Brand-name prescription drug manufacturers use various strategies to extend their market exclusivity periods by delaying generic or biosimilar competition. Recent Congressional legislation has targeted four such tactics. We analyze these proposals and assess their likely effect on competition in the U.S. drug market.

This paper asked participants to assess four selected expert-rated Taiwan International Student Design Competition (TISDC) products using four methods: Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT), Creative Product Semantic Scale (CPSS), Product Creativity Measurement Instrument (PCMI), and revised Creative Solution Diagnosis Scale (rCSDS). The results revealed that, between experts and non-experts, the ranking results by the CAT and CPSS were the same, while the ranking results of the rCSDS were different. The CAT, CPSS, and TISDC methods provided the same results indicating that raters may return the same results on creativity assessment, and the results are not affected by the selected methods.

If it is necessary to use non-experts to assess creativity and the creativity results are expected to be the same with that of experts, asking non-expert raters to use CPSS to assess creativity and then ranking the creativity score is more reliable. The study offers a contribution to the creativity domain on deciding which methods may be more reliable from a comparison perspective.

We characterize the linear order types $\tau $ with the property that given any countable linear order $\mathcal {L}$, $\tau \cdot \mathcal {L}$ is a computable linear order iff $\mathcal {L}$ is a computable linear order, as exactly the finite nonempty order types.

Prototyping is interwoven with nearly all product, service, and systems development efforts. A prototype is a pre-production representation of some aspect of a concept or final design. Prototyping often predetermines a large portion of resource deployment in development and influences design project success. This review surveys literature sources in engineering, management, design science, and architecture. The study is focused around design prototyping for early stage design. Insights are synthesized from critical review of the literature: key objectives of prototyping, critical review of major techniques, relationships between techniques, and a strategy matrix to connect objectives to techniques. The review is supported with exemplar prototypes provided from industrial design efforts. Techniques are roughly categorized into those that improve the outcomes of prototyping directly, and those that enable prototyping through lowering of cost and time. Compact descriptions of each technique provide a foundation to compare the potential benefits and drawbacks of each. The review concludes with a summary of key observations, highlighted opportunities in the research, and a vision of the future of prototyping. This review aims to provide a resource for designers as well as set a trajectory for continuing innovation in the scientific research of design prototyping.

Certification initiatives are product-focused, rely on standards and use sustainabilitymetrics to inform end-users on the provenance of commodities. In the metals sector, thephenomenon of formal certification programs has recently gained traction. Four initiativesare reviewed to illustrate the status and prospects of metal certification. The prime caseis the Conflict Free Smelter Program operated by the global electronics industry. Thisscheme has developed and applied standards on mineral chain-of-custody, including use ofthird-parties to audit smelters and refineries all over the world. Additional programsdiscussed are the Green Lead Project, Fair Trade and Fair Mined gold, and the ResponsibleJewellery Council. Collectively these initiatives address a variety of sustainabilitycriteria, including social, economic and environmental dimensions, but focus only onprecious and specialty metals (Au, platinum group, Pb, Sn, Ta and W). Metalscertifications programs are building capacity and infrastructure compared to matureprograms in agriculture and other commodity sectors. Opportunities and issues for growthof metals certification are considered.

The product w = u ⊗ v of two sequences u and v is a naturally defined sequence on the alphabet of pairs of symbols. Here, we study when the product w of two balanced sequences u,v is balanced too. In the case u and v are binary sequences, we prove, as a main result, that, if such a product w is balanced and deg(w) = 4, then w is an ultimately periodic sequence of a very special form. The case of arbitrary alphabets is approached in the last section. The partial results obtained and the problems proposed show the interest of the notion of product in the study of balanced sequences.

Let λ be a regular ordinal with λ≥ω1. Then we prove that (λ+1)×λ is not base-countably metacompact. This implies that base-κ-paracompactness is not an inverse invariant of perfect mappings, which answers a question asked by Yamazaki.

In this paper we give some properties of the pairwise perfectly normal spaces defined by Lane. In particular we prove that a space (X, P, Q) is pairwise perfectly normal if and only if every P(Q)–closed set is the zero of a P(Q)–l.s.c. and Q(P)–u.s.c. function. Also we characterize the pairwise perfect normality in terms of sequences of semicontinuous functions by means of a result which contains the known Tong's characterization of perfectly normal topological spaces, whose proof we modify by using the technique of binary relations.

Different methods are used to show that a finite or countable product of Lindelöf scattered spaces is Lindelöf. Also, a technique of Kunen is modified to yield results concerning the Lindelöf degree of the Gδ and Gα-topologies on the countable product of compact scattered spaces.

It is known that if a topological property of Tychonoff spaces is closed-hereditary, productive and possessed by all compact Hausdorff spaces, then each (0-dimensional) Tychonoff space X is a dense subspace of a (0-dimensional) Tychonoff space with such that each continuous map from X to a (0-dimensional) Tychonoff space with admits a continuous extension over . In response to Broverman's question [Canad. Math. Bull. 19 (1), (1976), 13–19], we prove that if for every two 0-dimensional Tychonoff spaces X and Y, if and only if , then is contained in countable compactness.