Separating patent wheat from chaff: Would the US benefit from adopting patent post-grant review?

This article assesses the impact in the US of adopting a patent post-grant review (PGR) procedure similar to one provided in the America Invents Act (AIA) of 2011. We employ novel methods for matching US patents to their European counterparts to find that opposition rates are about three times higher among European Patent Office (EPO) equivalents of US litigated patents as against control-group (unlitigated) patents. Contingent on reaching a final judgment in EPO post-grant opposition, we find that about 70% of these equivalents have challenged claims that are either completely revoked or amended. Using our empirical findings to inform a series of welfare estimates, we calculate benefit-to-cost ratios that the US may expect from implementing PGR in the range of 4:1–10:1. We also discover that these large social benefits result primarily from eliminating unwarranted market power in the current stock of granted patents, and much less so from litigation cost savings per se. Our results provide evidence that the US may benefit substantially from adopting the AIA post-grant review, but only provided that costs are controlled and that administration and appeals are not allowed to become too costly.     

Sports officials’ intention to continue

With governments in many western countries implementing sport policy programmes directed at increasing levels of participation, stress is being placed on the capacity of sport systems to provide sufficient numbers of appropriately accredited officials. However, with declining numbers of officials, particularly early career officials, sport organisations are also facing management problems in relation to the retention of existing officials. Using a quasi-experimental 2 × 2 field-based research design this study explored the efficacy of organisational support aimed at increasing retention of early career sports officials. The research addressed two questions: (1) Do stressors of officiating, commitment and organisational support predict the intention of early career officials to continue officiating? and (2) What is the efficacy of organisational support in increasing the intention of early career officials to continue officiating? The results support previous research that stressors and commitment explain intention to continue. Intention to continue was found to be a stable construct that was not influenced by an organisational support programme. Despite significant zero-order relationships between organisational support and intentions to continue, organisational support explained no additional or unique variance above that explained by commitment and stressors of officiating. The results provide the basis for further research as well as insights for developing organisational support and retention strategies for sports officials.     

Effects of Goal-Setting Interventions on Selected Basketball Skills: A Single-Subject Design

Abstract

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the effects of a goal-setting intervention program on selected components of basketball performance over the course of a competitive season. A multiple-baseline, single-subject design was used with baseline observations on various performance components (e.g., turnovers, rebounds), collected for four elite college basketball players during their first eight games of the season. At the midseason break, these players selected one aspect of their play that they felt would benefit from improvement. A goal-setting program was designed based on the goal attainment scaling procedure recommended by Smith (1988), whereby subjects generated numerical targets for their chosen components. Performance components were then assessed for the next eight games as they had been in the preintervention phase. Following the intervention, 3 of the 4 subjects showed consistent improvements in their targeted area of performance. Also, there were no outcome changes in the performance components that weren't targeted by the subjects. The findings suggest that future studies may benefit from achieving greater ecological validity and utilizing alternative designs to the traditional nomothetic approaches which may tend to mask positive intervention effects on certain individuals.     

Hey - what's the big idea?

A ‘big idea’ in statistics can fail to register with students when it is obscured by finer details of lesson tasks or activities. Based on the graphics calculator, this article describes a lesson designed to introduce the Central Limit Theorem.     

杭州游记

I had joined a Chinese group for a tour of the famousresort of Hangzhou,some 175km from the bustle ofShanghai.First impressions,leaving the railway sta-tion after my two and a half hour s’journey,werenot good—a modem city with traffic as manic as the oneI had just left.But then I saw the West Lake. This is probably Hangzhou’s most famous view—avast expanse of water,ringed with green hills,dottedwith small islands and causeways,with little pleasureboats pottering about.This was the first stop on our