Vagueness of Patent Claim Language, Claim Construction and Patent Infringement – What a Mess!

The claim drafting process, which is inherently related to inventions, is not exempt from difficulties. Prominent among these is vagueness, which can often be the chief characteristic of patent claims. This paper argues that such ambiguities may hamper the development and teaching functions of patent documents and can also distort infringement systems. It addresses legal issues related to patent claim construction, including the use of intrinsic or extrinsic evidence to clarify an ambiguous or vague claim. Confusion surrounding the use of expert testimony for determining the meaning of a claim is also highlighted. Largely based on the US law, the paper suggests ways to reduce claim ambiguity, such as the use of claim charts. Emphasis is placed on the clarity of the claims’ wording, because this acts as a safeguard against any infringement risk. In brief, constructing patent claims remains largely an unsettled and uncertain area of patent law. What really matters is the clarity of the claim language because definiteness, preciseness, conciseness and exactness are major guarantees of a patent’s validity.

Defining Catholicism

This discussion asks what King Sigismund of Poland and his subjects understood catholicism to be in the 1520s and 1530s, through language analysis of a diverse and large corpus of sources. It finds that (in contrast to ‘luteranismus’) there was no name for catholicism per se. The church was defined primarily with reference to the past: as the church of one’s ancestors, of the Fathers, of many past centuries. Its chief characteristic was its (alleged) historic unity, resting on a carefully preserved consensus down the ages. Under the pressure of events, however, we find the language used by catholics in Poland-Prussia shifting, from a pre-confessional universal world view towards proto-confessional positions: from ‘good and bad Christians’ to ‘Catholic’ versus ‘Lutheran’. Reformation supporters, meanwhile, described this church very differently—as papal-led, built on distinctive doctrinal positions, and located in a dead, rather than a living, past.

The Roots and Ramifications of Narrative in Modern Medicine

Narrative became a concept of great versatility and fluidity in the second half of the twentieth century, configuring multi-dimensional understandings and meanings in healthcare. The literary and social theorist Martin Kreiswirth speaks of ‘a massive and unprecedented eruption of interest in narrative and in theorizing about narrative’ in the period, which resulted in stories and fragments of stories gaining significant conceptual traction in many discourses and practices. Not until narrative began to be credited with such multi-disciplinary capacities were claims for a pluripotential role in medicine explicitly formulated. Yet in attempting to respond to human needs incarnated in language, narrativity and medicine have long been co-implicated. If ‘the chief characteristic of human life is that it is always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story,’ as Hannah Arendt argued, narrativity is a precondition of epitomising and reflecting on illness.6

WAR AND WORK IN KUZBASS PEASANTRY REMINISCENCES: A SKETCH OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND

The submitted paper acts as a presentation of the second issue of ‘Kuzbass Peasantry Speaking’ – a collection of monologues devised by Siberian local countryside dwellers. The collection has recently been published (January, 2016) and includes the results of a fifty-year-long research aimed at recording and cameral processing of dialect speech. The recorded monologues reflect the specific local peculiarities of phonetics, lexis, and grammar, as well as the diverse complexity of Siberian dwellers’ being and living. A close attention is paid to the topics of war and work. The research is aimed at a) examination of predominant topical elements within this or that monologue; b) linguistic and cultural markers able to structure the collective image of an average Siberian countryside dweller. The main methods employed by the authors involve the linguistic personality depiction; historical and cultural commentary; the general scientific methods of continuous observation and factual description. Conclusion. The chief characteristic features of the book involve topical dominants, gender factor significance, emotive links, absence of direct evaluation, and hypertextuality. Significance. The monologues included into the present collection can serve as a source base for further pieces of research on Russian dialect studies [2; 6; 8] (e. g., dialect syntax and theory of dialect personality) or on regional studies in general.

Animosities in Yugoslavia before its demise: Revelations of an opinion poll survey

Contrary to the widespread opinion that hatred and mutual dislike among various ethnic groups was a chief characteristic of Yugoslavia and was at the bottom of the country’s destruction, the ethnic distance survey conducted in 1990 indicates that Yugoslav society was a community with a generally low level of ethnic animosities. The results demonstrate the huge discrepancy between what most Yugoslav citizens felt and needed, and what political elites and nationalist intellectuals claimed “their people” wanted and needed in the 1990s. Many scholars have not incorporated or noticed the difference.

The Gothic Novel and the Lingering Appeal of Romance

Romance, the dominant long-form fiction since 200 CE, is in eclipse for half a century after the rise of the realistic novel, but has a new efflorescence around 1790 in the Gothic novel for a number of reasons. It was a mode of historical writing without any need for accuracy about dates and places, a mode of sentimental writing that found in its villainous anti-heroes an entry point to the sadomasochistic desires of its readers. The chief characteristic of the heroine or hero is passivity, an attitude mirrored in the implied female reader of the Gothic, who seeks escape or retreat into an inner world of fantasy. It is ironic that the Gothic was displaced by 1820 by the historical romance of Scott, who adopted its plots and themes, but set them in a colder verisimilar world.

Protective Labor Legislation in the Courts: Substantive Due Process and Fairness in the Progressive Era

The Supreme Court's decision inLochner v. New York(1905), invalidating an act limiting working hours for bakers as a violation of contractual freedom, has come to symbolize an era in constitutional law. The period covers the years from the end of the Gilded Age through the Progressive Era. Its chief characteristic, according to its critics, is the judiciary's hostility to progressive labor legislation. Statutes intended to protect vulnerable classes from the ravages of industrialization were routinely defeated in the courts. Progressives pioneered an interpretation in whichLochnerbecame a leading “anticanonical” case, wrongly deploying the doctrine of substantive due process to shield inherited distributions of wealth and power. The time is long past when scholars characterized the era as a product of judges' reactionary commitments to laissez-faire or, worse, to Social Darwinism, following Justice Holmes's quip, dissenting inLochner, that “the Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics.” Contemporary scholars have reconstructed the period's jurisprudence, finding in it a principled commitment to a conception of justice grounded in the Founding. The most widely accepted explanation, developed by Gillman's influential study, is that substantive due process embodied a principle of neutrality requiring courts to distinguish the authentic public aims of legislation from illegitimate attempts to advantage some classes at others' expense. An alternative explanation is that judges, drawing on the theory of natural rights, developed the doctrine of substantive due process to limit government's discretion to encumber prepolitical rights to private property and liberty of contract.

Critical curves and 2D coupled maps

The theory of critical curves for maps of the plane provides powerful tools for locating the chief characteristic features of a discrete dynamical system in two dimensions: the location of its chaotic attractors, its basin boundaries, and the mechanisms of its bifurcations. Nowadays one begins to recognize the role played by critical curves of maps in the analysis, in the understanding and description of the bifurcations, and transition to chaotic behavior in coupled maps. In this paper we consider some properties of such maps, which possess a chaotic attractor. Some examples are considered in this paper in which we can see the effective role played by such curves in bifurcation theory.

Polish Attitudes towards Jewish Spirituality in the Eighteenth Century

This chapter describes Polish attitudes towards Jewish spirituality during the eighteenth century. The chief characteristic of the Polish conception of the Jewish religion, at least as it was captured in writing, was that it was not a specifically Polish construct but was imported from western Europe or had migrated to Poland with the Jews themselves. The official Christian doctrine was formulated in literary works written by clerics, polemic and homiletic literature, pastoral epistles, and synodal legislation. The popular Christian conception of Judaism, which differed substantially from official Church doctrine, was also practically identical in all its components to the popular, stereotypical view of Judaism widespread in the West. This conception was formulated mainly in works written by burghers, who used popular religious stereotypes in their attacks on their economic competitors, the Jews.

The Use of Increased Wheel Flexibility to Improve Chatter Performance in Grinding

The metal removal rates attainable during grinding may often be limited by the onset of an unstable vibration, commonly called regenerative chatter. Chatter is a self-induced vibration which leads to increased power consumption, a poor, generally unacceptable, ***workpiece surface finish, uneven wear of the grinding wheel and, in some cases, actual damage to the wheel. It is known that chatter is more likely to occur when the grinding wheel is hard and for this reason chatter often develops when grinding with diamond or cubic boron nitride (CBN) wheels, whose chief characteristic is that they are very hard-wearing. This paper describes the development of a technique for suppressing chatter which is particularly applicable to the use of diamond and CBN wheels. It has been predicted theoretically and confirmed by experiment that chatter may be suppressed, or even eliminated, by increasing the radial flexibility of a grinding wheel, whilst at the same time maintaining high values of the wheel's natural frequency and damping. It has been shown that the increased flexibility may be achieved by mounting the abrasive rim of the wheel via a flexible coupling, or by manufacturing a wheel by conventional means but with a flexible hub material. Both techniques are successful and diamond and CBN wheels, manufactured to these designs, have performed substantially better than conventional ultra-hard abrasive wheels currently marketed. It is considered that the problem of chatter when using diamond or CBN wheels has been solved. Since this problem has represented one of the major obstacles to the acceptance of CBN wheels by industry, it is anticipated that these wheels will now enjoy a much more widespread usage.