Developing the Curriculum for Collaborative Intellectual Property Education

Intellectual property education, i.e. how intellectual property should be taught or more importantly how intellectual property is learnt, is a recent addition to the academic 'intellectual property' agenda. The regulation, acquisition and management of intellectual property rights presents economic, ethical, social and policy challenges across the international academic and business communities. Intellectual property is also the starting point of interesting academic cross-disciplinary collaborations in learning and teaching and in research. It will probably always be primarily a law subject taught by lawyers to law students hoping to practice. At the same time there is a growing array of disciplines demanding an awareness of and a competence in handling intellectual property concepts and regulations. At Bournemouth, we have been teaching IP across the disciplines for more than a decade. Recently, the Higher Education Academy subject centres in Law and in Engineering jointly funded a project to research 'IP for Engineers'. WIPO has begun addressing IP Education in earnest. At an international symposium in July 2005, papers addressed different aspects of IP Education, including Collaboration between Law Faculties and other disciplines. In November 2005, they jointly sponsored a National Conference in China to consider IP Education from primary school thru postgraduate research. IP education beyond the law school raises interesting questions for anyone contemplating teaching this complex law subject to non-lawyers. What constitutes the IP syllabus? Who should be teaching IP? When should it be taught? How should it be taught? What resources should be available? This paper begins to explore some of the answers

An online survey of adults with cystic fibrosis: accessing and using life expectancy information

A spreadsheet containing a subset of the original data from all respondents (n=85) from an online questionnaire entitled "Online survey to gain understanding of what people with cystic fibrosis aged 16+ would like to learn about their life expectancy and other outcomes". The survey was conducted in July 2016. Responses to all multiple choice questions are included. Free text responses have been removed in accordance with information provided to the respondents. Ages have been categorised. The data do not contain any identifying information

The ADA's Journey Through Congress

First published in Wake Forest Law Review

‘This growing genetic disaster’: obesogenic mothers, the obesity ‘epidemic’ and the persistence of eugenics

In this era of ever-increasing emphasis on personal responsibility the 'obesity epidemic', officialised in global health warnings, threatens to swamp the West with the consequences of overindulgence. With childhood obesity identified as a particular threat, maternal feeding behaviour from conception onwards has come under scrutiny for its obesogenic potential. Epigenetic research now suggests that the mother's poor diet and excessive intake of calories can permanently damage not only the fetus itself but the genetic coding it carries, thus (re)creating a narrative of degeneration which performs complex cultural and social functions. While mothers have always been associated with the weakening and/or poisoning of children and the national body, the new narrative of degenerative uterine toxicity focuses attention on poor maternal choice as productive of a 'bio-underclass', and thus diverts attention from the many structural and socioeconomic associations of obesity with poverty, and particularly inequality. As government and child protection agencies in the UK and US attempt to discipline parents through surveillance and prosecution and the austerity agenda lends moral weight to discourses of 'waste' and necessary 'belt-tightening', the contradictions and implications of obesity as a 'disease' of 'overindulgence' in consumer cultures founded on 'indulgence' are too easily avoided by political and scientific focus on the abject body of the obesogenic 'underclass' mother

Murder and the political body in early colonial Ibadan

The article examines a murder trial in the Nigerian city of Ibadan during 1902. In the course of the trial a senior chief stated that those found guilty of the homicide should be fined, not executed, as a more severe punishment. The meaning of this statement is closely investigated in the context of the political climate in Ibadan at the time, of past judicial practices and through a reconstruction of the murder incident. It was argued that the assertion related to increasing competition between Ibadan chiefs and was an attempt to define constitutionally the economic and political value of a follower's body

The Role of the Audit Committee In Risk Management

Risk is a Board responsibility, which cannot be delegated. The boundaries of the audit committee lie somewhere below strategic risk, which is a Board function, and above detailed internal control, which belongs to management. However, there was no consensus about just where those boundaries lie. The flipside of risk is opportunity, and the Board should set a risk appetite for the organisation that reflects this. The Combined Code suggests a role for a Board-level risk committee, comprising independent non executives. The participants in the discussion did not think this to be practical: risk management must involve executives. There is a danger that too much focus on the process of risk management could lead to complacency or to a lack of focus on the risks themselves. The review of risk at Board and audit committee level necessitates having non executive directors with a suitable range of backgrounds. The skills mix, as well as financial, should include high-level business knowledge, for example the understanding of significant opportunities/risks specific to the business. A key aspect of risk management is understanding the culture of the organisation. Non executives, with limited contact below Board level, may find difficulty in understanding the culture at lower levels of the organisation. The audit committee's role in risk management requires a strong relationship with the internal audit function of the organisation, one of whose roles is as a ‘financial policeman'. Different types of risk should be addressed in different ways. Financial, operational and strategic risk have little in common, and their management and review should reflect the context of the particular compa

Evaluating lifelong learning networks

The focus of this short article is on the interim evaluation of Lifelong Learning Networks (LLNs) that the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information of The Open University was commissioned to undertake by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) during 2007 (HEFCE, 2008). It is not the intention to go into the detail of that evaluation, but instead to do two main things: to discuss the main challenges that the project team experienced in undertaking the evaluation, and to explore some of the challenges that LLNs are likely to experience as they reach the end of their HEFCE funding periods