Not for Designers: On the Inadequacies of EU Design Law and How to Fix It

Design rights represent an interesting example of how the EU legislature has successfully regulated an otherwise heterogeneous field of law. Yet this type of protection is not for all. The tools created by EU intervention have been drafted paying much more attention to the industry sector rather than to designers themselves. In particular, modern, digitally based, individual or small-sized, 3D printing, open designers and their needs are largely neglected by such legislation. There is obviously nothing wrong in drafting legal tools around the needs of an industrial sector with an important role in the EU economy, on the contrary, this is a legitimate and good decision of industrial policy. However, good legislation should be fair, balanced, and (technologically) neutral in order to offer suitable solutions to all the players in the market, and all the citizens in the society, without discriminating the smallest or the newest: the cost would be to stifle innovation. The use of printing machinery to manufacture physical objects created digitally thanks to computer programs such as Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software has been in place for quite a few years, and it is actually the standard in many industrial fields, from aeronautics to home furniture. The change in recent years that has the potential to be a paradigm-shifting factor is a combination between the opularization of such technologies (price, size, usability, quality) and the diffusion of a culture based on access to and reuse of knowledge. We will call this blend Open Design. It is probably still too early, however, to say whether 3D printing will be used in the future to refer to a major event in human history, or instead will be relegated to a lonely Wikipedia entry similarly to ³Betamax² (copyright scholars are familiar with it for other reasons). It is not too early, however, to develop a legal analysis that will hopefully contribute to clarifying the major issues found in current EU design law structure, why many modern open designers will probably find better protection in copyright, and whether they can successfully rely on open licenses to achieve their goals. With regard to the latter point, we will use Creative Commons (CC) licenses to test our hypothesis due to their unique characteristic to be modular, i.e. to have different license elements (clauses) that licensors can choose in order to adapt the license to their own needs.”

Digital First Sale Doctrine Ante Portas – Exhaustion in the Online Environment

The purpose of the article is to provide first a doctrinal summary of the concept, rules and policy of exhaustion, first, on the international and EU level, and, later, under the law of the United States. Based upon this introduction, the paper turns to the analysis of the doctrine by the pioneer court decisions handed over in the UsedSoft, ReDigi, the German e-book/audio book cases, and the pending Tom Kabinet case from the Netherlands. Questions related to the licence versus sale dichotomy; the so-called umbrella solution; the “new copy theory”, migration of digital copies via the internet; the forward-and-delete technology; the issue of lex specialis and the theory of functional equivalence are covered later on. The author of the present article stresses that the answers given by the respective judges of the referred cases are not the final stop in the discussion. The UsedSoft preliminary ruling and the subsequent German domestic decisions highlight a special treatment for computer programs. On the other hand, the refusal of digital exhaustion in the ReDigi and the audio book/e-book cases might be in accordance with the present wording of copyright law; however, they do not necessarily reflect the proper trends of our ages. The paper takes the position that the need for digital exhaustion is constantly growing in society and amongst businesses. Indeed, there are reasonable arguments in favour of equalizing the resale of works sold in tangible and intangible format. Consequently, the paper urges the reconsideration of the norms on exhaustion on the international and EU level.

Rahmenwerk für zielgruppenorientiertes Blended E-Learning im MINT-Bereich im Kontext des Lebenslangen Lernens

Das heutige Leben der Menschen ist vom Internet durchdrungen, kaum etwas ist nicht „vernetzt“ oder „elektronisch verfügbar“. Die Welt befindet sich im Wandel, die „Informationsgesellschaft“ konsumiert in Echtzeit Informationen auf mobilen Endgeräten, unabhängig von Zeit und Ort. Dies gilt teilweise auch für den Aus- und Weiterbildungssektor: Unter „E-Learning“ versteht man die elektronische Unterstützung des Lernens. Gelernt wird „online“; Inhalte sind digital verfügbar. Zudem hat sich die Lebenssituation der sogenannten „Digital Natives“, der jungen Individuen in der Informationsgesellschaft, verändert. Sie fordern zeitlich und räumlich flexible Ausbildungssysteme, erwarten von Bildungsinstitutionen umfassende digitale Verfügbarkeit von Informationen und möchten ihr Leben nicht mehr Lehr- und Zeitplänen unterordnen – das Lernen soll zum eigenen Leben passen, lebensbegleitend stattfinden. Neue „Lernszenarien“, z.B. für alleinerziehende Teilzeitstudierende oder Berufstätige, sollen problemlos möglich werden. Dies soll ein von der europäischen Union erarbeitetes Paradigma leisten, das unter dem Terminus „Lebenslanges Lernen“ zusammengefasst ist. Sowohl E-Learning, als auch Lebenslanges Lernen gewinnen an Bedeutung, denn die (deutsche) Wirtschaft thematisiert den „Fachkräftemangel“. Die Nachfrage nach speziell ausgebildeten Ingenieuren im MINT-Bereich soll schnellstmöglich befriedigt, die „Mitarbeiterlücke“ geschlossen werden, um so weiterhin das Wachstum und den Wohlstand zu sichern. Spezielle E-Learning-Lösungen für den MINT-Bereich haben das Potential, eine schnelle sowie flexible Aus- und Weiterbildung für Ingenieure zu bieten, in der Fachwissen bezogen auf konkrete Anforderungen der Industrie vermittelt wird. Momentan gibt es solche Systeme allerdings noch nicht. Wie sehen die Anforderungen im MINT-Bereich an eine solche E-Learning-Anwendung aus? Sie muss neben neuen Technologien vor allem den funktionalen Anforderungen des MINTBereichs, den verschiedenen Zielgruppen (wie z.B. Bildungsinstitutionen, Lerner oder „Digital Natives“, Industrie) und dem Paradigma des Lebenslangen Lernens gerecht werden, d.h. technische und konzeptuelle Anforderungen zusammenführen. Vor diesem Hintergrund legt die vorliegende Arbeit ein Rahmenwerk für die Erstellung einer solchen Lösung vor. Die praktischen Ergebnisse beruhen auf dem Blended E-Learning-System des Projekts „Technische Informatik Online“ (VHN-TIO).

Impacts of a word-picture training on reading in youth with mixed intellectual disabilities. A waiting-list control group comparison

Individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) often struggle with learning how to read. Reading difficulties seem to be the most common secondary condition of ID. Only one in five children with mild or moderate ID achieves even minimal literacy skills. However, literacy education for children and adolescents with ID has been largely overlooked by researchers and educators. While there is little research on reading of children with ID, many training studies have been conducted with other populations with reading difficulties. The most common approach of acquiring literacy skills consists of sophisticated programs that train phonological skills and auditory perception. Only few studies investigated the influence of implicit learning on literacy skills. Implicit learning processes seem to be largely independent of age and IQ. Children are sensitive to the statistics of their learning environment. By frequent word reading they acquire implicit knowledge about the frequency of single letters and letter patterns in written words. Additionally, semantic connections not only improve the word understanding, but also facilitate storage of words in memory. Advances in communication technology have introduced new possibilities for remediating literacy skills. Computers can provide training material in attractive ways, for example through animations and immediate feedback .These opportunities can scaffold and support attention processes central to learning. Thus, the aim of this intervention study was to develop and implement a computer based word-picture training, which is based on statistical and semantic learning, and to examine the training effects on reading, spelling and attention in children and adolescents (9-16 years) diagnosed with mental retardation (general IQ  74). Fifty children participated in four to five weekly training sessions of 15-20 minutes over 4 weeks, and completed assessments of attention, reading, spelling, short-term memory and fluid intelligence before and after training. After a first assessment (T1), the entire sample was divided in a training group (group A) and a waiting control group (group B). After 4 weeks of training with group A, a second assessment (T2) was administered with both training groups. Afterwards, group B was trained for 4 weeks, before a last assessment (T3) was carried out in both groups. Overall, the results showed that the word-picture training led to substantial gains on word decoding and attention for both training groups. These effects were preserved six weeks later (group A). There was also a clear tendency of improvement in spelling after training for both groups, although the effect did not reach significance. These findings highlight the fact that an implicit statistical learning training in a playful way by motivating computer programs can not only promote reading development, but also attention in children with intellectual disabilities.

Modified 3+3 design for phase I clinical trials

Phase I clinical trial is mainly designed to determine the maximum tolerated dose (MTD) of a new drug. Optimization of phase I trial design is crucial to minimize the number of enrolled patients exposed to unsafe dose levels and to provide reliable information to the later phases of clinical trials. Although it has been criticized about its inefficient MTD estimation, nowadays the traditional 3+3 method remains dominant in practice due to its simplicity and conservative estimation. There are many new designs that have been proven to generate more credible MTD estimation, such as the Continual Reassessment Method (CRM). Despite its accepted better performance, the CRM design is still not widely used in real trials. There are several factors that contribute to the difficulties of CRM adaption in practice. First, CRM is not widely accepted by the regulatory agencies such as FDA in terms of safety. It is considered to be less conservative and tend to expose more patients above the MTD level than the traditional design. Second, CRM is relatively complex and not intuitive for the clinicians to fully understand. Third, the CRM method take much more time and need statistical experts and computer programs throughout the trial. The current situation is that the clinicians still tend to follow the trial process that they are comfortable with. This situation is not likely to change in the near future. Based on this situation, we have the motivation to improve the accuracy of MTD selection while follow the procedure of the traditional design to maintain simplicity. We found that in 3+3 method, the dose transition and the MTD determination are relatively independent. Thus we proposed to separate the two stages. The dose transition rule remained the same as 3+3 method. After getting the toxicity information from the dose transition stage, we combined the isotonic transformation to ensure the monotonic increasing order before selecting the optimal MTD. To compare the operating characteristics of the proposed isotonic method and the other designs, we carried out 10,000 simulation trials under different dose setting scenarios to compare the design characteristics of the isotonic modified method with standard 3+3 method, CRM, biased coin design (BC) and k-in-a-row design (KIAW). The isotonic modified method improved MTD estimation of the standard 3+3 in 39 out of 40 scenarios. The improvement is much greater when the target is 0.3 other than 0.25. The modified design is also competitive when comparing with other selected methods. A CRM method performed better in general but was not as stable as the isotonic method throughout the different dose settings. The results demonstrated that our proposed isotonic modified method is not only easily conducted using the same procedure as 3+3 but also outperforms the conventional 3+3 design. It can also be applied to determine MTD for any given TTL. These features make the isotonic modified method of practical value in phase I clinical trials.^

Simulation Model of Benthic Antarctic Assemblages (SIMBAA), link to PC-executable

SIMBAA is a spatially explicit, individual-based simulation model. It was developed to analyse the response of populations of Antarctic benthic species and their diversity to iceberg scouring. This disturbance is causing a high local mortality providing potential space for new colonisation. Traits can be attributed to model species, e.g. in terms of reproduction, dispersal, and life span. Physical disturbances can be designed in space and time, e.g. in terms of size, shape, and frequency. Environmental heterogeneity can be considered by cell-specific capacities to host a certain number of individuals. When grid cells become empty (after a disturbance event or due to natural mortality of of an individual), a lottery decides which individual from which species stored in a pool of candidates (for this cell) will recruit in that cell. After a defined period the individuals become mature and their offspring are dispersed and stored in the pool of candidates. The biological parameters and disturbance regimes decide on how long an individual lives. Temporal development of single populations of species as well as Shannon diversity are depicted in the main window graphically and primary values are listed. Examples for simulations can be loaded and saved as sgf-files. The results are also shown in an additional window in a dimensionless area with 50 x 50 cells, which contain single individuals depicted as circles; their colour indicates the assignment to the self-designed model species and the size represents their age. Dominant species per cell and disturbed areas can also be depicted. Output of simulation runs can be saved as images, which can be assembled to video-clips by standard computer programs (see GIF-examples of which "Demo 1" represents the response of the Antarctic benthos to iceberg scouring and "Demo 2" represents a simulation of a deep-sea benthic habitat).