bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Communication, Observability and Cooperation: a Field Experiment on Collective Water Management in India
Authors: O'Garra Tanya , Alfredo Katherine A.
Published: July 2018

This study is an empirical investigation of the potential for communication and observability interventions to increase cooperation around communal water treatment systems amongst villagers in rural India. Despite the dependence of many rural communities in India on communal water sources and treatment plants for safe drinking water, they often fail to collectively manage these resources, resulting in abandoned water points and treatment systems with consequent health and mortality impacts. Results of public goods games framed in terms of the management of communal water treatment systems suggest that observability (public disclosure of behaviour) had the very significant effect of decreasing contributions to the public good. Analysis suggests this was mainly due to conformity to frequently-observed free-riding. Only when participants were actively encouraged to negotiate agreements, did cooperation increase significantly - albeit intermittently. These results show that the success of institutional design principles devised to increase cooperation depends on existing social norms and practices in the community of interest. A failure to account for these informal rules and standards of behaviour may result in unintended consequences, such as a decline in collective action around the public good.
How to Make a Patent Market
Authors: Lemley Mark
Published: July 2018

Imagine a stock market in which buyers and sellers couldn't find out theprices at which anyone else sold a share of stock. If you wanted to buy (orsell) a share of stock, you'd have to guess what it was worth. The result,everyone would agree, would be massively inefficient. Willing buyers andsellers would often miss each other. Patents, however, exist in just such ablind market. Want to know if you're getting a good deal on a patentlicense, or acquiring rights in a technology? Too bad. Even if that patentor ones like it have been licensed dozens of times before, the terms ofthose licenses, including the price itself, will almost invariably beconfidential. Patent owners who want to put their rights up for sale facethe same problem.The result? Willing licensors and licensees can't find each other. Patentauctions often fizzle, because without a thick market - one with an arrayof buyers and sellers bidding on price - no one can know whether they aregetting a steal or being had. When parties do license patents, the pricesare (to the extent we can tell) all over the map. And the rest of the worldhas no idea what those prices are. This in turn means that courts lackadequate benchmarks to determine a ¿reasonable royalty¿ when companiesinfringe patents.The solution is straightforward: require publication of patent assignmentand license terms. Doing so won't magically make the market for patentswork like a stock exchange; there will still be significant uncertaintyabout whether a patent is valid and what it covers. But it will permit theaggregate record of what companies pay for rights to signal what particularpatents are worth and how strong they are, just as derivative financialinstruments allow markets to evaluate and price other forms of risk. Itwill help rationalize patent transactions, turning them from secret,one-off negotiations into a real, working market for patents. And by makingit clear to courts and the world at large what the normal price is forpatent rights, it will make it that much harder for a few unscrupulouspatent owners to hold up legitimate innovators, and for establishedcompanies to systematically infringe the rights of others.
Porphyreon through the Ages. The Fading Archaeological Heritage of the Lebanese Coast
Authors: Gwiazda Mariusz
Published: July 2018

Ancient Porphyreon (Jiyeh/Nebi Younis) was a large rural settlement located on the coast of modern-day Lebanon, near the Phoenician city of Sidon. This article presents the initial research results of the stratigraphic data, extending from at least the eighth century BC to the seventh century AD, and how Phoenician village functioned. Analysis proves that it played a significant role in the local economy—on the one hand, providing for the city of Sidon and, on the other, mediating the exchange of goods with rural settlements, scattered across the mountainous hinterland. Uncovering the mysteries of this coastal settlement is extremely important, especially in light of the increasing threat to the archaeological heritage of Lebanon.
Revisiting Demise Through Success: The Lesbian and Gay Movement after Obergefell
Authors: van der Vort Eric
Published: July 2018

This article examines the prospects of decline in the LGBT movement after the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision, Obergefell v. Hodges. I reject arguments that the movement is likely to enter a period of decline and argue that we should analyze the post-marriage movement developmentally. The LGBT movement is actually multiple movements made up of numerous strands developed over time. This developmental approach views movements as a set of organizations and actors who are best served by keeping these numerous strands active and available to call on in times of need. In uncertain political times where the movement seeks to defend its gains and gain new ones, it can resist decline by activating and institutionalizing these numerous strands.This article was published in Sociological Imagination vol 53 iss 1.
Post-Truth Overexposure: Media Consumption and Confidence in Institutions
Authors: Papazian Nick
Published: July 2018

Does increased consumption of media affect how the public views the institutions of government and media? This study analyzes the relationships between time spent consuming television and Internet, where a respondent gets their news from (television vs. Internet), and confidence in these institutions. I predict an inverse relationship between exposure to television and Internet and confidence in media and government. I further hypothesize that people who get their news primarily from the Internet have less confidence in these institutions than those who get their news from television. I test this relationship using a sample of 370 respondents from the 2016 General Social Survey (GSS) dataset, controlling for race, gender, political views, education, respondents' family income at the age of 16, and age. OLS regression analysis shows that more hours spent watching television positively impacts confidence in media, and that those who get their news from the Internet have less confidence in the media, as do conservatives, regardless of media consumption. No independent variables determine confidence in government, which is only associated negatively with being conservative. A second regression model using confidence in press instead of media shows that females are significantly less likely to trust the press and that people of color are significantly more likely to trust the press. The relationships from the first model retained their significance. This model shows a higher significance level for the conservative relationship. These differences are discussed along with recommendations for further research.
Valuable Patents
Authors: Lemley Mark
Published: July 2018

While the theory of the patent system is premised on the idea that patentswill be used to exclude competitors, only a tiny fraction of patents areever enforced. Legal and economic scholars have theorized as to how toidentify valuable patents based on their individual characteristics. Inthis paper, we present the results of the largest empirical study everconducted of the patent system. We compare the characteristics of litigatedpatents to those of issued patents generally, and we find importantdifferences in a range of dimensions. These data confirm some predictionsin the literature regarding patent value and refute others. New patents aremore likely to be litigated than old patents. Foreign patent owners areless likely to litigate than domestic patent owners. Patents that issue toindividuals or small companies are much more likely to be litigated thanthose that issue to big companies, though many of those patents havechanged hands by the time they are brought to court. Patents that cite moreprior art are more likely to be litigated, and those that are litigatedtend to be cited more elsewhere. Most significantly, there are substantialdifferences between industries in the likelihood of patent litigation.Patents in the mechanical, computer, and medical device industries aresignificantly more likely to be litigated, for example, than patents in thechemical and semiconductor industries.In the paper, we explore the implications of these findings in detail.Taken together, the data give a profile of a few valuable patents thatstand out from a field of ordinary ones. They are the patents that theirowners spend the most time and money in prosecuting. They are the ones thatcompetitors recognize as most important. They are concentrated in a fewindustries in which patents play a more significant role in encouraginginnovation. And they are patents that issue to individuals or smallcompanies with asymmetric stakes in patent litigation, not to largecompanies. These conclusions in turn have significant implications for thedesign of the patent system, patent reform efforts and patent valuationtheories - implications we consider at the end of the paper.
Cultural complexity and demography: the case of folktales
Authors: Acerbi Alberto
Published: July 2018

We investigate the relation between cultural complexity and population size in a non-technological cultural domain for which we have suitable quantitative records: folktales. We define three levels of complexity for folk narratives: the number of tale types, the number of narrative motifs, and, finally, the number of traits in variants of the same type, for two well known tales for which we have data from previous studies. We found a positive relationship between number of tale types and population size, a negative relationship for the number of narrative motifs, and no relationship for the number of traits. The absence of a consistent relation between population size and complexity in folktales provides a novel perspective on the current debates in cultural evolution. We propose that the link between cultural complexity and demography could be domain dependent: in some domains (e.g. technology) this link is important, whereas in others, such as folktales, complex traditions can be easily maintained in small populations as well as large ones, as they may appeal to universal cognitive biases.
When size matters: advantages of weighted effect coding in observational studies
Authors: Nieuwenhuis Rense
Published: July 2018

To include nominal and ordinal variables as predictors in regression models, their categories first have to be trans- formed into so-called ‘dummy variables’. There are many transformations available, and popular is ‘dummy coding’ in which the estimates represent deviations from a prese- lected ‘reference category’. A way to avoid choosing a reference category is effect coding, where the resulting estimates are deviations from a grand (unweighted) mean. An alternative for effect coding was given by Sweeney and Ulveling in 1972, which provides estimates representing deviations from the sample mean and is especially useful when the data are unbalanced (i.e., categories holding different numbers of observation). Despite its elegancy, this weighted effect coding has been cited only 35 times in the past 40 years, according to Google Scholar citations (more recent references include Hirschberg and Lye 2001 and Gober and Freeman 2005). Furthermore, it did not become a standard option in statistical packages such as SPSS and R. The aim of this paper is to revive weighted effect coding illustrated by recent research on the body mass index (BMI) and to provide easy-to-use syntax for SPSS, R, and Stata on http://www.ru.nl/sociology/mt/wec/ downloads. For didactical reasons we apply OLS regres- sion models, but it will be shown that weighted effect coding can be used in any generalized linear model.
An Antitrust Assessment of the Google Book Search Settlement
Authors: Lemley Mark
Published: July 2018

The Google Book Search settlement has prompted a flurry of attention fromcommentators, including a number of respected scholars who have worriedthat the settlement makes Google an 'orphan works monopoly.' In this paperI evaluate these claims and find them generally unpersuasive. The GoogleBook Search settlement expands, rather than diminishes, access to books ofall sorts, and that is particularly true of orphan works.
Archipelagic Nationalism and Chinese Food Culture in New Order Indonesia: Making Indonesian Food, Erasing Chinese Food
Authors: Oman-Reagan Michael P.
Published: July 2018

This paper examines the history of Indonesian nationalism in terms of relationships with Chinese food culture. The paper explores how colonial inheritances, assimilationist ideology and the emergence of an archipelagic nationalism included and excluded Chinese foodways in New Order era embargoes on and erasures of Chinese cultural expression. By looking at the way food was and was not included in the bans on public performances of Chinese culture, I explore how Chinese-Indonesian culture was constructed, produced, and framed in the New Order era in light of the culture bans. I do this by first looking for the historical roots of New Order nationalism and assimilation and seeking to understand how these relations of power informed what was considered Indonesian and what was considered Chinese. I then look at how the Chinese origin of Indonesian food culture was erased from collective memory by these processes. I propose that an archipelagic nationalism was produced in Indonesia through a claim to “unity in diversity” which relied on the exclusion of groups within Indonesia’s boundaries from that unification.Keywords:Southeast Asian Studies, Chinese Studies, Anthropology of Food, Nationalism, Malaysia, Communism, Indonesia, China, EmpirePlease cite as:Oman-Reagan, Michael P. 2013. “Archipelagic Nationalism and Chinese Food Culture in New Order Indonesia: Making Indonesian Food, Erasing Chinese Food.” SocArXiv, Open Science Framework. Manuscript, submitted January 23, 2017. osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/cm7eu
Designing Optimal Software Patents
Authors: Lemley Mark
Published: July 2018

Patents constitute our foremost policy tool for encouraging innovation.However, because each new technology provides an important input tosubsequent innovation, the exclusive rights conferred by a patent may alsoimpose significant costs upon follow-on innovators. Optimal patent policyshould seek to maximize the patent incentive effect, while minimizingburdens placed on future innovation by tailoring the scope of the patent tothe characteristics of each technological sector affected.In the case of software, recent scholarship has illuminated the innovationprofile of the current industry. Software is characterized by incrementalinnovation, relatively low development costs, and short, volatile productlife cycles. Interoperability and compatibility between complementaryproducts is a major concern, making technical transparency or reverseengineering critical to product development. This suggests a need forrelatively narrow patents that are relatively easy to obtain, and subjectto the exceptions necessary to ensure interoperation and follow-ondevelopment.However, current software patent doctrine bears little relationship to thisindustrial profile. The United States Court of Appeals for the FederalCircuit has set an extremely lax standard of disclosure software patents,resulting in patents scope unconstrained by doctrines of enablement andwritten description. Recent changes that make patent law amenable tosoftware have produced a flood of new applications, allowing firms to adopta patent thicket strategy for licensing leverage. At the same time, FederalCircuit case law suggests that a stringent standard for patentnon-obviousness will be applied to such patents, resulting in relativelyfew valid software patents. Optimal software patent doctrine wouldconstrain scope to deal with patent thicket while lowering thenon-obviousness standard to validate more issued software patents.
We Live in a Motorized Civilization: Robert Moses Replies to Robert Caro
Authors: Boeing Geoff
Published: July 2018

In 1974, Robert Caro published The Power Broker, a critical biography of Robert Moses’s dictatorial tenure as the "master builder" of mid-century New York. Moses profoundly transformed New York's urban fabric and transportation system, producing the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the Westside Highway, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Lincoln Center, the UN headquarters, Shea Stadium, Jones Beach State Park and many other projects. However, The Power Broker did lasting damage to his public image and today he remains one of the most controversial figures in city planning history. On August 26, 1974, Moses issued a turgid 23-page statement denouncing Caro's work as "full of mistakes, unsupported charges, nasty baseless personalities, and random haymakers." Moses's original typewritten statement survives today as a grainy photocopy in the New York City Parks Department archive. To better preserve and disseminate it, I have extracted and transcribed its text using optical character recognition and edited the result to correct errors. Here I compile my transcription of Moses's statement, alongside Caro's reply to it.
Marital boundaries and highly achieving immigrants: How upward assimilation can lead to intermarriage resistance
Authors: Cheng Yuching
Published: July 2018

According to the ‘Asian American marriage paradox’, Asian-origin groups generally achieve upward assimilation, but experience different paths to marital assimilation, including marriage to white natives. The author uses the perceptions of a sample of successful Taiwanese immigrant parents regarding marriageable partners for their children to examine how integration can result in resistance to intermarriage with whites. An analytical framework called marital boundaries is proposed to show how differences between ‘marriageable us’ and ‘undesirable them’ are perceived by individuals who occupy different family positions. Data from 37 interviews with highly achieving Taiwan-origin immigrants residing in San Diego reveal a long-term effect of homeland politics on their Asian-centered hierarchies for preferred marriage partners for their children. Impacted by a growing sense of Taiwanese nationalism starting in the 1970s, many interviewees described a moral line between different Asian groups that helped them define their marital boundaries. The data provide evidence of a tendency among Asian immigrants to follow segmented assimilation paths based in part on transnational influences. The findings challenge assumptions found in the immigration literature that define intermarriage with whites as a form of social mobility, as well as descriptions of Asians as a single homogeneous category.
Dirty Theory: Sketches of an Anthropological Account of Mountain Biking
Authors: Prisk Dan
Published: July 2018

At attempt to sketch the outlines of an anthropological account of mountain biking. Engaging with Foucauldian power, Standpoint theory, notions of technology, and of embodied practice.
Life After Bilski
Authors: Lemley Mark
Published: July 2018

In Bilski v. Kappos, the Supreme Court declined calls to categoricallyexclude business methods - or any technology - from the patent law. It alsorejected as the sole test of subject matter eligibility the FederalCircuit’s deeply-flawed "machine or transformation" test, under which noprocess is patentable unless it is tied to a particular machine ortransforms an article to another state or thing. Subsequent developmentsthreaten to undo that holding, however. Relying on the Court’s descriptionof the Federal Circuit test as a "useful and important clue', the U.S.Patent and Trademark Office, patent litigants, and district courts have allcontinued to rely on the machine-or-transformation test in the wake ofBilski: no longer as the sole rule, but as a presumptive starting pointthat threatens to effectively become mandatory. In this Article, we suggesta new way to understand the exclusion of abstract ideas from patentablesubject matter. No class of invention is inherently too abstract forpatenting. Rather, the rule against patenting abstract ideas is an effortto prevent inventors from claiming their ideas too broadly. By requiringthat patent claims be limited to a specific set of practical applicationsof an idea, the abstract ideas doctrine both makes the scope of theresulting patent clearer and leaves room for subsequent inventors toimprove upon - and patent new applications of - the same basic principle.Recasting the abstract ideas doctrine as an overclaiming test eliminatesthe constraints of the artificial machine-or-transformation test, as wellas the pointless effort to fit inventions into permissible or impermissiblecategories. It also helps understand some otherwise-inexplicabledistinctions in the case law. Testing for overclaiming allows courts tofocus on what really matters: whether the scope of the patentee's claimsare commensurate with the invention’s practical, real-world contribution.This inquiry, we suggest, is the touchstone of the abstract ideas analysis,and the way out of the post-Bilski confusion.
Percent Black: Regionalism, Urbanism and Group Threat as Explanations for Racial Disparities in Imprisonment 1985-2001
Authors: Oliver Pamela Elaine
Published: July 2018

Black prison admission rates & Black/White disparities in prison admissions 1985-2001 were lower in the Old South than in the North. Detailed examination shows a threshold effect: the minimum Black imprisonment rate was uncorrelated with percent Black, but very high Black imprisonment rates occurred only where the percent Black was relatively low. This is not explained by the statistical instability of small populations: although there is more instability where the percent Black is low, the pattern holds up for places with large Black populations. It is also not explained by urbanity as the pattern replicates for metropolitan areas. In addition, the assumption that imprisonment is basically an urban phenomenon is wrong: Whites have higher imprisonment rates in rural areas, and the urban-rural difference for Blacks declined to a low level by the end of the study period. Other minorities are briefly discussed, showing that each has a distinctive pattern. Overall the data refute simplistic theories of group threat and support social control theories that consider both the capacity and desire for social control.
Intuition, iteration, induction
Authors: van Atten Mark
Published: July 2018

In Mathematical Thought and Its Objects, Charles Parsons argues that our knowledge of the iterability of functions on the natural numbers and of the validity of complete induction is not intuitive knowledge ; Brouwer disagrees on both counts. I will compare Parsons' argument with Brouwer's and defend the latter. I will not argue that Parsons is wrong once his own conception of intuition is granted, as I do not think that that is the case. But I will try to make two points: (1) Using elements from Husserl and from Brouwer, Brouwer's claims can be justified in more detail than he has done; (2) There are certain elements in Parsons' discussion that, when developed further, would lead to Brouwer's notion thus analysed, or at least something relevantly similar to it. (This version contains a postscript of May, 2015.)
The prevalence of child sexual abuse among Slovak late adolescents
Authors: Karkoskova Slavka , Ropovik Ivan
Published: July 2018

The present study aimed to assess the prevalence and characteristics of child sexual abuse (CSA) in a nationally-representative sample of Slovak late adolescents. Randomized cluster sampling plan was used to sample 2186 secondary school students in their final school year with mean age of 18.6 years (SD = 0.7 years). The study employed the Child Sexual Abuse Questionnaire (Mohler-Kuo et al., 2014) consisting of multiple behavior-specific questions. The prevalence of CSA was analyzed separately for three clusters of CSA and gender. The self-reported lifetime prevalence of at least one form of CSA was 47.3% among girls and 22.0% among boys. The prevalence of noncontact forms of CSA was 40.6% among girls and 17.7% among boys. CSA with physical contact without penetration was reported by 30.2% girls and 11.6% boys. The prevalence of CSA with penetration was 5.6% among girls and 1.3% among boys. More than half of CSA occurred between 16-18 year of age in all three CSA cluster types. The severity of abuse was positively associated with the acquaintance with the perpetrator. Roughly 43-56% disclosed the abuse to another person. The majority of disclosed CSA was revealed to peers and partners. Negligible proportion of CSA instances were reported to the police. The results show that CSA is a widespread and considerably covert phenomenon within the population of Slovak late adolescents. Prevention activities should consider broad spectrum of CSA forms in order to counteract tendencies to associate CSA only with unwanted sexual intercourse.
Open Educational Science
Authors: van der Zee Tim , Reich Justin
Published: July 2018

Scientific progress is built on research that is reliable, accurate, and verifiable. The methods and evidentiary reasoning that underlie scientific claims must be available for scrutiny. Like other fields, the education sciences suffers from problems such as failure to replicate, validity and generalization issues, publication bias, and high costs of access to publications—all of which are symptoms of a nontransparent approach to research. Each aspect of the scientific cycle—research design, data collection, analysis, and publication—can and should be made more transparent and accessible. Open Education Science is a set of practices designed to increase the transparency of evidentiary reasoning and access to scientific research in a domain characterized by diverse disciplinary traditions and a commitment to impact in policy and practice. Transparency and accessibility are functional imperatives that come with many benefits for the individual researcher, the scientific community, and society at large—Open Education Science is the way forward.
Operating Anew: Queering GIS with Good Enough Software
Authors: Gieseking Jack
Published: July 2018

In the last decade, conversations around queering of GIScience emerged. Drawing on literature from feminist and queer critical GIS with special attention to the under-examined political economy of GIS, I suggest that the critical project of queering all of GIS, both GIScience and GISystems, requires not just recognition of the labor and lives of queers and research in geographies of sexualities. Based upon a queer feminist political economic critique and evidenced in my teaching critical GIS at two elite liberal arts colleges, I argue that “status quo” between ESRI and geography as a field must be interrupted. Extending a critical GIS focus beyond data structures and data ethics, I argue that geographic researchers and instructors have a responsibility in queering our choice and production of software, algorithms, and code alike. I call this production and choice of democratic, accessible, and useful software by, for, and about the needs of its users good enough software. Instead, I argue that “status quo” between ESRI and geography as a field must be interrupted.
The Natural and Infrastructural Capital Elements of Potential Post-Electrification Wealth Creation in Kenya
Authors: Diego
Published: July 2018

While it is widely accepted that electricity is a “necessary but not sufficient condition” for development, there is little research that explores the conditions under which electrification might lead to wealth creation post-electrification. Using Kenya as a case study, this paper uses natural capital (NC) and infrastructural capital (IC) to compare the enabling environments of entrepreneur vs. government run off-grid electrification projects, explores the role that NC and IC can play in determining wealth creation post-electrification, and develops a micro-enterprise development (MED) index indicating regions in Kenya that could be well positioned for wealth creation (and thus, persistent demand) post-electrification. A comparison between the MED index and a nightlights GDP per capita proxy finds that their local differences are informative towards the management and use of local resources, suggests that a nightlights proxy could provide a large underestimate, and sheds light towards regions where the gap between achieved and unrealized potential may be large. We hypothesize that the large discrepancy between our MED index and the night lights income proxy is due to an underestimate of economic activity by night lights (most of the economic activity in rural areas happens during the day), the nature of the MED index being a measure of ‘potential’, and several other factors that could affect both variables such as local climate and environmental conditions, population stress on natural resources, quality of infrastructural capital (not only access), local corruption, and ethnic favoritism. We discuss these at length throughout our paper.
Broadest Reasonable Interpretation and Appellate Review
Authors: Rantanen Jason
Published: July 2018

In this essay, I examine the meaning of "broadest reasonable interpretation" along two dimensions: how it affects the Federal Circuit's review of Patent Office claim constructions and what it seems to mean in substantive terms. Central to both is the term "reasonable." How should that term be understood? Does it mean that the Federal Circuit grants deference to the Patent Office when reviewing its constructions, as some commentators describe and some opinions suggest? And, perhaps more importantly, what is a "broadest reasonable interpretation" and how does that fit into the process of claim construction generally?Here, I argue that regardless of one's view on the historical nature of judicial review of Patent Office claim interpretation, any deference is inconsistent with the Federal Circuit's use of a de novo standard when reviewing claim interpretations by the Patent Office (with the exception of findings of fact relating to extrinsic evidence). Second, I argue that the still-developing jurisprudence at the Federal Circuit is coalescing around a meaning of "broadest reasonable interpretation" that allows for the existence of multiple ordinary meanings and reads the intrinsic evidence with a certain degree of "looseness," but which is still hesitant to embrace ambiguity within the application of the tools of claim construction.
Investigating the Difference in Policy Responses to the 2004 and 2005 Hurricane Seasons and Homeowner Insurance Crises in Florida and Louisiana
Authors: Ubert Emanuel
Published: July 2018

In 2004 and 2005, a series of hurricanes caused record homeowner insurance losses in Florida and Louisiana. Despite comparably sized losses, the two states responded differently to these shocks. Florida expanded state subsidized homeowner insurance, breaking from a free market response, whereas Louisiana actively promoted private market supply. Comparing the two policy processes reveals that the politics and transformation of homeowner insurance evoked by extreme weather events depend on how concentrated the hurricane impact is and whether it effectively mobilizes homeowners into electoral politics. The broader distribution of losses in Florida prompted homeowners to exert sufficient electoral pressure to influence policy responses, fostering political dynamics emphasized by interest group theories of policy, and a break from the market. The more concentrated hurricane impact in Louisiana blocked homeowners from doing the same, leaving Louisiana’s policymakers free to draw on the institutionalized free-market logic to guide their response to hurricane damages and producing trajectories expected by structural-class theories. The findings highlight the contingency of different approaches to the politics of markets and policy, suggesting that the dynamics proposed by the two theories depend on the distribution and political impact of the problems and shocks involved.
The Audience in Intellectual Property Infringement
Authors: Lemley Mark
Published: July 2018

Every IP right has its own definition of infringement. In this paper, wesuggest that this diversity of legal rules is largely traceable todifferences in the audience in IP cases. Patent, trademark, copyright, anddesign patent each focus on a different person as the fulcrum forevaluating IP infringement. The fact that patent law focuses on an expertaudience while trademark looks to a consumer audience explains many of thedifferences in how patent and trademark cases are decided. Expert audiencesare likely to evaluate infringement based on the technical similaritybetween the plaintiff’s and defendant’s works. Consumers, by contrast, arelikely to pay more attention to market substitution and less attention tohow things work under the hood. Understanding the different audiences in IPinfringement is critical to understanding how the IP regimes defineinfringement.The focus on audience has normative as well as descriptive implications.Neither patent law, with its focus on experts and technical similarity, nortrademark law, with its market-based consumer focus, has it entirelycorrect. Rather, we suggest that as a general matter infringement of an IPright should require both technical similarity and market substitution.Assessing infringement through the expert’s eyes ensures that the lawprevents closely related works in the field while allowing latercontributions to the field that are sufficiently different. The consumervantage point ensures that we protect IP owners only when they have beenharmed in the marketplace.IP owners who want to show infringement should have to show both that thedefendant’s work is technically similar to their own from the expert’svantage point and that the defendant’s use causes the plaintiff marketharm. Copyright law, which does look both to experts and to consumers atvarious points in infringement analysis, is on the right track.
An Empirical Study of the Twenty-Year Patent Term
Authors: Lemley Mark
Published: July 2018

The new twenty-year patent term has engendered considerable controversy. Anumber of inventors have complained that the new patent term may reducepatent protection because some applications spend a number of years in“prosecution” before the PTO. Under the old law, delay in processing anapplication did not hurt the patentee, but under the new rule, each dayspent in prosecuting the patent is a day of protection lost.The purpose of this study is to evaluate in a neutral and systematic waythe likely effects of the new law. I conclude that on average, and for mostindustries, the new law gives more protection to patentees than the oldlaw. However, there is some question as to whether the biotechnologyindustry will receive less protection under the new law. I conclude thatthere is no significant relationship between the length of time a patentspends in prosecution and whether it will be judged valid in the courts.Finally, the study produces some interesting data about the problem of“submarine patents.”
Implementing and Analyzing Social Media in Higher Education
Authors: Compton D'Lane , Davis Jenny , Farris Nicole , Love Tony
Published: July 2018

This article examines how social media can incorporate into the higher education setting in meaningful ways using optional participation, active content production, and active moderation. The authors use two authoethnographic case studies. The first case pertains to pedagogical use through a student created and maintained Facebook group for a Sociology of Gender course. The second case pertains to the construction and maintenance of a participatory learning culture through a departmental Facebook page. The article includes accounts from each case and an analysis of the successful components.
'Humanising the prison walls'
Authors: BHATLI PARIKA
Published: July 2018

Understanding the Sociology of Prisons and reform activities. Also an insight into inmates perspective on society.
Ignoring Patents
Authors: Lemley Mark
Published: July 2018

More than 2.5 million United States patents have been issued in the lasttwenty years. While these patents are spread across all industries, a largepercentage are concentrated in the information technology (IT) industries,and others in biotechnology. The prevalence of patents in these industrieshas caused a number of people to worry about an "anticommons" in patentlaw. Given these problems, it's a wonder companies make products inpatent-intensive industries at all.And yet make products they do. Both my own experience and what limitedempirical evidence there is suggest that companies do not seem muchdeterred by the threat of all this patent litigation from making products.What's going on here? The answer, I think, is quite simple: bothresearchers and companies in component industries simply ignore patents.Virtually everyone does it. They do it at all stages of endeavor. From theperspective of an outsider to the patent system, this is a remarkable fact.And yet it may be what prevents the patent system from crushing innovationin component industries like IT. Ignoring patents, then, may be a"workaround" that allows the innovation system to function in the face ofoverbroad patent protection.At the same time, ignoring patents is hardly the optimal solution. Isuggest some ways we might move towards a compromise - a robust patentmarket in which inventors could get paid without the problems of holdup andthe anticommons.
Improving access to digital historical census boundaries in Canada
Authors: Allen Jeff , Leahey Amber
Published: July 2018

Historical census boundary datasets are invaluable resources for mapping and analyzing demographics over space and time. In Canada, finding and using historical census boundary data can be a little difficult. Statistics Canada makes tabular census data available online for the 2011, 2006, 2001, and 1996 Censuses, with some summary profile tables available back to 1991. For boundary files however, fewer censuses are accessible, with only 2011, 2006, and 2001 available online. Today, access to the older collections is typically mediated by Statistics Canada, or academic libraries who have access through the Data Liberation Initiative (DLI) program. Given that the data from these earlier years are not readily available online publically, it prevents researchers from easily accessing and using them. In addition, for some of the older censuses, the digital spatial data are stored in archaic data formats which present challenges for use in modern Geographic Information Systems (GIS).In the fall of 2015, Scholars Portal and the University of Toronto Map and Data Library embarked on a project to bring together the dispersed collection of digital census geography datasets and make them available online so they can be easily accessed by researchers, students, and the general public. This project makes data and documentation available openly through the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) Scholars GeoPortal platform (http://geo.scholarsportal.info). In making the collection available online openly and all in one place, these datasets will be shared and reused more effectively, thus reducing barriers and duplication for researchers everywhere.This paper outlines the current status of census boundary datasets in Canada and then details our work which includes collecting known datasets from a variety of sources, data conversion, composing a comprehensive set of metadata, and providing online access to the collection. We also compiled an extensive inventory of all known boundaries produced in order to keep track of the collection as well as assess any gaps to help plan future digitization projects. We hope that this work is utilized and shared with others so that more attention is given to this important historical GIS collection.
Costly, Regressive and Ineffective: How Sensitive Is Public Support for the Mortgage Interest Deduction?
Authors: McCabe Brian J
Published: July 2018

This paper investigates whether public support for the mortgage interest deduction issensitive to critiques of the policy as regressive, costly or ineffective. The deduction is a popularsocial policy that lowers the cost of owning a home for some homeowners by enabling them to deduct their mortgage interest payments from their federal tax liability. Although the deduction enjoys broad public support, critics argue that it disproportionately benefits wealthy households, fails to expand homeownership opportunities to households on the margins and costs the federalgovernment an extraordinary amount of money in foregone tax revenue. Drawing on datacollected through an on-line experiment, this analysis tests the sensitivity of public support tothese critiques. The findings reveal that support for the mortgage interest deduction declineswhen respondents are presented with information about the cost, effectiveness or distribution of benefits associated with the deduction. Disaggregating support by political party and homeownership status reveals that support among renters is more sensitive to framing effects than that of homeowners. Republicans are less sensitive to framing effects than Democrats when the deduction is framed as distributing benefits unequally, but more sensitive to these effects when the issues is framed as costly. However, all groups register their lowest level of support when told that the mortgage interest deduction is not an effective tool for expanding ownership opportunities.
Aliens on the Internet—Anthropology of the imagination in online speculative fiction
Authors: Genovese Taylor R.
Published: July 2018

Read here: https://medium.com/space-anthropology/aliens-on-the-internet-60f72332ec81An analysis of a forum thread on SomethingAwful from a user claiming to be an extraterrestrial. Examines the cultural importance of online-based speculative fiction to the human imagination.
Risks, Returns, and Relational Lending: Personal Ties in Microfinance
Authors: Doering Laura
Published: July 2018

Personal relationships are a common feature of financial intermediation. However, existing research offers different expectations about whether personal ties prove detrimental or beneficial for lenders. Research on embeddedness from economic sociology highlights the advantages lenders accrue when they develop personal ties with borrowers, including enhanced trust, information-sharing and greater social control. Yet research from social psychology offers reason to suspect that personal relationships can be costly because lenders who feel personally tied to borrowers run the risk of escalating commitment to poor performers. Drawing on these lines of research, this study uses data from a Latin American microfinance bank to ask: When are personal relationships detrimental or beneficial for financial intermediaries? It shows that, when lenders and borrowers have personal relationships, lenders are less likely to cut ties with poor performers and borrowers miss fewer payments, consistent with expectations from both literatures. However, these trends vary with frequency of contact. When lenders and borrowers interact less frequently, lenders continue to show heightened commitment, but borrowers become less compliant, creating potential problems for lenders. Overall, this study integrates theories from economic sociology and social psychology to offer a more balanced, temporally-informed understanding of personal ties in finance.
Why Sociology Needs Science Fiction
Authors: Hirschman Daniel
Published: July 2018

Viewpoint forthcoming in Contexts Magazine.
Party, Class, and Mobility: An Empirical Investigation of Parents' Chinese Communist Party Membership's Effects on Children's Social Class in Contemporary China
Authors: Xiao Tongtian
Published: July 2018

Sociological interest in post-reform China has burgeoned since sociologists such as Victor Nee and Andrew Walder had initiated a debate of whether the market transition of former socialist countries benefit the direct producers of the market rather than political elites. Informed by the market transition debate, stratification theories, and intergenerational mobility studies, this study aims to examine whether under the party-state political structure, ruling party membership is a substantial exogenous source of social class stratification. Data in this study is drawn from the 2013 Chinese General Social Survey (n = 2,209). The ordinary least square (OLS) regression suggests that for non-institutionalized Chinese adults who are born during the reform era (1978 -2013), their parents' Chinese Communist Party membership is a statistically significant factor in determining their social class measured by their income and education, when holding constant sex, age, region, urbanity, and ethnicity. This study contributes to the sociological understanding of how political institutions shape individual socio-economic status and how state intervention perpetuates or diminishes social inequality on the individual level.
Grades of Discrimination: Indiscernibility, symmetry, and relativity
Authors: Button Tim
Published: July 2018

There are several relations which may fall short of genuine identity, but which behave like identity in important respects. Such grades of discrimination have recently been the subject of much philosophical and technical discussion. This paper aims to complete their technical investigation. Grades of indiscernibility are defined in terms of satisfaction of certain first-order formulas. Grades of symmetry are defined in terms of symmetries on a structure. Both of these families of grades of discrimination have been studied in some detail. However, this paper also introduces grades of relativity, defined in terms of relativeness correspondences. This paper explores the relationships between all the grades of discrimination, exhaustively answering several natural questions that have so far received only partial answers. It also establishes which grades can be captured in terms of satisfaction of object-language formulas, and draws connections with definability theory.Forthcoming in Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic.
Quantitative Assessment Method of Illegal Dumping in Small Rivers Case Study: Neamţ County, Romania
Authors: MIHAI Florin Constantin
Published: July 2018

Poor waste management facilities from Romanian rural areas lead touncontrolled waste disposal on improper sites. These bad practices arefrequently in the proximity of built-up areas , therefore, the small riversinside these areas are susceptible to waste dumping. The paper aims todevelop a quantitative assessment method of waste disposed into such smallrivers from extra-Carpathian region of Neam . The lack of organized waste collection servicesfrom 2003 lead to high values of waste disposed in such rivers frequentlyover 15 t/yr for each one. Despite some improvements compared to 2003 thesmall rivers inside built-up areas of villages are still highly exposed towaste dumping. The values vary depending on demographic and geographicfeatures of each locality and on the other side, due to the presence of anorganized waste collection system.The results and comparative analysisbetween 2003 and 2010 show some positive changes but the illegal dumpingissue is far from being eliminated.
Identity, Intersectionality and Welfare
Authors: Guha Majumdar Mrittunjoy
Published: July 2018

In this paper, nuances of identity, intersectionality and welfare are explored. I begin with a historical overview of the subject followed by an evolution of the concept. I move on to different realizations of intersectionality in politics and policy-making, healthcare, education, employment and property. I end the paper with a statement, based on the workings of the paper, that true welfare is always intersectional, in nature.