Monday, December 30, 2019

Intellectual Property Rights On Sino Us Economic And Trade...

In the 1990s, the two countries have since undergone three intense intellectual property disputes, each to the brink of a trade war. Intellectual property issues in Sino-US economic and trade relations in the 1990s to become one of the major outstanding issues. With the signing of the Sino-US memorandum of understanding on the protection of intellectual property rights in 1992, and the signing of two bilateral intellectual property agreements in February 1995, and June 1996, China and the US intellectual property disputes have been eased. China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), which greatly contributed to the development of Sino-US economic and trade relations. In 2003, China became the third largest trading partner of the†¦show more content†¦International protection of the vital interests of the countries involved in the development of enterprises, and the relationship between national intellectual property rights. In the late 1980s, facing recession, the United States dropped its international competitiveness because its intellectual property rights could not be protected in the world, that its biggest competition in the economic resources and with the advantage of technology and invention, effective protection of intellectual property rights is critical to the US economy overseas. Therefore, the US spared no effort to initiate the GATT Uruguay Round negotiations n 1986, and put intellectual property protection into the framework of the GATT, known as the trade-related intellectual property rights. With the signing of 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), the international multilateral mechanism to protect intellectual property and international trade - the WTO closely together. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act in the conduct of unfair trade retaliation 301 adds a Special 301, and the intellectual property rights as an individual, do not protect US intellectual property or intellectual property rights hinder US companies to enter their national markets to investigate and impose trade sanctions. Thus, protection of intellectual property has

Sunday, December 22, 2019

The Decline of Honeybees Implications, Causes, and Responses

The lives of humans and honeybees have been intertwined for millennia. For at least 8,000 years, humans have sought honey for applications in disciplines ranging from medicine to the culinary arts. But while humans love honey, honeybees provide a much more valuable service: pollination. As the world’s most prolific pollinator, honeybees are essential to the reproduction of many plant species, which in turn benefits other animals and plants. In fact, humans heavily rely on honeybees to pollinate our own food source, a service that is worth billions of dollars a year. Unfortunately, the honeybee population is in a severe and prolonged decline, often in the form of colony collapse disorder, in which entire colonies are seemingly abandoned by†¦show more content†¦However, many countries are not so fortunate. Ssenoga (2014) wrote, In Uganda, honey bees provide pollination services to such crops as coffee, cotton, beans, peas, mango, citrus, avocado, tomatoes, passion fruits, apples, soya beans, water melons, and several others. Any collapse in the services will have detrimental effects to the livelihoods of the 65.5 percent of rural farmers, who also depend on agriculture for food security. In 2013, nearly half of Ugandans were food energy deficient, 5% suffered from extremely unbalanced diets, and 33% of Ugandan children were stunted (World Food Programme, 2013). In countries like Uganda, which is relatively well-off in comparison to many other African nations, a honeybee shortage resulting in decreased food production could mean starvation for many people. Colony Collapse Disorder The current downward trend in honeybee populations has been punctuated by wide occurrences of colony collapse disorder (CCD). This is not a new phenomenon; the first recorded incident occurred in 1869. Since that time, there have been occurrences of CCD in locations as diverse as Oregon, Australia, and Great Britain, to name a few. In instances of colony collapse disorder, the colony is almost completely absent of adult bees, and there are few if anyShow MoreRelatedDeformed Wing Virus Of Honeybees1698 Words   |  7 PagesFannon – Week 7 Report PhD Project Title: Deformed Wing Virus of Honeybees Supervisor: Prof. David Evans, School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick. Background. Insect pollinators play a vital role in the majority of terrestrial ecosystems and the survival and productivity of many wild and agricultural plants depends upon successful pollination by insects [1,2]. In a 2005 assessment of the potential impact of pollinator decline, it was estimated that the total economic value of insect pollinationRead MoreAgriculture Is An Essential Component That Supports The Lives Of Many Individuals Essay1816 Words   |  8 Pagesresult this paper seeks to demonstrate that, Monstanto’s drive for economic gain has resulted in the creation of genetically modified organisms, which has diminished aspects of food sovereignty within agricultural systems. This has resulted in implications surrounding humans working against nature, potential harm to human health as well as rejecting the values of other farmers/ food providers. In relation to humans working against nature research has demonstrated that Monsanto’s GM crops have causedRead More50 Harm ful Effects of Genetically Modified (Gm) Foods14312 Words   |  58 Pagesmatchmaker and inviting two people to a dinner party, to meet and see if they are compatible. This differs essentially from forcing their meeting and union or a violent date rape. The former act may be divine, and the latter considered criminal. The implication is that biotechnology involves vital moral issues in regard to the whole of life in nature. With biotechnology, roses are no longer crossed with just roses. They are mated with pigs, tomatoes with oak trees, fish with asses, butterflies with worms

Saturday, December 14, 2019

Virtual Merchants Free Essays

A Virtual merchant is any website which offers the sale of goods or services in a return for remuneration. [ (Tatum, 2010) ] Virtual merchants are essentially the same as a retail outlet, except they only operate online, example Amazon. They allow the consumer easy and instant access to view/purchase merchandise at the click of a button anytime and anywhere. We will write a custom essay sample on Virtual Merchants or any similar topic only for you Order Now Online stores are now being called e-tailers as they are highly popular with the general consumer. For example in 2008 Amazon had over ‘’76 million active customers accounts and order fulfilment to more than 200 countries’’. [ (DaveChaffey, last modified 13-03-2008) ] Amazons success and domination in the market place is well known. Customers tend to stay loyal to the e-tailer as they are extremely reliable on delivery, have an easy and user friendly online interface and are constantly learning and establishing trading relationships with its customer’s example possible likes e-mails. This loyalty aspect is one problem which most virtual merchants face and in Amazons case the customer orientated strategy they employ seems to be very effective at maintaining brand loyalty. ‘’Relentlessly focus on customer experience by offering our customers low prices, convenience, and a wide selection of merchandise’’ [ (DaveChaffey, last modified 13-03-2008) ] Many trading merchants offer the virtual trading aspect to their existing physical business to stay competitive and diverse within in the market place. This retail outlet coupled with the virtual merchant allows the business to appeal to a larger target market of potential customers, example the convenience shopper (online) and the physical shopper. This type of merchant can be referred to as bricks and clicks merchant example Wal-Mart. The value proposition defines how a company’s product or service fulfils the needs of customers (Kambil, Ginsberg and Bloch 1998). In Amazons case the value proposition is quiet simple as it aims to offer the world’s biggest choice of certain goods and be extremely customer focused and orientated. Amazon offers a personalised and customized service at a very competitive cost to their customers at the click of a mouse. According to Kambil 1997 and Bakos 1998, offering personalization, customization of product offerings and a reduction on product search costs are extremely important factors in developing a company’s value proposition. A company’s revenue model defines how they intend to generate profit and return on investment. In the virtual merchant market place there are several ways where profit can be generated. Firstly there is the direct sales profit margin and in amazons case they don’t have to rent retail outlets in busy high streets etc only merchandise warehousing storage etc, this accompanied with its online trading medium means that overheads, example direct contact with customer and reduction in sales support costs, are kept to a minimum allowing Amazon to offer an unrivalled selection and value for money. This places Amazon extremely competitive within the market place. Secondly they offer other businesses space to advertise on their webpage for example Hewlett pacard, Thompson holidays, Travel lodge etc. Virtual merchants are constantly looking to be dynamic and diverse in their service which they provide and different ways in targeting new customers. The e-tailer market is constantly growing as new users and accounts are set up every day. Amazon began in 1995 and have gained there competitive advantage within their market, they generated over 5 billion in sales in under a decade. When we compare this statistic with Wal-Mart (a bricks and clicks merchant) it took them twenty years to hit this sales figure. This is an indicator of how big and expanding the e-tailer market is. How to cite Virtual Merchants, Papers

Friday, December 6, 2019

Resource Management and SLA Management

Questions: 1. Discuss the requirements for remote administration, resource management and SLA management. It may be useful to consider Morad and Dalbhanjans operational checklists for DSIs OSDS. This section should be no more than two to three pages in length. 2. Discuss briefly how you will consider application resilience, backup and disaster recovery for your chosen provider in relation to OSDS. This section should be no more than two to three pages in length. 3. Use Erls SLA guidelines to assess the SLA for your chosen provider. This section should be no more than two to three pages in length. 4.Provide a covering one to two page executive summary of these two assessments to DSI Executive Management and summarise the major opportunities and risks that have been identified in your assessments. Answers: Executive Summary Online Spatial Delivery System (OSDS) is a suite of web services and applications for the Department of Spatial Information (DSI). DSI has decided to shift OSDS to a cloud provider and the chosen model is Platform as a Service (PaaS). The major risks that come up in the migration of services to the cloud are to the data protection and information security. Access controls and use of proper authentication and authorization methods can act as important and impactful countermeasures. The report discusses the six components that are necessary in the migration process that is involved with OSDS. Remote administration has a few shortcomings associated with it in terms of multi-platform support and scalability. Resource management can be done with ease through managing the resources at all levels such as top, middle and low. SLA management for OSDS is recommended to be done at the service level. Application resilience focuses on the High Availability requirements that are associated with DS I and OSDS. Data back up and disaster recovery are of prime importance to yield protection to the data and recover the same in case of an attack or loss of the same. Data protection and information security risks are the two prime risks that are associated with OSDS and may result in adverse impacts if the measures to prevent and handle these two are not undertaken with utmost perfection. Introduction Online Spatial Delivery System (OSDS) has to be migrated to a cloud provider. The most applicable model to execute the same is Platform as a Service (PaaS). PaaS provides the platform and environment to build the applications upon the same. Each and every entity plays a crucial role and a phased approach needs to be followed for achieving the best results out of them. Remote Administration Remote Administration is the act of handling and processing the system from any of the remote locations (cbigconsulting.com, 2016). The use of Remote Administration is however, discouraged owing to the shortcomings that it comes with. There are multiple tools that do not scale properly. It becomes tedious for the administrators to simultaneously work upon the network with varied speeds and that too in a secure manner. Multi-platform support is another issue that is seen with the implementation of Remote Administration in the architecture. Organizations make use of different operating systems such as Linux, Windows, iOS and many other and all of them need to be supported in an efficient manner. Mobile devices are also being used by most of the organizations and the OS of those devices need support too. Use of varied tools and devices with different platforms and operating systems is difficult to manage by the remote administrator. Regulatory requirements such as encryption, authentication and access controls also appear as an issue in the implementation of remote administration (sans.org, 2016). Resource Management Resource Management is the second components for OSDS that is required for successful implementation and migration of the services and applications on the cloud. There are multiple resources across various departments that are associated with OSDS. The key resources are as listed below. Business owners Database admin and team Operations head and team Development team Design team Network team Network admin Support and maintenance team DSI needs to develop strategies to efficiently mannage resources and other departments. The basic step in achieveing the same is to find answers to the following list of questions. Is there an already implemented resource tagging strategy in place? What is the internal resource management team that is associated with DSI and how does it link to the overall company model? What is the process that is used in the allocation of resources to a particular project or department? Are there required metadat and service instances available or need to be included? SLA Management SLA is a term for Service Level Agreement and it is a written legal contract that is agreed upon and signed between the service user and the service provider. A service along with all of its aspects is formally defined in this contract. There are a certain particular aspects such as scope, quality and responsibilities that are present in SLA in complete detail. One of the most important feature that is present in SLA is an agreed-upon delivery time. For OSDS, it will also include the time it would be required to completed migrate the services and applications on the cloud provider and also the details on every phase. This would be in terms of percentage that is how much percent of the entire service will be completely migrated in a specified time period. Other details that are defined in SLA are Mean time to failure (MTTF), Mean time between failures (MTBF) and Mean time to repair or recovery (MTTR). It would help in the identification os the parties that would be responsible for han dling the failures and dealing with the costs associated with the same. Levels in SLA Management Shared resources is a phenonmenon that is common in case of cloud computing. The most applicable SLA level in case of OSDS would be at the service level (Bose et al., 2011). The following factors play a major role in designing of SLA for OSDS: The services that have been agreed upon between DSI and the cloud provider Supply chain management team Accurate assignment of roles and responsibilities to the resources Complete analysis of the cost and description for each of the component Broad level flow chart highlighting the critical features Performance indicators (mitsm.de, 2016) Service Levels Agreements are output based in nature which means that the results that will be recived by the customers would be the subject and source of the agreement. The (expert) service provider can demonstrate their value by organizing themselves with ingenuity, capability, and knowledge to deliver the service required, perhaps in an innovative way. OSDS can also explain the details and specifications of these services agreed with the provider in a specification document. The major services and details that will be covered in the SLA for OSDS would be as listed below: Primary resposible source for all the services along with the secondary points of contact. What all services will be covered? What would be the time constraints that would apply on these services? Will there be any extrenal entities that would be required in the service Completion? What will be the design that would be followed and will it apply to all the services or on a particular section of services? For every service, the contribution ot be made by DSI and the one to be done by the cloud provider would also be contracted to avoid the disimilarties and differences in opinions later on. Application Resilience Every application has a set of critical and high on priority requirements. OSDS also has a set of the same which are termed as High Availability (HA) requirements. There needs to be a step-by-step approach to be developed for the complete execution of such requirements. The strategy would include the following: A fault tolerant application in cloud that would help in maintenance of availability and reliability of the services Adherence to the guidelines Applicable and required data storage options Architecture of cloud Data Storage Backup Storing and managing the huge data is a task in itself and there are Big Data tools that can be utilized for this purpose (Goes, J. 2016). There is database named NoSQL for performing this task and it also provides additional features such as easy visualizations, flexibility and creation of reports. Predictive analysis on the data to correctly manage and store the same is also possible through NoSQL (Pentaho, 2016). Mongo DB, Elasticsearcg, CouchDB, AmazonSimpleDB and Terrastore are some of the NoSQL databases that provide good storge and indexing features (Big Data Made Simple - One source. Many perspectives., 2014). Disaster Recovery Disaster Recovery (DR) comes in to the picture when the attack or any such event takes place and the data needs to be recovered. These are the measures that should be adopted to avoid the risks at the first place and recover from the same. Preventative Measures for firsthand security like use of antivirus, firewalls and deployment of physical security guards fall under this one. Reactive They are the ones that are adapted once the event already takes place. Detective Measures such as intrusion detection and motion detection fall in this category of countermeasures Administrative These are used to make the processes adhere to the defined guideleines. DR, as already stated is the set of processes that is used to recover as much data as possible and is required for maintenance and management of the same. DR would allow the recovery process to be enabled in multiple locations (Kiblin, 2011). Many strategies are present to have an application recovered (aws.amazon.com, 2016). Cloud for disaster recovery is a viable option for DSI both from the financial perspective and from the control perspective as well (Dix, 2016). Conclusions Opportunities and Risks OSDS needs the components as Remote adminstration, SLA management, data storage and back up along with the disaster recovery during its migration to a cloud provider. Remote administration suffers from a few drawbacks related to scalability and multi-platform support. Resource management is necessary for accurate utilization of resources and their skills. Critical requirements, data storage and recovery also play an important role for OSDS. Cloud suffers from certain potential and probable risks as well that mainly revolve around data protection and information security. These risks include loss of data, accessing of the data by an unauthorized user, denial of services, attack of malicious software, spoofing, phishing and inadequate due diligence. Such risks possess a threat to the confidentiality, integrity and authneticty of the information, Use of authorizations measures along with proper access controls are mandatory to protect the data belonging to OSDS. The data associated is private and confidential in nature and the landing of the same in unauthorized hands could be extremely adverse for DSI. ("Risks of cloud computing | Queensland Government", 2016). References Bose, S., Pasala, A., Ramanujam A, D., Murthy, S. and Malaiyandisamy, G. (2011). Big Data Made Simple - One source. Many perspectives. (2014). Dix, J. (2016). Cloud computing causing rethinking of disaster recovery. Goes, J. (2016). How to choose a NoSQL analytics system. Innotas. (2016). Project Resource Management Benefits | Innotas. Executive Summary