'SABAM v scarlet: Evidence of an emerging backlash against corporate copyright lobbies in Europe?

The symbols, signs, and traces of copyright and related intellectual property laws that appear on everyday texts, objects, and artifacts have multiplied exponentially over the past 15 years. Digital spaces have revolutionized access to content and transformed the ways in which content is porous and malleable. In this volume, contributors focus on copyright as it relates to culture. The editors argue that what «counts» as property must be understood as shifting terrain deeply influenced by historical, economic, cultural, religious, and digital perspectives. Key themes addressed include issues of how: • Culture is framed, defined, and/or identified in conversations about intellectual property; • The humanities and other related disciplines are implicated in intellectual property issues; • The humanities will continue to rub up against copyright (e.g., issues of authorship, authorial agency, ownership of texts); • Different cultures and bodies of literature approach intellectual property, and how competing dynasties and marginalized voices exist beyond the dominant U.S. copyright paradigm. Offering a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective, Cultures of Copyright offers readers – scholars, researchers, practitioners, theorists, and others – key considerations to contemplate in terms of how we understand copyright’s past and how we chart its futures.

Exploring Customer Value Formation: A Customer Dominant Logic Perspective

This paper extends current discussions about value creation and proposes a customer dominant value perspective. A customer-dominant marketing logic positions the customer in the center, rather than the service provider/producer or the interaction or the system. The focus is shifted from the company´s service processes involving the customer, to the customer´s multi-contextual value formation, involving the company. It is argued that value is not always an active process of creation; instead value is embedded and formed in the highly dynamic and multi-contextual reality and life of the customer. This leads to a need to look beyond the current line of visibility where visible customer-company interactions are focused to the invisible and mental life of the customer. From this follows a need to extend the temporal scope, from exchange and use even further to accumulated experiences in the customer´s life. The aim of this paper is to explore value formation from a customer dominant logic perspective. This is done in three steps: first, value formation is contrasted to earlier views on the company’s role in value creation by using a broad ontologically driven framework discussing what, how, when, where and who. Next, implications of the proposed characteristics of value formation compared to earlier approaches are put forward. Finally, some tentative suggestions of how this perspective would affect marketing in service companies are presented. As value formation in a CDL perspective has a different focus and scope than earlier views on value it leads to posing questions about the customer that reveals earlier hidden aspects of the role of a service for the customer. This insight might be used in service development and innovation.

Rethinking Service Companies’ Business Logic: Do We Need a Customer-Dominant Logic as a Guideline?

Purpose –This paper explores and expands the roles of customers and companies in creating value by introducing a new a customer-based approach to service. The customer’s logic is examined as being the foundation of a customer-based marketing and business logic. Design/methodology/approach – The authors argue that both goods-dominant logics and service-dominant logics are provider-dominant. Contrasting the customer-dominant logic with provider-dominant logics, the paper examines the creation of service value from the perspectives of value-in-use, the customer’s own context, and the customer’s experience of service. Findings –Moving from a provider-dominant logic to a customer-dominant logic uncovered five major challenges to service marketers: Company involvement, company control in co-creation, visibility of value creation, locus of customer experience, and character of customer experience. Research limitations/implications – The paper is exploratory. It presents and discusses a conceptual model and suggests implications for research and practice. Practical implications –Awareness of the mechanisms of customer logic will provide businesses with new perspectives on the role of the company in their customer’s lives. We propose that understanding the customer’s logic should represent the starting-point for the marketer’s business logic. Originality/value – The paper increases the understanding of how the customer’s logic underpins the customer-dominant business logic. By exploring consequences of applying a customer-dominant logic, we suggest further directions for theoretical and empirical research.

Diagnosis of dominant forcing factors for large-scale vertical velocities during active and break phases of the monsoon

An attempt to diagnose the dominant forcings which drive the large-scale vertical velocities over the monsoon region has been made by computing the forcings like diabatic heating fields,etc. and the large-scale vertical velocities driven by these forcings for the contrasting periods of active and break monsoon situations; in order to understand the rainfall variability associated with them. Computation of diabatic heating fields show us that among different components of diabatic heating it is the convective heating that dominates at mid-tropospheric levels during an active monsoon period; whereas it is the sensible heating at the surface that is important during a break period. From vertical velocity calculations we infer that the prime differences in the large-scale vertical velocities seen throughout the depth of the atmosphere are due to the differences in the orders of convective heating; the maximum rate of latent heating being more than 10 degrees Kelvin per day during an active monsoon period; whereas during a break monsoon period it is of the order of 2 degrees Kelvin per day at mid-tropospheric levels. At low levels of the atmosphere, computations show that there is large-scale ascent occurring over a large spatial region, driven only by the dynamic forcing associated with vorticity and temperature advection during an active monsoon period. However, during a break monsoon period such large-scale spatial organization in rising motion is not seen. It is speculated that these differences in the low-level large-scale ascent might be causing differences in convective heating because the weaker the low level ascent, the lesser the convective instability which produces deep cumulus clouds and hence lesser the associated latent heat release. The forcings due to other components of diabatic heating, namely, the sensible heating and long wave radiative cooling do not influence the large-scale vertical velocities significantly.

Dominant role of the Cu---O charge-transfer energy, electronic polarizability and associated factors in the superconductivity of cuprates

Although it is believed that there is strong hybridization between the Cu(3d) and O(2p) orbitals in the layered cuprates and that the parent compounds such as La2CuO4 are charge-transfer gap insulators, very few models consider the Cu---O charge-transfer energy, Δ, or the hybridization strength, tpd, to be the important factors responsible for the superconductivity of these materials. Based on the crucial experimental observation that the relative intensity of the features in Cu(2p) photoemission of several families of cuprates varies systematically with the hole concentration, nh, we have been able to show that both these properties vary smoothly with Δ /tpd. More importantly, we show that the electronic polarizability of the CuO2 sheets, α , is sufficiently large to favour hole pairing and that the value α also depends on Δ/tpd. Both nh and α increase smoothly with decreasing Δ /tpd. Considering that the maximum Tc in the various cuprate families containing the same number of CuO2 sheets occurs around the same nh value (e.g., nh≈ 0.2 in cuprates with two CuO2 sheets). The present study demonstrates how Δ /tpd, α and such chemical bonding characteristics have an important bearing on the superconducting properties of the cuprates.

Properties of Toeplitz operators on analytic function spaces : from function symbols to distributions

Toeplitz operators are among the most important classes of concrete operators with applications to several branches of pure and applied mathematics. This doctoral thesis deals with Toeplitz operators on analytic Bergman, Bloch and Fock spaces. Usually, a Toeplitz operator is a composition of multiplication by a function and a suitable projection. The present work deals with generalizing the notion to the case where the function is replaced by a distributional symbol. Fredholm theory for Toeplitz operators with matrix-valued symbols is also considered. The subject of this thesis belongs to the areas of complex analysis, functional analysis and operator theory. This work contains five research articles. The articles one, three and four deal with finding suitable distributional classes in Bergman, Fock and Bloch spaces, respectively. In each case the symbol class to be considered turns out to be a certain weighted Sobolev-type space of distributions. The Bergman space setting is the most straightforward. When dealing with Fock spaces, some difficulties arise due to unboundedness of the complex plane and the properties of the Gaussian measure in the definition. In the Bloch-type spaces an additional logarithmic weight must be introduced. Sufficient conditions for boundedness and compactness are derived. The article two contains a portion showing that under additional assumptions, the condition for Bergman spaces is also necessary. The fifth article deals with Fredholm theory for Toeplitz operators having matrix-valued symbols. The essential spectra and index theorems are obtained with the help of Hardy space factorization and the Berezin transform, for instance. The article two also has a part dealing with matrix-valued symbols in a non-reflexive Bergman space, in which case a condition on the oscillation of the symbol (a logarithmic VMO-condition) must be added.

Laundry Symbols and License Management

One of the most challenging tasks in building language resources is the copyright license management. There are several reasons for this. First of all, the current European copyright system is designed to a large extent to satisfy the commercial actors, e.g. publishers, record companies etc. This means that the scope and duration of the rights are very extensive and there are even certain forms of protection that do not exist elsewhere in the world, e.g. database right. On the other hand, the exceptions for research and teaching are typically very narrow.

Toeplitz Operators with Special Symbols on Segal-Bargmann Spaces

We study the boundedness of Toeplitz operators on Segal-Bargmann spaces in various contexts. Using Gutzmer's formula as the main tool we identify symbols for which the Toeplitz operators correspond to Fourier multipliers on the underlying groups. The spaces considered include Fock spaces, Hermite and twisted Bergman spaces and Segal-Bargmann spaces associated to Riemannian symmetric spaces of compact type.

Joint data detection and dominant singular mode estimation in time varying reciprocal MIMO systems

This paper proposes an algorithm for joint data detection and tracking of the dominant singular mode of a time varying channel at the transmitter and receiver of a time division duplex multiple input multiple output beamforming system. The method proposed is a modified expectation maximization algorithm which utilizes an initial estimate to track the dominant modes of the channel at the transmitter and the receiver blindly; and simultaneously detects the un known data. Furthermore, the estimates are constrained to be within a confidence interval of the previous estimate in order to improve the tracking performance and mitigate the effect of error propagation. Monte-Carlo simulation results of the symbol error rate and the mean square inner product between the estimated and the true singular vector are plotted to show the performance benefits offered by the proposed method compared to existing techniques.

Identification of immuno-dominant antigens of Trypanosoma evansi for detection of chronic trypanosomosis using experimentally infected equines

Trypanosoma evansi is the most extensively distributed trypanosome responsible for disease called surra in livestock in many countries including frequent outbreaks in India. The prevalence of this disease is most commonly reported by standard parasitological detection methods (SPDM); however, antibody ELISA is being in practice by locally produced whole cell lysate (WCL) antigens in many countries. In the present investigation, we attempted to identify and purify immuno dominant, infection specific trypanosome antigens from T. evansi proteome using experimentally infected equine serum by immuno blot. Three immuno dominant clusters of proteins i.e. 62-66 kDa, 52-55 kDa and 41-43 kDa were identified based on their consistent reactivity with donkey sequential serum experimentally infected T. evansi up to 280 days post infection (dpi). The protein cluster of 62-66 kDa was purified in bulk in native form and comparatively evaluated with whole cell lysate antigen (WCL). ELISA and immuno blot showed that polypeptide of this cluster is 100% sensitive in detection of early and chronic infection. Further, this protein cluster was also found immuno reactive against hyper immune serum raised against predominantly 66 kDa exo antigen, revealed that this is a common immunodominant moieties in proteome and secretome of T. evansi.

Call intensity is a repeatable and dominant acoustic feature determining male call attractiveness in a field cricket

Acoustic signal variation and female preference for different signal components constitute the prerequisite framework to study the mechanisms of sexual selection that shape acoustic communication. Despite several studies of acoustic communication in crickets, information on both male calling song variation in the field and female preference in the same system is lacking for most species. Previous studies on acoustic signal variation either were carried out on populations maintained in the laboratory or did not investigate signal repeatability. We therefore used repeatability analysis to quantify variation in the spectral, temporal and amplitudinal characteristics of the male calling song of the field cricket Plebeiogryllus guttiventris in a wild population, at two temporal scales, within and across nights. Carrier frequency (CF) was the most repeatable character across nights, whereas chirp period (CP) had low repeatability across nights. We investigated whether female preferences were more likely to be based on features with high (CF) or low (CP) repeatability. Females showed no consistent preferences for CF but were significantly more attracted towards signals with short CPs. The attractiveness of lower CP calls disappeared, however, when traded off with sound pressure level (SPL). SPL was the only acoustic feature that was significantly positively correlated with male body size. Since relative SPL affects female phonotaxis strongly and can vary unpredictably based on male spacing, our results suggest that even strong female preferences for acoustic features may not necessarily translate into greater advantage for males possessing these features in the field. (C) 2013 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Suppression of gravitational instabilities by dominant dark matter halo in low-surface-brightness galaxies

The low-surface-brightness galaxies are gas rich and yet have a low star formation rate; this is a well-known puzzle. The spiral features in these galaxies are weak and difficult to trace, although this aspect has not been studied much. These galaxies are known to be dominated by the dark matter halo from the innermost regions. Here, we do a stability analysis for the galactic disc of UGC 7321, a low-surface-brightness, superthin galaxy, for which the various observational input parameters are available. We show that the disc is stable against local, linear axisymmetric and non-axisymmetric perturbations. The Toomre Q parameter values are found to be large (>> 1) mainly due to the low disc surface density, and the high rotation velocity resulting due to the dominant dark matter halo, which could explain the observed low star formation rate. For the stars-alone case, the disc shows finite swing amplification but the addition of dark matter halo suppresses that amplification almost completely. Even the inclusion of the low-dispersion gas which constitutes a high disc mass fraction does not help in causing swing amplification. This can explain why these galaxies do not show strong spiral features. Thus, the dynamical effect of a halo that is dominant from inner regions can naturally explain why star formation and spiral features are largely suppressed in low-surface-brightness galaxies, making these different from the high-surface-brightness galaxies.

Ovarian development in a primitively eusocial wasp: Social interactions affect behaviorally dominant and subordinate wasps in opposite directions relative to solitary females

In many primitively eusocial wasp species new nests are founded either by a single female or by a small group of females. In the single foundress nests, the lone female develops her ovaries, lays eggs as well as tends her brood. In multiple foundress nests social interactions, especially dominance-subordinate interactions, result in only one `dominant' female developing her ovaries and laying eggs. Ovaries of the remaining `subordinate' cofoundresses remain suppressed and these individuals function as workers and tend the dominant's brood. Using the tropical, primitively eusocial polistine wasp Ropalidia marginata and by comparing wasps held in isolation and those kept as pairs in the laboratory, we demonstrate that social interactions affect ovarian development of dominant and subordinate wasps among the pairs in opposite directions, suppressing the ovaries of the subordinate member of the pair below that of solitary wasps and boosting the ovaries of dominant member of the pair above that of solitary females. In addition to being of physiological interest, such mirror image effects of aggression on the ovaries of the aggressors and their victims, suggest yet another mechanism by which subordinates can enhance their indirect fitness and facilitate the evolution of worker behavior by kin selection. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Identification of dominant modes in random dynamical and aeroelastic systems

Identification of dominant modes is an important step in studying linearly vibrating systems, including flow-induced vibrations. In the presence of uncertainty, when some of the system parameters and the external excitation are modeled as random quantities, this step becomes more difficult. This work is aimed at giving a systematic treatment to this end. The ability to capture the time averaged kinetic energy is chosen as the primary criterion for selection of modes. Accordingly, a methodology is proposed based on the overlap of probability density functions (pdf) of the natural and excitation frequencies, proximity of the natural frequencies of the mean or baseline system, modal participation factor, and stochastic variation of mode shapes in terms of the modes of the baseline system - termed here as statistical modal overlapping. The probabilistic descriptors of the natural frequencies and mode shapes are found by solving a random eigenvalue problem. Three distinct vibration scenarios are considered: (i) undamped arid damped free vibrations of a bladed disk assembly, (ii) forced vibration of a building, and (iii) flutter of a bridge model. Through numerical studies, it is observed that the proposed methodology gives an accurate selection of modes. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.