How vague can your patent be? Vagueness strategies in U.S. patents

Patent claims defi ne the protection scope of the intellectual property sought by the patent applicant or patentee. Broad claims are valuable as they can describe more expansive rights to the invention. Therefore, if these claims are too broad a potential infringer will more easily argue against them. But if the claims are too narrow the scope of protection of the intellectual property is greatly reduced. Patent claims have to be, on the one hand, determinate and precise enough and, on the other hand, as inclusive as possible. Therefore patent applicants must fi nd a balance in the broadness of the scope defi ned by their claims. This balance can be achieved by the choice of words with a convenient degree of semantic indeterminacy, by the choice of modifi ers or other strategies. In fact, vagueness in patent claims is a desirable characteristic for such documents. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of 350 U.S. patents provides a promising starting point to understand the linguistic instruments used to achieve the balance between property claim scope and precision of property description. To conclude, some issues relating vagueness and pragmatics are suggested as a line of further research.

A comparative analysis of ABE Bachelor of Science programs in European and US Universities.

European Universities are involved in series of great changes regarding teaching and education organization during the last few years. The origin of these changes is the creation of the so-called European Higher Education Area (EHEA), which main target is to harmonize the different University studies throughout Europe. As a consequence, most of the programs of studies in all degrees are suffering changes in order to converge to common structures. Taking advantage of the actual process, some European universities are moving from traditional Agricultural Engineering programs to a more wide discipline named recently as Biosystems Engineering, which is a science- based engineering discipline that integrates engineering science and design with applied biological, environmental and agricultural sciences, broadening in this way the area of application of Engineering sciences not strictly to agricultural sciences, but to the biologic al sciences in general, including the agricultural sciences. This paper presents a comparative study of different Bachelor of Science degrees offered by American and European Universities in the field of Agricultural/Biosystems Engineering. To carry out the analysis 40 programs accredited by ABET in American Universities and 50 European programs. Among other questions, the total number of credits, the number of semesters, the kind of modules and the distribution of subjects in groups (Basic Sciences, Engineering Fundamentals, Agricultural/Biological Sciences, Humanities & Economic Sciences, Applied Agricultural/Biological Engineering and electives) are discussed in the paper. The information provided can be an useful starting point in future definitions of new or renewed degrees with the aim of advancing in internationalization of the programs and helping student’s mobility.

Performance variability in basketball players with intellectual impairment: Ankara World Championships 2013 analysis

The aim of the present study was to identify performance variability in basketball for players with intellectual impairment (II) and to compare it with able-bodied (AB) players. Official game statistics from the 13 games played in the Ankara World II-Basketball Championships (2013) were gathered and descriptive data, variability coefficient (VC), maximum scores and its Z-score were calculated from those players who participated at least 10 minutes per game (N = 46; guards = 10, forwards = 21, centers = 15). Results indicated higher performance variability and lower efficiency in shooting percentages and turnovers in II-players comparing with studies in ABplayers. Differences found between game positions indicated similar roles of guards, forwards and centers in II and AB-players. These findings are relevant to understand how II impact on basketball performance, which is a necessary step to develop specific eligibility systems in II-basketball according to the guidelines of the International Paralympic Committee.