Australia experiments with 'experimental use' exemption

Lawmakers are asking whether Australian researchers need an express 'experimental use' defense against patent infringement. The overriding policy for establishing a patent system is indisputably the promotion of innovation. According to traditional intellectual property pedagogy, the incentive to innovate flows from the reward afforded to the inventor. A balancing policy is that the patentee must fully disclose the invention to help minimize the risks of duplication and provides a basis for improvements by further research.Where there is uncertainty as to how these competing policy limbs are balanced and whether a patentee can exclude others from experimenting on a patented invention, the uncertain legal environment disadvantages both the patentee and researcher. Different jurisdictions have treated the experimental use question quite differently with varied results for the researcher. The biotechnology industry is evolving at an unprecedented pace and the law will as is always the case, lag behind in its usual cautious fashion. The Australian law may finally catch up to researchers' concerns.

Detection and prevention of distributed denial of services attacks by collaborative effort of software agents, first prototype implementation

Distributed Denial of Services DDoS, attacks has become one of the biggest threats for resources over Internet. Purpose of these attacks is to make servers deny from providing services to legitimate users. These attacks are also used for occupying media bandwidth. Currently intrusion detection systems can just detect the attacks but cannot prevent / track the location of intruders. Some schemes also prevent the attacks by simply discarding attack packets, which saves victim from attack, but still network bandwidth is wasted. In our opinion, DDoS requires a distributed solution to save wastage of resources. The paper, presents a system that helps us not only in detecting such attacks but also helps in tracing and blocking (to save the bandwidth as well) the multiple intruders using Intelligent Software Agents. The system gives dynamic response and can be integrated with the existing network defense systems without disturbing existing Internet model. We have implemented an agent based networking monitoring system in this regard.

Effect of physical activity and other stressors on appetite: Overcoming underconsumption of military operational rations revisited.

Recognizing the importance of good nutrition for physical and mental status, the Department of Defense asked the Institute of Medicine to guide the design of the nutritional composition of a ration for soldiers on short-term, high-stress missions. Nutrient Composition of Rations for Short-Term, High-Intensity Combat Operations considers military performance, health concerns, food intake, energy expenditure, physical exercise, and food technology issues. The success of military operations depends to a large extent on the physical and mental status of the individuals involved.

A distributed denial of service testbed

The Denial of Service Testing Framework (dosTF) being developed as part of the joint India-Australia research project for ‘Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Denial of Service Attacks’ allows for the construction, monitoring and management of emulated Distributed Denial of Service attacks using modest hardware resources. The purpose of the testbed is to study the effectiveness of different DDoS mitigation strategies and to allow for the testing of defense appliances. Experiments are saved and edited in XML as abstract descriptions of an attack/defense strategy that is only mapped to real resources at run-time. It also provides a web-application portal interface that can start, stop and monitor an attack remotely. Rather than monitoring a service under attack indirectly, by observing traffic and general system parameters, monitoring of the target application is performed directly in real time via a customised SNMP agent.

Remembering beliefs

Optimal decision-making requires us to accurately pinpoint the basis of our thoughts, e.g. whether they originate from our memory or our imagination. This paper argues that the phenomenal qualities of our subjective experience provide permissible evidence to revise beliefs, particularly as it pertains to memory. I look to the source monitoring literature to reconcile circumstances where mnemic beliefs and mnemic qualia conflict. By separating the experience of remembering from biological facts of memory, unusual cases make sense, such as memory qualia without memory (e.g. déjà vu, false memories) or a failure to have memory qualia with memory (e.g. functional amnesia, unintentional plagiarism). I argue that a pragmatic, probabilistic approach to belief revision is a way to rationally incorporate information from conscious experience, whilst acknowledging its inherent difficulties as an epistemic source. I conclude with a Bayesian defense of source monitoring based on C.I. Lewis’ coherence argument for memorial knowledge.

Equity and research design

This chapter recognizes that research is a cultural invention and explains why. It discusses what equity, research and research design mean, and suggests that the concept of equity is enriched considerably when ideas from Indigenous, critical and politically committed research traditions are involved in research design. When research design and the processes of research are guided by principles of equity, several issues warrant investigation. These include power relations, deficit models of research, homogeneity and reflexivity. Research design that is informed by principles of equity is explicit in its political purpose of seeking socially just outcomes for the short and long term.

Independent Brisbane: Four Plays [BOOK REVIEW]

Independent Brisbane: Four Plays is, as the title suggests, a collection of plays by independent theatre-makers and theatre-making collectives in Brisbane in the 2002– 07 period, including Marcel Dorney’s Harriers (6–51), the nest’s The Knowing of Mary Poppins (52–102), Linda Hassall’s Post Office Rose (103–71) and Maxine Mellor’s Magda’s Fascination with Wax Cats (172–216). According to the contextualising information on the book’s back cover, these plays are ‘distinctive’ in content, story and style, ‘[y]et carry with them what is characteristic of the city they come from – a preoccupation with landscape, creation in tightly knit collaborative teams and brave, often unexpected, theatrical choices’.

Stronger difficulty notions for client puzzles and denial-of-service-resistant protocols

Client puzzles are meant to act as a defense against denial of service (DoS) attacks by requiring a client to solve some moderately hard problem before being granted access to a resource. However, recent client puzzle difficulty definitions (Stebila and Ustaoglu, 2009; Chen et al., 2009) do not ensure that solving n puzzles is n times harder than solving one puzzle. Motivated by examples of puzzles where this is the case, we present stronger definitions of difficulty for client puzzles that are meaningful in the context of adversaries with more computational power than required to solve a single puzzle. A protocol using strong client puzzles may still not be secure against DoS attacks if the puzzles are not used in a secure manner. We describe a security model for analyzing the DoS resistance of any protocol in the context of client puzzles and give a generic technique for combining any protocol with a strong client puzzle to obtain a DoS-resistant protocol.

Ecology and behavior of first instar larval Lepidoptera

Neonate Lepidoptera are confronted with the daunting task of establishing themselves on a food plant. The factors relevant to this process need to be considered at spatial and temporal scales relevant to the larva and not the investigator. Neonates have to cope with an array of plant surface characters as well as internal characters once the integument is ruptured. These characters, as well as microclimatic conditions, vary within and between plant modules and interact with larval feeding requirements, strongly affecting movement behavior, which may be extensive even for such small organisms. In addition to these factors, there is an array of predators, pathogens, and parasitoids with which first instars must contend. Not surprisingly, mortality in neonates is high but can vary widely. Experimental and manipulative studies, as well as detailed observations of the animal, are vital if the subtle interaction of factors responsible for this high and variable mortality are to be understood. These studies are essential for an understanding of theories linking female oviposition behavior with larval survival, plant defense theory, and population dynamics, as well as modern crop resistance breeding programs.

Making coups history

International support is capable of making the difference between the successful defense of democracy and its ignominious defeat. Indeed, the perceived probability of both support for democratically chosen leaders and opposition to their attackers can fundamentally shift the balance in the domestic struggle between them. Nevertheless, although changes to international law and international relations justify a greater international role in preventing and deterring coups and erosions, not all responsibility for protecting democracy should be assigned to the international community. Indeed, the first line of defense should be a democracy’s own domestic initiatives, with the main role of the international community being to support a domestic response to threats to democracy.

The spermostatic and microbicidal actions of quinones and malemides : towards a dual-purpose contraceptive agent

There is an urgent need to develop safe, effective, dual-purpose contraceptive agents that combine the prevention of pregnancy with protection against sexually transmitted diseases. Here we report the identification of a group of compounds that on contact with human spermatozoa induce a state of “spermostasis,” characterized by the extremely rapid inhibition of sperm movement without compromising cell viability. These spermostatic agents were more active and significantly less toxic than the reagent in current clinical use, nonoxynol 9, giving therapeutic indices (ratio of spermostatic to cytotoxic activity) that were orders of magnitude greater than this traditional spermicide. Although certain compounds could trigger reactive oxygen species generation by spermatozoa, this activity was not correlated with spermostasis. Rather, the latter was associated with alkylation of two major sperm tail proteins that were identified as A Kinase-Anchoring Proteins (AKAP3 and AKAP4) by mass spectrometry. As a consequence of disrupted AKAP function, the abilities of cAMP to drive protein kinase A-dependent activities in the sperm tail, such as the activation of SRC and the consequent stimulation of tyrosine phosphorylation, were suppressed. Furthermore, analysis of microbicidal activity using Chlamydia muridarum revealed powerful inhibitory effects at the same low micromolar doses that suppressed sperm movement. In this case, the microbicidal action was associated with alkylation of Major Outer Membrane Protein (MOMP), a major chlamydial membrane protein. Taken together, these results have identified for the first time a novel set of cellular targets and chemical principles capable of providing simultaneous defense against both fertility and the spread of sexually transmitted disease.

Gap analysis of intrusion detection in smart grids

Given the recent emergence of the smart grid and smart grid related technologies, their security is a prime concern. Intrusion detection provides a second line of defense. However, conventional intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are unable to adequately address the unique requirements of the smart grid. This paper presents a gap analysis of contemporary IDSs from a smart grid perspective. This paper highlights the lack of adequate intrusion detection within the smart grid and discusses the limitations of current IDSs approaches. The gap analysis identifies current IDSs as being unsuited to smart grid application without significant changes to address smart grid specific requirements.