Default, deadlock and remedies

The primary purpose of this chapter is to examine the effectiveness of common default provisions and the range of common law and equitable remedies available to a joint venture partner in the event of default by a co-venturer. Because of the various joint venture vehicles such as trusts, corporations, partnerships and others, it is proposed to deal only generally with these questions.

The Doha deadlock: Intellectual property and climate change

In November 2001, Doha hosted trade talks over intellectual property and public health. The discussions resulted in the landmark Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health. The Doha Declaration recognised “that the TRIPS Agreement does not and should not prevent members from taking measures to protect public health” - particularly in relation to HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other epidemics.

Scheduling Trains with Priorities : a no-wait blocking parallel-machine job-shop scheduling model

The paper investigates train scheduling problems when prioritised trains and non-prioritised trains are simultaneously traversed in a single-line rail network. In this case, no-wait conditions arise because the prioritised trains such as express passenger trains should traverse continuously without any interruption. In comparison, non-prioritised trains such as freight trains are allowed to enter the next section immediately if possible or to remain in a section until the next section on the routing becomes available, which is thought of as a relaxation of no-wait conditions. With thorough analysis of the structural properties of the No-Wait Blocking Parallel-Machine Job-Shop-Scheduling (NWBPMJSS) problem that is originated in this research, an innovative generic constructive algorithm (called NWBPMJSS_Liu-Kozan) is proposed to construct the feasible train timetable in terms of a given order of trains. In particular, the proposed NWBPMJSS_Liu-Kozan constructive algorithm comprises several recursively-used sub-algorithms (i.e. Best-Starting-Time-Determination Procedure, Blocking-Time-Determination Procedure, Conflict-Checking Procedure, Conflict-Eliminating Procedure, Tune-up Procedure and Fine-tune Procedure) to guarantee feasibility by satisfying the blocking, no-wait, deadlock-free and conflict-free constraints. A two-stage hybrid heuristic algorithm (NWBPMJSS_Liu-Kozan-BIH) is developed by combining the NWBPMJSS_Liu-Kozan constructive algorithm and the Best-Insertion-Heuristic (BIH) algorithm to find the preferable train schedule in an efficient and economical way. Extensive computational experiments show that the proposed methodology is promising because it can be applied as a standard and fundamental toolbox for identifying, analysing, modelling and solving real-world scheduling problems.

Performance-driven live migration of multiple virtual machines in datacenters

Live migration of multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) has become an indispensible management activity in datacenters for application performance, load balancing, server consolidation. While state-of-the-art live VM migration strategies focus on the improvement of the migration performance of a single VM, little attention has been given to the case of multiple VMs migration. Moreover, existing works on live VM migration ignore the inter-VM dependencies, and underlying network topology and its bandwidth. Different sequences of migration and different allocations of bandwidth result in different total migration times and total migration downtimes. This paper concentrates on developing a multiple VMs migration scheduling algorithm such that the performance of migration is maximized. We evaluate our proposed algorithm through simulation. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can migrate multiple VMs on any datacenter with minimum total migration time and total migration downtime.

Intellectual property, innovation, and the environment (2014) edited by Peter Menell and Sarah Tran: A review

Peter S. Menell and Sarah M. Tran (ed.), Intellectual Property, Innovation and the Environment, Cheltenham (UK) and Northampton (MA): Edward Elgar, 2014, 756 pp Hardback 978 1 78195 160 6, http://www.e-elgar.com/bookentry_main.lasso?id=15063 There has been a longstanding deadlock over intellectual property and clean technologies in international climate talks. The United States — and other developed countries such as Japan, Denmark Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand — have pushed for stronger and longer protection of intellectual property rights related to clean technologies. BASIC countries — such as Brazil, South Africa, India, and China — have pushed for greater flexibilities in respect of intellectual property for the purpose of addressing climate change and global warming. Small island states, least developed countries, and nations vulnerable to climate change have called for climate-adaptation and climate-mitigation technologies to be available in the public domain. In the lead-up to the United Nations Climate Summit in New York on the 23rd September 2014, it is timely to consider the debate over intellectual property, innovation, the environment, and climate change.