New technologies change the ways in which information and knowledge are used and created. This has economic impacts that have led to extensive discussions on the need to revise and adapt intellectual property rights in the knowledge society. Access to information and knowledge has also political consequences, as societal development and the possibilities to participate in development crucially ...

Micron-sized magnetic poly (methyl acrylate) (mPMA) microspheres were prepared by a novel modified suspension polymerization method. mPMA microspheres were highly functionalized by the ammonolysis reaction with ethylenediamine to yield abundant amino groups (-NH2) on the surface. The morphology, magnetic property and surface functionality of the magnetic microspheres were examined by SEM, VSM a...

Self-organizing maps (SOM) are widely used for their topology preservation property: neighboring input vectors are quantified (or classified) either on the same location or on neighbor ones on a predefined grid. SOM are also widely used for their more classical vector quantization property. We show in this paper that using SOM instead of the more classical Simple Competitive Learning (SCL) algo...

The level of serum neuron-specific enolase (NSE) has been implicated as a prognostic factor for patients with small cell lung cancer (SCLC). A prospective evaluation was undertaken to assess the prognostic significance of pretreatment NSE and treatment-induced minimum NSE values in patients with SCLC. Patients from two Phase III North Central Cancer Treatment Group trials [one for patients with...

BACKGROUND The rate of detection of HER-2/neu and CD117 (c-kit) overexpression in small cell lung cancer (SCLC) has varied widely; between 5-35% and 21-70% respectively. METHODS To evaluate the relationship between pesticide exposure and HER-2/neu and CD117 overexpression in extensive stage SCLC (ESSCLC), we identified patients with ESSCLC and assessed pesticide exposure using a predetermined...

In this paper, we propose a modified Polak–Ribière–Polyak (PRP) conjugate gradient method. An attractive property of the proposed method is that the direction generated by the method is always a descent direction for the objective function. This property is independent of the line search used. Moreover, if exact line search is used, the method reduces to the ordinary PRP method. Under appropria...

This paper studies the effect of strengthening intellectual property rights (IPRs) after the signing of the TRIPS on agricultural trade, for the period 1995-2011. It uses data of agricultural exports and a new yearly index of intellectual property (IP) protection, for 60 developed and developing countries. Also, the paper studies bilateral trade links and the intensive and extensive margins of ...

In order to closely simulate the real network scenario thereby verify the effectiveness of protocol designs, it is necessary to model the traffic flows carried over realistic networks. Extensive studies [1] showed that the actual traffic in access and local area networks (e.g., those generated by ftp and video streams) exhibits the property of self-similarity and long-range dependency (LRD) [2]...