A pragmatic approach to intellectual property and development : a case study of the Jordanian copyright law in the internet age

On October 4, 2004, Brazil and Argentina requested that WIPO adopt a development-oriented approach to IP and to reconsider its work in relation to developing countries. In October, 2007, WIPO member States adopted a historic decision for the benefit of developing countries, to establish a WIPO Development Agenda. Although there have been several studies related to IP and development that call for IP laws in developing countries to be development-friendly, there is little research that attempts to provide developing countries with practical measures to achieve that goal. This article takes the copyright law in Jordan as a case study and shows how, in practical terms, a pro-development-oriented approach could be implemented in the copyright laws of developing countries. It provides specific recommendations for developing countries to ensure that their IP laws are aligned with and serve their social and economic development objectives.

The pragmatic approach : the myriad gene patents before the Australian courts

The Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia in D'Arcy v Myriad Genetics [2014] FCAFC 115 recently upheld the validity of Myriad Genetics' Australian BRCA1 gene patent over isolated DNA sequences.

A Pragmatic Approach to DHT Adoption

Despite the peer-to-peer community's obvious wish to have its systems adopted, specific mechanisms to facilitate incremental adoption have not yet received the same level of attention as the many other practical concerns associated with these systems. This paper argues that ease of adoption should be elevated to a first-class concern and accordingly presents HOLD, a front-end to existing DHTs that is optimized for incremental adoption. Specifically, HOLD is backwards-compatible: it leverages DNS to provide a key-based routing service to existing Internet hosts without requiring them to install any software. This paper also presents applications that could benefit from HOLD as well as the trade-offs that accompany HOLD. Early implementation experience suggests that HOLD is practical.

A Pragmatic Approach to Ethical Inquiry on Transhuman Athletes and Gene Doping in Sport

Gene doping is the most recent addition to the list of banned practices formulated by the World Anti-doping Agency. It is a subset of doping that utilizes the technology involved in gene therapy. The latter is still in the experimental phase but has the potential to be used as a type of medical treatment involving alterations of a patient‘s genes. I apply a pragmatic form of ethical inquiry to evaluate the application of this medical innovation in the context of sport for performance-enhancement purposes and how it will affect sport, the individual, society and humanity at large. I analyze the probable ethical implications that will emerge from such procedures in terms of values that lie at the heart of the major arguments offered by scholars on both affirmative and opposing sides of the debate on gene doping, namely fairness, autonomy and the conception of what it means to be human.

A pragmatic approach to State intervention: the Brazilian case

Includes bibliography

Token codeswitching and language alternation in narrative discourse: a functional-pragmatic approach

This study is concerned with two phenomena of language alternation in biographic narrations in Yiddish and Low German, based on spoken language data recorded between 1988 and 1995. In both phenomena language alternation serves as an additional communicative tool which can be applied by bilingual speakers to enlarge their set of interactional devices in order to ensure a smoother or more pointed processing of communicative aims. The first phenomenon is a narrative strategy I call Token Cod-eswitching: In a bilingual narrative culminating in a line of reported speech, a single element of L2 indicates the original language of the reconstructed dialogue – a token for a quote. The second phenomenon has to do with directing procedures, carried out by the speaker and aimed at guiding the hearer's attention, which are frequently carried out in L2, supporting the hearer's attention at crucial points in the interaction. Both phenomena are analyzed following a model of narrative discourse as proposed in the framework of Functional Pragmatics. The model allows the adoption of an integral approach to previous findings in code-switching research.

Pragmatic approach to the development of robust real-time protocols

This research is concerned with the development of distributed real-time systems, in which software is used for the control of concurrent physical processes. These distributed control systems are required to periodically coordinate the operation of several autonomous physical processes, with the property of an atomic action. The implementation of this coordination must be fault-tolerant if the integrity of the system is to be maintained in the presence of processor or communication failures. Commit protocols have been widely used to provide this type of atomicity and ensure consistency in distributed computer systems. The objective of this research is the development of a class of robust commit protocols, applicable to the coordination of distributed real-time control systems. Extended forms of the standard two phase commit protocol, that provides fault-tolerant and real-time behaviour, were developed. Petri nets are used for the design of the distributed controllers, and to embed the commit protocol models within these controller designs. This composition of controller and protocol model allows the analysis of the complete system in a unified manner. A common problem for Petri net based techniques is that of state space explosion, a modular approach to both the design and analysis would help cope with this problem. Although extensions to Petri nets that allow module construction exist, generally the modularisation is restricted to the specification, and analysis must be performed on the (flat) detailed net. The Petri net designs for the type of distributed systems considered in this research are both large and complex. The top down, bottom up and hybrid synthesis techniques that are used to model large systems in Petri nets are considered. A hybrid approach to Petri net design for a restricted class of communicating processes is developed. Designs produced using this hybrid approach are modular and allow re-use of verified modules. In order to use this form of modular analysis, it is necessary to project an equivalent but reduced behaviour on the modules used. These projections conceal events local to modules that are not essential for the purpose of analysis. To generate the external behaviour, each firing sequence of the subnet is replaced by an atomic transition internal to the module, and the firing of these transitions transforms the input and output markings of the module. Thus local events are concealed through the projection of the external behaviour of modules. This hybrid design approach preserves properties of interest, such as boundedness and liveness, while the systematic concealment of local events allows the management of state space. The approach presented in this research is particularly suited to distributed systems, as the underlying communication model is used as the basis for the interconnection of modules in the design procedure. This hybrid approach is applied to Petri net based design and analysis of distributed controllers for two industrial applications that incorporate the robust, real-time commit protocols developed. Temporal Petri nets, which combine Petri nets and temporal logic, are used to capture and verify causal and temporal aspects of the designs in a unified manner.

What is the public value of government action? Towards a (new) pragmatic approach to values questions in public endeavours

There has been a resurgence of interest in values in recent public administration research, based on two distinct arguments. For different reasons, neither approach is likely to secure a robust normative basis for public endeavours. These reasons are assessed, using an alternative body of theory rooted in contemporary social theory that we term, 'new pragmatism'. New pragmatic ideas are deployed to critique the divorce of values from facts; the abstraction of values from concrete situations; the anthropocentric foundation to social choice; the poorly developed understanding of the process of governance, with its inherent pluralism; and the seeming reluctance to articulate principles of political discourse. © 2010 The Authors. Public Administration © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

A pragmatic approach for engineering porous mannitol and mechanistic evaluation of particle performance

The importance of mannitol has increased recently as an emerging diluent for orodispersible dosage forms. The study aims to prepare spray dried mannitol retaining high porosity and mechanical strength for the development of orally disintegrating tablets (ODTs). Aqueous feed of d-mannitol (10% w/v) comprising ammonium bicarbonate, NH4HCO3 (5% w/v) as pore former was spray dried at inlet temperature of 110-170°C. Compacts were prepared at 151MPa and characterized for porosity, hardness and disintegration time. Particle morphology and drying mechanisms were studied using thermal (HSM, DSC and TGA) and polymorphic (XRD) methods. Tablet porosity increased from 0.20±0.002 for pure mannitol to 0.53±0.03 using fabricated porous mannitol. Disintegration time dropped by 50-77% from 135±5.29s for pure mannitol to 75.33±2.52-31.67±1.53s for mannitol 110-170°C. Hardness increased by 150% at 110°C (258.67±28.89N) and 30% at 150°C (152.70±10.58N) compared to pure mannitol tablets (104.17±1.70N). Increasing inlet temperature resulted in reducing tablet hardness due to generation of 'micro-sponge'-like particles exhibiting significant elastic recovery. Impact of mannitol polymorphism on plasticity/elasticity cannot be ruled out as a mixture of α and β polymorphs formed upon spray drying.

Paradoxical Deterioration During Anti-Tuberculous Therapy in Non-HIV-Infected Patients with Pleural Tuberculosis: A Pragmatic Approach

We report a case of paradoxical deterioration. A male patient diagnosed with pleural tuberculosis, but who was not infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), experienced clinical deterioration 3 weeks after the initiation of anti-tuberculous treatment. After other diagnoses were ruled out, a paradoxical response to treatment was established and the patient was started on systemic corticosteroids. Paradoxical response to treatment should be considered in patients with clinical deterioration after they start on anti-tuberculous treatment.

L’image numérique entre modélisation et captation : une étude sémiopragmatique de la réception des images depuis la reproduction technique

Si la manière de produire une image depuis la reproductibilité technique a toujours été profondément déterminée par la captation d’une réalité physique, le numérique (qui constitue une méthode d’inscription visuelle distincte) devrait, en théorie, modifier la relation du spectateur à ces « nouvelles images ». Toutefois, en pratique, le spectateur fait-il l’expérience des images numériques d’une manière différente de celles issues de la captation? Afin de répondre à cette question, ce mémoire analyse, à l’aide de l’approche sémio-pragmatique, comment le spectateur a conditionné son regard à travers les techniques de la captation (photographie, cinéma et vidéo). Ensuite, cette étude compare les habitudes et les attentes visuelles engendrées par ces techniques aux images numériques. Enfin, cette étude situe le problème de la rupture dans une perspective plus large que celle des techniques afin de poser le questionnement dans toute une tradition de la représentation artistique.

Expérience hétérotopique du cinéma : approches théoriques et historiographiques du cinéma en salle

Nous exposons dans ce mémoire les principes qui fondent, au sein de la discipline des études cinématographiques, une conception théorique de la réception d’images animées reposant sur la modalité de consommation spécifique du cinéma en salle. Notre analyse d’un ensemble représentatif d’approches théoriques et historiographiques de l’expérience cinématographique permet de relever les principes qui orientent la conception de différentes formes de médialité conférées à l’expérience du cinéma en salle. Les théories du dispositif et du signifiant imaginaire de Jean-Louis Baudry et Christian Metz proposent une conception de l’expérience du cinéma en salle qui met l’accent sur les effets de transparence médiatique de certaines composantes des salles de cinéma sur les spectateurs ainsi que sur le caractère imaginaire, symbolique et institutionnel de ces médiations. La sémio-pragmatique de Roger Odin et l’approche historiographique de la New Cinema History telle que présentée par Robert C. Allen et Richard Maltby proposent une conception de l’opacité médiatique de l’ensemble complexe des effets de médiation sensorielle, relationnelle, sociale et économique de l’expérience du cinéma en salle et dont les spectateurs font l’épreuve sur toute l’étendue de ce type de site d’exploitation et sur toute la durée de son occupation spectatorielle. Au terme de notre analyse, les différents principes relevés permettent de formuler la notion d’expérience hétérotopique du cinéma pour désigner la conception de l’expérience du cinéma en salle qui caractérise la compréhension de la réception d’images animées dans le cadre des études cinématographiques.