IN RE BILSKI案：确定专利标的物的新动向

在美国道富银行信托有限公司诉Signature金融集团有限公司一案中,联邦巡回法院对<美国法典>第35章第101条1进行了解释,并对三个最高法院案例进行了解释,将适用于专利的标的物范围扩展到包含任何能产生实用性、有型性和实体性成果的发明.然而,去年,该法院在Bilski一案中却根据相同法律和案例却做出了非常不同的判决,把可申请专利的"程序"限定于依附于特定机械或设施的程序,或将某一物品转化为其它状态或物品的过程.In re Bilski一案的判决标志着近十年来美国法律将专利标的物范围扩展到包含任何能产生实用性、有型性和实体性成果的发明的趋势之终结.     

“Strength at Home” Group Intervention for Military Populations Engaging in Intimate Partner Violence: Pilot Findings

In this brief report, we present information on the Strength at Home intervention to treat male active duty or military veteran perpetrators of intimate partner violence (IPV) as well as preliminary pilot study findings. Strength at Home is a 12-session cognitive-behavioral group intervention developed by the authors that is based on a social information processing model of IPV perpetration. Six men referred to two intervention groups and five collateral female partners participated in this pilot study. Findings indicated large reductions for most indices of physical and psychological IPV from pre-treatment to 6-month follow-up. These initial results are promising though the small sample size and other study limitations preclude our ability to draw firm conclusions.     

Modeling health insurance expansions: effects of alternate approaches.

Estimates of the costs and consequences of many types of public policy proposals play an important role in the development and adoption of particular policy programs. Estimates of the same, or similar, policies that employ different modeling approaches can yield widely divergent results. Such divergence often undermines effective policymaking. These problems are particularly prominent for health insurance expansion programs. Concern focuses on predictions of the numbers of individuals who will be insured and the costs of the proposals. Several different simulation-modeling approaches are used to predict these effects, making the predictions difficult to compare. This paper categorizes and describes the different approaches used; explains the conceptual and theoretical relationships between the methods; demonstrates empirically an example of the (quite restrictive) conditions under which all approaches can yield quantitatively identical predictions; and empirically demonstrates conditions under which the approaches diverge and the quantitative extent of that divergence. All modeling approaches implicitly make assumptions about functional form that impose restrictions on unobservable heterogeneity. Those assumptions can dramatically affect the quantitative predictions made.