The 1883 Patents Act in Britain provides perspective formodern patent policy reforms because it radically changed incentives for inventors by reducing filing fees by 84 percent. Patents increased 2.5-fold after the reform, which was evenly distributed across the geography of inventors, the organization of invention 0 September 2010 ccepted 15 October 2010 vailable online 30 November 2010

As laparoscopic cholecystectomy is being used more and more frequently, a cost analysis was aimed to be performed to evaluate cost effectiveness in Turkey. Records of 376 patients who underwent cholecystectomy by various methods were analyzed retrospectively. Mean duration of postoperative hospital stay was 5.1 +/- 2.6 days for the open cholecystectomy group (OC group), composed of 177 patients...

During these times of financial restraint it is beholden on all clinicians critically to evaluate their therapeutic methods with regard to cost effectiveness. Take, for example, intravenous nutrinion. Can it be justified in terms of clinical benefit and, if so, might not the costs be reduced without compromising the effectiveness of the regimens employed? Intravenous feeding is expensive. The s...

Current Mars rovers travel a few kilometers per year. Future rovers will need to travel a couple orders of magnitude faster than that in order to move from safe landing zones to areas of scientific interest – which may be many 10s of kilometers away from a suitable landing location. This paper describes a recent field test of the SR-II rover. SR-II is a 22kg solar powered autonomous rover, whic...

abstract : Matrix clocks have nice properties that can be used in the context of distributed database protocols and fault tolerant protocols. Unfortunately, they are costly to implement, requiring storage and communication overhead of size O(n 2) for a system of n sites. They are often considered a non feasible approach when the number of sites is large. In this paper, we rstly describe an eeci...