Intellectual Property : In the News

Jason Williams, who heads the center, said Erie is a central location, and the Plastics Engineering Technology program has expertise from talented students and faculty.

“Within the Buffalo-Pittsburgh-Cleveland triangle, Erie’s the epicenter of that. So it really puts us in a good position to really help all three of those regions,” he said. “And that’s really what led to this. We’re starting to see a really big push for the device manufacturers in the Pittsburgh area, alone.”

The medical plastics industry is projected to grow 5-8 percent per year through 2015, Williams said.

Speaking at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a city that's taken hits from the decline of traditional manufacturing sectors like steel, Obama called for a joint effort by industry, universities and the federal government to help reposition the United States as a leader in cutting-edge manufacturing.

"We have not run out of stuff to make, we've just got to reinvigorate our manufacturing sector so that it leads the world the way it always has, from paper and steel and cars to new products we haven't even dreamed up yet," Obama said at Carnegie Mellon's National Robotics Engineering Center.

"That's how we're going to strengthen existing industries, that's how we're going spark new ones," he said. "That's how we're going to create jobs, grow the middle class and secure our economic leadership."

While more Amish residents move out of Pennsylvania than those who move in, the state's Amish population nonetheless leapt by nearly 82 percent in that same period, according to revised figures from the Young Center.

The study estimates that Pennsylvania now has 59,500 Amish residents, up from 56,500 two years ago and only 32,700 in 1992. That works out to a 4.3 percent increase in the last year. The center estimates the national Amish population to total 240,000.

Original Source: The Huffington Post

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Beginning several years ago, the researchers assembled a dataset of more than 60,000 various crimes, including homicides. Using an algorithm they developed, they found a subset of people much more likely to commit homicide when paroled or probated. Instead of finding one murderer in 100, the UPenn researchers could identify eight future murderers out of 100.

Berk's software examines roughly two dozen variables, from criminal record to geographic location. The type of crime, and more importantly, the age at which that crime was committed, were two of the most predictive variables.

Original Source: Discovery News

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'Bioreplication began about 2001 or 2002,' said Akhlesh Lakhtakia, Godfrey Binder Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics. 'All the techniques currently available are not conducive to mass replications. In many cases you can make as many replicas as you want, but you need an insect for each replication. This is not good for industrial purposes.'

Lakhtakia, working with Drew Patrick Pulsifer, graduate student in engineering science and mechanics; Carlo G. Pantano, distinguished professor of materials science and engineering and director of Penn State's Materials Research Institute; and Raul Jose Martin-Palma, professor of applied physics, Universidad Autonomia de Madrid, Spain, developed a method to create macroscale moulds or dies that retain nanoscale features.

Original Source: Science Centric

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Dr. Norcini said there had been concern about the competence of foreign-trained doctors, based in part on reports in the 1990s of lower test scores and performance ratings. But his study noted that “by the mid-1990s, international medical graduates were outperforming U.S. graduates” on tests in internal medicine.

The researchers set out to evaluate doctors by assessing the health of their patients. They analyzed records from 244,153 hospitalizations in Pennsylvania from 2003-06. All the patients had congestive heart failure or had suffered heart attacks, conditions that are considered a good gauge of the quality of medical care.

Original Source: The New York Times

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"Here's this (market) that is huge, that is really important, that needs innovation, and there's just nothing out there to sort of foster it," said Doug Lynch, vice dean of Penn's Graduate School of Education. "Let's create a Silicon Valley around education."

K-12 schools and degree-granting institutions spend more than $1 trillion on education annually, federal statistics show. That represents immense potential for entrepreneurs - if they can resist the lure of more established tech firms and trendier ventures like social networks.

Original Source: Associated Press

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The implications are immediate. If researchers can in theory predict what human beings will decide before they themselves know it, what is left of the notion of human freedom? How can we say that humans are free in any meaningful way if others can know what their decisions will be before they themselves make them?

Research of this sort can seem frightening. An experiment that demonstrated the illusory nature of human freedom would, in many people’s mind, rob the test subjects of something essential to their humanity.

The search engine giant generated the figures in the report by examining the number of businesses, website publishers and nonprofits using its search and advertising tools.

Nationwide, the company (NASDAQ:GOOG) said it’s search and advertising tools generated $54 billion in economic activity.

The Lehigh Valley economy is on the road to recovery, with more companies hiring people than shedding workers for the first time since July 2008.

The news doesn't mean unemployed workers will suddenly find a vast number of jobs to choose from. But it does reverse the troubling trend of their ranks swelling while opportunities shrank. And for those working who feared they could be laid off, such a trend, in general, makes that less likely.

After majority lenders bought the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News from former head Brian Tierney last week, the group has named former Newsweek publisher Greg Osberg to head operations. Osberg pledged to preserve jobs at the storied Philadelphia institution, the Associated Press reports. 

Osberg--who recently was president and CEO of Buzzwire, a company that provides content and video for mobile phones--said he hopes to work on improving the papers' brand, focus on the use of multimedia like video and audio, and better utilize social-networking sites.

"There will be a culture of rewarding innovation," he said.

Original Source: Associated Press

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The Greater Wilkes-Barre Development Corp., the real-estate arm of the Greater Wilkes-Barre Chamber of Business and Industry which owns the Innovation Center, proposed to construct a new building.

The project would provide support to more than 33 new start-up companies and has the potential to create about 205 new jobs and more than $35 million in wages during the first 10 years of operation, chamber officials said.

In its monthly look at state job trends, the Labor Department said Friday that Maryland led the country with a gain of 35,800 payroll jobs last month. Virginia and Pennsylvania also posted increases that topped 20,000 in the month.

By contrast, Michigan continued to have the nation's highest unemployment rate at 14.1 percent, and also led the country in job losses in March with a decline of 9,500. Nevada and Florida also posted sizable job losses and were among 17 states recording job losses during the month.

Nationally, the unemployment remained unchanged at 9.7 percent in March while payrolls grew by 162,000, the biggest gain in three years.

The local group's final offer had been the equivalent of $129 million, which included the company's North Broad Street headquarters building, which the company valued at about $30 million.

Lawrence G. McMichael, the lead attorney for the company, said he expected the sale to move smoothly to confirmation, with the company coming out of bankruptcy by the end of June.

"And that is a tremendous result," McMichael said

Funded in part by a grant from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the more than $14 million Center is undergoing its third expansion in as many years. In fact, since it opened in 2006, the Center has grown from 63,000 square feet in one building to a total of 100,000 square feet in two buildings located on a 10-acre campus in Doylestown, a suburb of Philadelphia.

The $9.2 million in grants and loans the Commonwealth Financing Authority approved today, he added, will benefit seven projects throughout the state that are showing how alternative energy can conserve resources and cut expenses--two aspects that are critical to Pennsylvania’s long-term economic competitiveness.

The Commonwealth Financing Authority administers Pennsylvania's economic stimulus programs, including portions of the $650 million Alternative Energy Investment Fund.

John Schotland of the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues are getting closer to a new technology that could provide nanometer resolution, or 3-D images of small semiconducting structures or proteins inside cells, reports Physical Review Focus.

Now Schotland and his colleagues have proposed a new method, using a similar setup, that eliminates the need for phase information and instead uses an atomic force microscope (AFM), a device famous for its precise maneuverability. First, a tiny object that scatters light strongly, such as a gold nanoparticle, is attached to the AFM's slender probe, which then hovers less than a wavelength above the sample's surface. Next, aiming the laser at the prism-sample interface from below, a researcher would move the AFM's probe delicately over the sample's surface while a detector measured the power of the reflected beam. "The atomic force microscope has the capability of changing the position of the tip [at] nanometer scales with extraordinary precision," Schotland says.

Original source: Physical Review Focus
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Wellspring Worldwide, with headquarters in Pittsburgh, has acquired Flintbox Innovation Network of Canada and expects to hire up to seven people in the next 18 months, reports Pop City.

Founded in 2003, Wellspring aspires to be a global leader in technology commercialization software, helping universities, small businesses and non-profits to translate intellectual property into successful commercial enterprises. Acquiring Flintbox, a sort of Ebay for university technologies, allows Wellspring to combine the two platforms and expand the client base, says Rob Lowe, CEO.

Original source: Pop City
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The Nanotechnology Institute awarded more than $2 million in grants to 30 university and research scientists in the Philadelphia area, reports the Philadelphia Business Journal.

The grants are meant to fund development and commercialization of intellectual property in the field of nanotechnology, which involves working with substances on a molecular scale.
Nanotechnology gets its name from the nanometer, a measurement unit that is one billionth of a meter.

Original Souce: Philadelphia Business Journal
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Philadelphia law schools are feeding a hungry market for broad expertise, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer.

In fact, government at all levels has turned to law schools in Philadelphia and beyond for experts to provide ideas and intellectual energy. The names of prominent law professors and other academics in the region regularly turn up on lists of potential nominees for prominent jobs.

The most notable recently was Temple Law School Dean JoAnne Epps, whose name has been tossed around as a potential nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter. Temple Law School also has supplied government agencies locally and in Washington with faculty experts. Law professor Jan Ting had been an assistant commissioner with the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington; professor Phoebe Haddon, an expert on constitutional law and torts, was with the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority for a time.

Philadelphia Inquirer
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Those hoping for a movie studio on the Tri State Sports property in Delaware County testified before the House Tourism and Recreational Development Committee to support a tax incentive for filmmakers in the state that could be discontinued, reports the Delaware County Daily Times.

Three bills in the House and Senate are aimed at eliminating or altering the current film-production tax credit in light of the economic climate. Act 55 of 2007 provides up to a $75 million to films that spend at least 60 percent of their budget in the state.

Philadelphia attorney Jeffrey Rotwitt and his partner, Pacifica Ventures of Santa Monica, Calif., plan to build a 370,000-square-foot production facility on the Concord Road property that once served as a recreational center for Sun Oil employees.

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Penn State-Harrisburg researchers are working on an alternative fuel source that could reduce the country's dependence on oil and is designed to grow in cold-weather states like Pennsyvlania, reports the Patriot-News.

The oil-rich jatropha plant is said to cost far less than soybeans and corn to produce biodiesel and can grow in marginal soil. An acre of the plant is capable of producing enough jatropha seeds to make 202 gallons of biodiesel fuel. The problem is this plant likes the hot, balmy temperatures of Costa Rica or India.

Enter a cold-tolerant gene, patented by Penn State Harrisburg assistant biology professor Sairam Rudrabhatla, and the technology that his research team developed.

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