Patent validation at the country level—The role of fees and translation costs

One feature of the European patent system that is heavily criticized nowadays is related to its fragmentation and the induced cost burden for applicants. Once a patent is granted by the EPO, the assignee must validate (and often translate) it and pay the renewal fees to keep it in force in each country in which protection is sought. The objective of this paper is to assess to what extent validation and renewal fees as well as translation costs affect the validation behavior of applicants. We rely on a gravity model that aims at explaining patent flows between inventor and target countries within the European patent system. The results show that the size of countries, their wealth and the distance between their capital cities are significant determinants of patent flows. Validation fees and renewal fees further affect the validation behavior of applicants. Translation costs seem to have an impact as well. The implementation of cost-reducing policy interventions like the London Protocol will, therefore, induce a significant increase in the number of patents validated in each European country.     

Intensity and content of private tutoring lessons during German secondary schooling: effects on students’ grades and test achievement

Private supplementary tutoring is a widespread phenomenon. However, evidence that private tutoring has positive effects on academic achievement or about the specific conditions of successful private tutoring is rare. Adapting Carroll’s (1963) model for school learning to private tutoring, we expected to find positive effects of tutoring duration, tutoring intensity, and students’ motivation to attend private tutoring. In a sample of eighth-grade students in German secondary schools (N = 8510, 18.6% currently being tutored), we conducted regression analyses with multiple covariates and did not find a positive main effect of private tutoring attendance in any of the school subjects examined. Moreover, within the subsamples of tutored students, we were not able to identify positive effects of tutoring duration, tutoring intensity, tutoring content (such as a focus on homework completion, test preparation, or study behavior), or students’ motivation to attend private tutoring. Given these disillusioning findings, we primarily derive suggestions for future research.

     

Abortion and Infanticide

Abstract

This issue introduces an occasional series where readers are invited to argue points of view, express opinions, raise issues they deem important ‐ or indeed disagree with an earlier point of view. Controversy need not be avoided! Contributions to the series, which should normally fall between 400 and 2000 words are now being sought.

The first contribution is concerned with abortion and infanticide and the moral problems thrown up by following certain lines of philosophical enquiry to their logical conclusion. Karin Bernath introduces the topic, pointing out that this is a topic intensely debated in the German‐speaking world, and Hans Furrer develops some of the philosophical implications in his paper. It is perhaps well to be reminded of these matters as the shades of World War II and the ideologies that underpinned it are once more in our minds.     

Teaching Genetics in Secondary Classrooms: a Linguistic Analysis of Teachers’ Talk About Proteins

This study investigates Swedish biology teachers’ inclusion of proteins when teaching genetics in grade nine (students 15–16 years old). For some years, there has been a call to give attention to proteins when teaching genetics as a means of linking the concepts ‘gene’ and ‘trait’. Students are known to have problems with this relation because the concepts belong to different organizational levels. However, we know little about how the topic is taught and therefore this case study focuses on how teachers talk about proteins while teaching genetics and if they use proteins as a link between the micro and macro level. Four teachers were recorded during entire genetics teaching sequences, 45 lessons in total. The teachers’ verbal communication was then analyzed using thematic pattern analysis, which is based in systemic functional linguistics. The linguistic analysis of teachers’ talk in action revealed great variations in both the extent to which they used proteins in explanations of genetics and the ways they included proteins in linking genes and traits. Two of the teachers used protein as a link between gene and trait, while two did not. Three of the four teachers included instruction about protein synthesis. The common message from all teachers was that proteins are built, but none of the teachers talked about genes as exclusively encoding proteins. Our results suggest that students’ common lack of understanding of proteins as an intermediate link between gene and trait could be explained by limitations in the way the subject is taught.