technological environment has expanded since the 1960’s and the use of electronic commerce has become more ubiquitous, so the concern around privacy and personal information protection has increased. Privacy is important at various levels and allows people to develop their individuality apart from the groups to which they belong and offers them the ability to decide what face they want others to see. Based on the recent Snowden leaks there is currently a heightened interest in privacy and related issues worldwide. The IEEE Security & Privacy magazine is one of the leading publications devoted to privacy, providing articles with both a practical and research focus by leading thinkers within the security and privacy field. The magazine has a broad audience which includes practitioners, researchers and policy-makers. The objective of this paper is to provide a systematic review of how privacy has been reported in the magazine over the past decade. The paper examines the shifts of privacy within the information security domain, with particular interest to the past three years which have seen revisions and amendments in various national privacy policies. In addition to reviewing the magazine there is input from the magazine’s current editor, who shares her views and insights on both the magazine and privacy in general. Findings show that over the period 2011–2013, privacy articles were predominantly driven by academic research, with the majority of security articles coming from within industry. There is little evidence that privacy has become a more dominant topic over the past ten years. While data loss and security breaches have escalated over the past decade the topic of privacy has taken second place to security.
Databases for social integration by transitional labour markets

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Globalization and Financial Market Contagion: Evidence from Financial Crisis and Natural Disasters

With financial globalization, investors can gain from diversification if returns from financial markets are stable and not correlated. However with volatility spillovers, increase in cross-market correlations exist as a real-effect and are not taken into account for asset allocation and portfolio composition. This chapter assesses financial contagion from two recent trends in the world economy: the global financial crisis and the 2011 Japanese natural disasters (tsunami, earthquake and nuclear crises).
Measuring Value Exchange in a Community: A Deeper Exploration

Abstract The previous edition of this Journal included an article titled ‘Making Engagement Worth It: Measuring and Managing How Entrepreneurs Exchange Value with Their Community’. It presented a case study whereby the techniques associated with the field of Customer Value Management in business were applied by researchers in the public sector. The case involved understanding and measuring the perceptions of entrepreneurs about the communities in which they start businesses, with the aim of providing community leaders and policymakers with actionable information about how to create a more compelling value proposition for entrepreneurs. This article provides further information about the approach and execution of that study. It contains details about the development of the qualitative framework which will allow you to understand how community members evaluate the worth of their community. It describes the design and implementation of the quantitative survey and analysis that generates data and conclusions for decision-makers. The main purpose of this article is to help researchers and practitioners of Customer Value Management techniques apply this successful method for measuring, managing and improving the value proposition of their own communities.
The market orientation of Chinese enterprises during a time of transition

As China moves from a command economy to one more directed by customer demands, its enterprises must acquire an entirely new understanding of the purpose of business. The marketing concept appears to offer an approach to management that is dramatically new to China but much needed in its current state of development. Reports the results of an empirical study concerning the market orientation of various types of Chinese enterprises based on their size, location, ownership and sector. The data suggest substantial differences between the various types of operations. Since the existing literature relating to market orientation is devoted almost exclusively to Western business settings, this study provides benchmark data that may be used to track the evolution of an economy that is in the midst of a dramatic economic transition.
Context-driven Business Process Modelling

Business professionals create business process models in order to get an understanding of who is involved and which resources are needed for the execution of a business process. Such business process models are required as a basis for knowledge transfer, quality purposes, regulations, communication between internal and external collaborative partners, or documentation in general. Current process modelling approaches and tools are still very costly, error-prone, and often used in an insouciant manner. For example, changes affecting similar process artefacts need to be executed manually in each embedding model. We aim to increase the reusability of business process knowledge and propose the integration of a context-driver principle for business process modelling.
The Effect of Options on Information Acquisition and Asset Pricing

We study the effect of introducing an options market on investors' incentive to collect private information in a rational expectation equilibrium model. We show that an options market has two effects on information acquisition: a negative effect, as options act as substitutes for information, and a positive effect, as informed investors have less need for options and can earn profits from selling them. When the population of informed investors is high because of the low information acquisition cost, the supply for options is larger than the demand, leading to low option prices. Low option prices in turn induce investors to use options instead of information to reduce risk, while informed investors have little opportunity to earn profits from selling options to cover their information acquisition cost. Introducing an options market thus decreases investors' incentive to acquire information, and the prices of the underlying assets become less informative, leading to lower prices and higher volatilities. A dynamic extension of this analysis shows that introducing an options market increases the price reactions to earnings announcements. However, when the information acquisition cost is high, the opposite effects arise. Further analysis shows that our results are robust for more general derivatives. These results provide a potentially unified theory to reconcile the conflicting empirical findings on the options listing of individual stocks in both the U.S. market and international markets.
The developmental potential of mouse somatic cell nuclear-transferred oocytes treated with trichostatin A and 5-aza-2′-deoxycytidine

Summary To facilitate nuclear reprogramming, somatic cells or somatic cell nuclear-transferred (SCNT) oocytes have been treated with the histone deacetylase inhibitor trichostatin A (TSA), or the DNA methyltransferase inhibitor, 5-aza-2′-deoxycytidine (5-aza-dC), to relax epigenetic marks of differentiated somatic cells. TSA-treated SCNT oocytes have increased developmental potential, but the optimal treatment period is unknown. Reduced methylation levels in somatic cells have no positive effect on SCNT oocytes, but the treatment of SCNT embryos with 5-aza-dC has not been investigated. We examined the effect of TSA treatment duration on the developmental potential of mouse SCNT oocytes and the effect of 5-aza-dC treatment on their in vitro and in vivo developmental potential. To determine the effects of TSA treatment duration, nuclear-transferred (NT) oocytes were cultured for 0 to 26 h with 100 nM TSA. SCNT oocytes treated with TSA for 8 to 12 h had the higher rate of development to blastocysts and full-term fetuses were obtained after treatment for 8 to 12 h. When oocytes were treated for 14 h and 26 h, blastocyst rates were significantly decreased and fetuses were not obtained. To examine the effect of 5-aza-dC, 2-cell stage SCNT embryos were cultured with 10 or 100 nM 5-aza-dC for 48 h to the morula stage and transferred. The potential of embryos treated with 5-aza-dC to develop into blastocysts was decreased and no fetuses were obtained after transfer. The findings demonstrated that long-term TSA treatment of SCNT mouse oocytes and treatment with 5-aza-dC inhibit the potential to develop into blastocysts and to fetuses after transfer.
Does Enforcement Change Earnings Management Behavior? Evidence from the EU after Mandatory IFRS Adoption

We examine the expected preventive function of enforcement of financial reporting which has been subject to reforms in several EU member states in the years following mandatory IFRS adoption. Specifically, we are interested in the question whether accounting quality – proxied by several earnings management metrics – improved in countries with substantive changes in their enforcement setting. For this reason, we compare the development in earnings management activities for a treatment sample of firms from 7 countries with enforcement changes with two control samples from 13 countries in total that do not exhibit comparable enforcement reforms. In contrast to prior literature, we cannot provide consistent evidence for a decrease in earnings management activities; however, some results indicate less upwards and more downwards earnings management after a strengthening of enforcement, arguably as an overcautious counter reaction of responsible managers. Given the limited numbers of observations, we regard our findings as a preliminary inventory in the attempt of assessing the effectiveness of accounting enforcement in the EU.
Human amniotic-fluid-derived stem cells: a unique source for regenerative medicine

Introduction: The first application of tissue engineering was based on the use of differentiated cells from the adult organism, which was associated with an invasiveness and high risk of diseased cells' transplantation. Over the years, the range of available cell populations for tissue engineering has widened. Areas covered: We review the comprehensive information concerning the characteristic features of amniotic-fluid-derived stem cells (AFSCs). We also review the potential applications of these cells in clinical practice. Expert opinion: AFSCs hold promise for the future treatment of many incurable diseases. However, such cell-based therapies have some limitations, and there are questions relating to the use of stem cells, which should be carefully analyzed before translation of these cells into clinical practice.
Characteristics and Trends in a National Study of Consumer Outage Costs

Ensuring reliability has and will continue to be a priority for electricity industry restructuring. Assessing the balance between public and private actions to ensure reliability should be guided in part by an understanding of the value of reliability to the nations' residential, commercial and industrial customers. Yet, there is no comprehensive body of information on this topic. This paper begins to address this information gap by analyzing studies conducted by electric utilities over the past 15 years to assess the value of electric service to their customers. Outage cost measurements prepared by 7 electric utilities through 20 studies are assembled and standardized into a national database of customer interruption costs. The database is used to describe trends in interruption costs, and regional (geographic) differences, differences in interruption costs by customer type. It can also be used to estimate customer damage functions. Results from the study are intended to contribute to an improved understanding of the importance of electricity reliability to the nation.
Maternal Nonthyroidal Illness and Fetal Thyroid Hormone Status, as Studied in the Streptozotocin-Induced Diabetes Mellitus Rat Model.

We have used the streptozotocin-induced diabetes mellitus pregnant rat as a model of maternal nonthyroidal illness. We measured the effects of different degrees of diabetes mellitus on maternal body weight, the outcome of pregnancy, circulating glucose, insulin, T4, T3, rT3, and TSH in mother and fetus, T4 and T3 in maternal and fetal tissues, and iodothyronine deiodinases in liver, lung, and brain. All of the changes in thyroid hormone status typical of nonthyroidal illnesses were observed in the mothers and were related to the degree of the metabolic imbalances. Most were controlled with a daily insulin dose of 0.5 U/100 g BW. Normalization of maternal placental T4, however, required higher insulin doses than in other maternal tissues. The number and body weight of the fetuses, their pituitary GH contents, and their thyroid hormone status were severely affected. The total extrathyroidal T4 and T3 pools decreased to one third of normal fetal values. T4 and T3 concentrations in the fetal brain were lower .
Most individuals with treated blood pressures above target receive only one or two antihypertensive drug classes

A significant proportion of individuals taking antihypertensive therapies fail to achieve blood pressures <140/90 mmHg. In order to develop strategies for improved treatment of blood pressure, we examined the association of blood pressure control with antihypertensive therapies and clinical and lifestyle factors in a cohort of adults at increased cardiovascular risk.
Regulatory analysis of the mouse Fgf3 gene: Control of embryonic expression patterns and dependence upon sonic hedgehog (Shh) signalling

Fgf3 displays a dynamic and complex expression pattern during mouse embryogenesis. To address the molecular mechanisms underlying Fgf3 expression, we used a transgenic approach to assay genomic regions from the mouse Fgf3 gene for regulatory activity. We identified an enhancer that mediates major components of embryonic expression, governing expression in the midbrain, hindbrain, surface ectoderm, dorsal roots and dorsal root ganglia (DRG), proximal sensory ganglia, and the developing central nervous system (CNS). Deletional analysis of the enhancer further delimited this regulatory activity to a 5.7‐kb fragment. We have also revealed sonic hedgehog (Shh) ‐dependent and Shh‐independent aspects of Fgf3 expression through breeding the Fgf3 reporter transgene into Shh mutants. In the absence of Shh signalling, Fgf3 reporter expression is lost in the ventral CNS, DRG, and superior cervical nerves, whereas activation of reporter expression in cranial ganglion cells is Shh independent. Moreover, detailed re‐examination of the Shh phenotype revealed that Shh signalling is required for the correct development/maturation of the DRG. Developmental Dynamics 230:44–56, 2004. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Chromospheric Alfvénic Waves Strong Enough to Power the Solar Wind

Alfvén waves have been invoked as a possible mechanism for the heating of the Sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, to millions of degrees and for the acceleration of the solar wind to hundreds of kilometers per second. However, Alfvén waves of sufficient strength have not been unambiguously observed in the solar atmosphere. We used images of high temporal and spatial resolution obtained with the Solar Optical Telescope onboard the Japanese Hinode satellite to reveal that the chromosphere, the region sandwiched between the solar surface and the corona, is permeated by Alfvén waves with strong amplitudes on the order of 10 to 25 kilometers per second and periods of 100 to 500 seconds. Estimates of the energy flux carried by these waves and comparisons with advanced radiative magnetohydrodynamic simulations indicate that such Alfvén waves are energetic enough to accelerate the solar wind and possibly to heat the quiet corona.
Compulsive usage of Internet and mobile phone by teenagers: a new empirical evidence

In the recent years, the rapid increase in mobile phone and Internet usage, has determined various benefits to their users, such as social relations and new ways of communication (virtual interactions by email, chat or instant messaging). On the other hand, an abuse of these technologies might cause adverse health effects (i.e. social isolation and other forms of psychological disorders), especially on young people, which is considered to be at high risk for pathological and addictive technologies use. In this paper, a case study on Internet and mobile phone habits among teenagers, is discussed. In particular, a questionnaire has been submitted to a sample of students, with ages ranging from 11 to 13 years old, attending some schools belonging to the districts of Lecce and Brindisi (Apulia Region). A cluster analysis combined with a binary logistic regression has been applied, in order to: a) outline the profile of teenagers that overuse Internet and mobile phone, b) assess the relationships among behaviours and attitudes of teenagers, with reference to the above-mentioned technologies.
Role of protein binding in renal elimination of leptin

objective Leptin, a hormone produced by fat which signals to the brain the extent of fat stores, is known to be eliminated from circulation primarily by the kidney. The hormone circulates in both free and protein‐bound forms, but there is little information concerning the inter‐relationship of these forms of leptin, or which form is influenced by physiological processes such as renal elimination. We studied total, free and bound concentrations of leptin in ambulatory adults undergoing catheterization for diagnosis/management of congenital cardiac disease.
The Earlier, the Worse? Age of Onset of Sexual Interest in Children.

AIM Investigating the variability of the age of onset (AOO) of sexual interest in children (SIC) and the interrelations of important measures in individuals having a SIC, especially the role of the AOO. METHODS A sample of 75 individuals from different contexts having a SIC was examined within an online survey. We explored the relations between AOO and other characteristics of the sample using correlation coefficients. The main outcome measures were self-reported AOO of the SIC, its exclusiveness, its flexibility over time, participants' motivation to change it, and their self-efficacy for modifying it. RESULTS Results displayed that the AOO ranges from 6 to 44, and has a mean value of 17 and a median of 15 years. AOO correlates only with the flexibility, indicating that the earlier participants recognized their SIC, the less change they have experienced over time. CONCLUSION AOO of SIC may be broadly distributed and related to its flexibility. Further studies should clarify the relevance of these preliminary results and their possible implications for clinical practice.