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Timely diagnosis of dysphagia is important for people with an intellectual disability. Periodic screening of each individual by speech-language therapists is barely feasible with respect to limited resources. Therefore, preselection of individuals with an increased dysphagia risk through screening by caregivers is crucial. This study aimed to develop the novel "Screening instrument for Dysphagia for people with an Intellectual Disability" (SD-ID).The SD-ID was developed, validated and optimised in two rounds. Version 3, consisting of nine risk factors and 20 items concerning eating/drinking behaviour, was thoroughly studied for feasibility, concurrent validity and reliability, and then optimised. The SD-ID (version 3) was filled out in an average of four minutes (feasibility). A strong positive association was found between scores on SD-ID and Dysphagia Disorder Survey (concurrent validity). Test-retest and interrater reliability were very good. Two additional risk factors were added and two items removed to yield the final version 4. The most optimal cut-off score appeared to be either 4 or 5.The SD-ID is a reliable instrument to screen for an increased risk of dysphagia in people with an intellectual disability. Ideally it is part of a cyclic work process: Screening with SD-ID (step 1), diagnostic work-up if necessary (step 2), recommendations (step 3), and evaluation (step 4).

The idea that there is a tension between antitrust and the intellectual property laws is readily exaggerated. The tension that exists results mainly from our uncertainty about the optimal amount and scope of IP protection. In general, antitrust draws clearer lines than intellectual property law does, although one should not push the point too far. Antitrust policy as manifested in the courts has achieved a fair amount of consensus today. By contrast, deep uncertainty remains about fundamental questions concerning the socially optimal outcome of IP disputes. In addition, while the antitrust statutes are for the most part public regarding provisions interpreted by the courts, the IP laws have increasingly become special interest statutes less concerned with optimal IP coverage and more concerned with protection of the claims of particular interest groups. As a result, antitrust needs to take a bolder position in areas of potential conflict with IP law than it has in the past. This does not mean that we must revert to a post-New Deal regime in which the courts imagined threats from IP rights where none existed. However, it does entail that antitrust stop being so deferential in areas where threats to competition are real and the IP laws are ambiguous on the issue in question.

The overwhelming majority of intellectual property lawsuits settle before trial. These settlements involve agreements between the patentee and the accused infringer, parties who are often competitors before the lawsuit. Because these competitors may agree to stop competing, to regulate the price each charges, and to exchange information about products and prices, settlements of intellectual property disputes naturally raise antitrust concerns. In this paper, we suggest a way to reconcile the interests of intellectual property law and antitrust law in evaluating intellectual property settlements. In Part I, we provide background on the issue. Part II argues that in most cases courts can determine the legality of a settlement agreement without inquiring into the merits of the intellectual property dispute being settled, either because the settlement would be legal even if the patent were invalid or not infringed, or because the settlement would be illegal even if the patent were valid and infringed. Only in a narrow class of cases will the merits of the intellectual property dispute matter. In Part II, we argue that in that narrow middle set of cases antitrust's ru1e of reason is unlikely to be helpful. Rather, courts must inquire into the validity, enforceability, and infringement issues in the underlying case, with particular sensitivity to both the type of intellectual property right at issue and the industrial context of the dispute. In Part IV, we apply our framework to a number of common settlement terms, most notably the use of exclusion payments to settle pharmaceutical patent disputes. We argue that exclusion payments that exceed litigation costs should be deemed illegal per se. There is no legitimate reason for such payments, and the most likely reason to permit the patentee to exclude competition that would likely have occurred absent the payment - isanticompetitive. Further, legitimate patent disputes can be settled in other ways than with an exclusion payment for example, by licensing the defendant or by agreeing to delay entry.

During intravascular procedures, medical devices interact mechanically with vascular tissue. The device design faces a trade-off: although a high bending stiffness improves its maneuvrability and deliverability, it may also trigger excessive supra-physiological loading that may result in tissue damage. In particular, the collagen fibers in vascular walls are load-bearing but may rupture on a microscopic scale due to mechanical interaction. When the mechanical load increases even further, tissue rupture or puncture occurs. To mitigate tissue damage, the current work focusses on the development of computational Finite Element (FE) based models wherein state-of-the-art constitutive tissue models are applied toward the design of safe devices. Several experiments are presented for tissue characterization in which device-mimicking indenters are pressed onto a porcine tissue. In these experiments, the Mullins effect, which is related to tissue damage, is observed. Consequently, the mechanical behavior of tissue, including the evolution of damage-induced energy dissipation, is accurately described by adopting a hyperelastic model incorporating the damage approach by Weisbecker et al. (2012). From the experimentally validated computational model, a novel design criterion is established, which allows for safe device development. Furthermore, an energy density criterion for the onset of puncture is proposed. With these tools, several frequently used work-horse guidewires are numerically evaluated. • A novel criterion for quantifying tissue damage based on fiber energy density dissipation is proposed and has been evaluated on several workhorse guidewires, as well as compared to existing damage models. • The hyperelastic tissue damage model has been experimentally characterized by means of cyclic indentation tests on porcine aortic tissues. • The verified and validated hyperelastic tissue damage model has been implemented through user-subroutines in a commercial FE package. • A novel design criterion is extracted by correlating device tip load values and corresponding tissue damage values for the workhorse guidewires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most pressing debates in antitrust today center on major platforms like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Platform markets are subject to strong network effects, which tend to create barriers to entry and reinforce market power. Frequently, the only way for a new platform to enter the market successfully is to differentiate itself from the leading incumbent in some way--often by offering exclusive content or features. However, recently some dominant platforms have attempted to prevent this by entering into a novel type of "most favored nation" (MFN) agreement with trading partners. Unlike traditional MFNs, which restrain pricing, these MFNs prohibit trading partners from offering any exclusive content, features, or other services to smaller platforms. These new MFNs are the subject of numerous ongoing lawsuits and regulatory probes involving major platforms, including Amazon. But they have not previously been examined in academic research. This article evaluates the novel antitrust issues they raise. The primary concern is that these MFNs may allow a dominant platform to forestall competitive entry by restraining the ability of new platforms to differentiate themselves. This is consistent with research in economics indicating that exclusive dealing can help to facilitate entry in network industries. I discuss some key differences between these restraints and traditional price-based MFNs, and I identify some key errors in recent judicial decisions evaluating them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antitrust enforcers and its other defenders have never done a good job of selling their field to the public. That is not entirely their fault. Antitrust is inherently technical, and a less engaging discipline to most people than, say, civil rights or criminal law. The more serious problem is that when the general press does talk about antitrust policy, it naturally gravitates toward the fringes, both the far right and the far left. Extreme rhetoric makes for better press than the day-to-day operations of a technical enterprise. The extremes are often stated in overdramatized black-and-white terms that avoid the real world subtleties that make science more fact dependent but also more useful. Both extreme positions generally favor lower output as a solution to antitrust problems. The result is higher prices and fewer jobs. The right shrugs at higher prices because of its faith that there are offsetting efficiencies in production. The left simply accepts that higher prices benefit smaller competitors, its preferred protected class. On employment, the extreme right does not really care, because suppressing labor power was part of a bigger neoliberal agenda. The negative impact on jobs remains a major blind spot for the left, however, which claims to support worker rights but ends up advocating policies that do much more harm than good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The marginalist revolution in economics became the foundation for the modem regulatory State with its "mixed" economy. For the classical political economists, value was a function of past averages. Marginalism substituted forward looking theories based on expectations about firm and market performance. Marginalism swept through university economics, and by 1920 or so virtually every academic economist was a marginalist. This Article considers the historical influence of marginalism on regulatory policy in the United States. My view is at odds with those who argue that marginalism saved capitalism by rationalizing it as a more defensible buttress against incipient socialism. While marginalism did permit economists and policy makers to strike a middle ground between laissez faire and socialism, the "middle ground" tilted very strongly toward public control. Ironically, regulation plus private ownership was able to go much further in the United States than socialism ever could because it preserved the rhetoric of capital as privately owned, even as it deprived firms of many of the most important indicia of ownership. Marginalism upended many of the classical conceptions about the market, including assumptions about their robustness, as well as the need for government intervention and the optimal type. For regulatory policy the most important issues were: (1) The fixed-cost controversy and the scope of natural monopoly; (2) cost classification, incentives, and ratemaking; (3) the changing domain of market failure, and regulation and Pigouvian taxes as correctives; (4) market diversity and the rise of sector regulation; (5) deregulation; (6) concerns about the distribution of wealth; (7) the development of cost-benefit analysis; and (8) the assessment of risk. The final section examines risk management under marginalism by looking at two diverse but important areas: negligence and products liability in tort law, and administrative review of patents by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homoplasy, autapomorphy and rapid radiation have frequently been discussed as the main causes of instable generic classifications of plants including ferns. In this study, we explore the natural generic classification for selligueoid ferns by investigating the phylogenetic relationships among almost all its previously recognized segregates. We compare the phylogenies that resulted from two datasets. Dataset 1 comprises a broad taxonomic sampling of fifty-one species of selligueoid ferns. Phylogenetic analysis of this dataset revealed a notable long branch followed by a polytomy recovering three core clades of selligueoid ferns. Only one of the core clades corresponds to the traditional generic concept of Arthromeris. Dataset 2 includes fewer species but a broader sample of six plastid DNA markers. However, the results of this dataset show that the increase of informative molecular characters still did not provide sufficient evidence to resolve the polytomy. The long branches together with a consistent backbone polytomy support a rapid radiation in the selligueoid ferns. The majority of morphological characters were recovered as homoplastic, which hampers the identification of segregates with unambiguous diagnostic characters. Considering morphological characters and our molecular phylogeny, a single genus Selliguea s.l., which includes all selligueoid species, is proposed here to achieve taxonomic stability in this group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]