Fitzgerald v. Barnstable School Committee: Enforcement of Constitutional Rights

The cloud is a fairly new concept in computer science, altough almost everyone has been or is in contact with it on a regular basis. As more and more systems and applications are migrating from the desktop and into the cloud, keeping a high availability in cloud services is becoming increasingly important. Seeing that the cloud users are dependant on the cloud services being online and accessable via the Internet, creating fault tolerant cloud systems is key to keeping the cloud stable and trustworthy. This thesis researches different aspects of the cloud infrastructure such as virtualization which detaches the services from the physical hardware, scheduling algorithms that decides the mapping of virtual machines onto physical machines and fault tolerance in the context of availability in the cloud. It then proposes a new scheduling algorithm with the purpose of deploying virtual machines in a way that active-passive replication can be sustained

China's Embrace of Globalization

As China has become an increasingly important part of the global trading system over the past two decades, interest in the country and its international economic policies has increased among international economists who are not China specialists. This paper represents an attempt to provide the international economics community with a succinct summary of the major steps in the evolution of Chinese policy toward international trade and foreign direct investment and their consequences since the late 1970s. In doing so, we draw upon and update a number of more comprehensive book-length treatments of the subject. It is our hope that this paper will prove to be a useful resource for the growing numbers of international economists who are exploring China-related issues, either in the classroom or in their own research.

Do Stronger Patents Induce More Innovation? Evidence from the 1988 Japanese Patent Law Reforms

Does an expansion of patent scope induce more innovative effort by firms? This article provides evidence on this question by examining firm responses to the Japanese patent reforms of 1988. Interviews with practitioners suggest the reforms significantly expanded the scope of patent rights in Japan, but that the average response in terms of additional R&D effort and innovative output was quite modest. Interviews also suggest that firm organizational structure is an important determinant of the level of response. Econometric analysis using Japanese and U.S. patent data on 307 Japanese firms confirms that the magnitude of the response is quite small.

Is Japan's Innovative Capacity in Decline?

This paper investigates changes in the output and productivity of research and development activities in Japanese manufacturing firms over the 1980s and 1990s. Evidence from aggregate patent and R&D statistics and a micro-level analysis of R&D productivity at the firm-level suggest that there has been a slowdown in the growth of Japanese research productivity in the 1990s. The paper goes on to suggest possible explanations for this slowdown and reviews some of the steps Japanese firms are taking to increase the effectiveness of their R&D. The paper presents empirical evidence concerning the impact of one of these steps the creation of technology alliances with U.S. firms on Japanese innovative output.

Black-body furnace Patent

Development of black-body source calibration furnac

Comparisons of Shark Catch Rates on Longlines Using Rope/Steel (Yankee) and Monofilament Gangions

During the months of June through September in 1991 and 1992, 71 shark longlines were fished in the Chesapeake Bight region ofthe U.S. mid-Atlantic coast with a combination of rope/steel (Yankee) and monofilament gangions. A total of 288 sharks were taken on 3,666 monofilament gangions, and 352 sharks were caught on 6,975 Yankee gangions. Catch rates between gear types differed by depth strata, by month, and by species. Analyses were divided between efforts in the nursery ground ofthe sandbar shark, Carcharhinus plumbeus, in Chesapeake Bay and efforts outside the Bay. Mean catch per unit effort (CPUE) ± SE, as sharks caught per 100 hooks fished, was significantly (P<0.05) lower for Yankee gangions. Mean CPUE's for sandbar sharks in the nursery ground were 20.6 ± 3.8 for Yankee gangions and 26.0 ± 3.0 for monofilament gangions, and mean CPUE's for all species combined outside the Bay were 3.7 ± 0.7 for Yankee gangions, and 6.9 ± 1.2 for monofilament gangions