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Gold extraction in primitive artisanal mines usually involves the over-usage of mercury (Hg). This practice results in significant environmental contamination, but is difficult to eliminate due to its effectiveness. Any alternative must be simple, inexpensive and visually effective. This paper proposes a novel, chemical-free method for extracting gold from gravity middlings which has potential as an effective alternative to Hg amalgamation. This method exploits the differences in relative malleability, rather than density, of gold and waste products by submitting concentrates to grinding in a rod mill. The grind products are separated through a sieve, where flattened gold particles are captured on the oversize while brittle waste reports to the fines. Recoveries often exceeded 90%, with nearly pure raw gold separated after only minutes of grinding. While recently adapted to the modern Yukon placer fields, this method has potential to reduce Hg usage by miners in more primitive settings.

Few groups face more significant, complex, and difficult economic and social problems than those confronted by American Indians. Economic impoverishment, unemployment, exploitation of natural resources, a failing educational system, insufficient housing, inadequate healthcare, and loss of cultural identity all threaten the wellbeing of native communities. Social entrepreneurship has proven an effective avenue for the pursuit of tribal economic development, sustained economic independence, and sovereignty of Native American people. Native American social entrepreneurs have specific and unique characteristics which impact business decision making, strategy, and enterprise growth. American Indian entrepreneurs can leverage knowledge of their distinct history, institutions, indigenous culture, and local economic resources in order to add value to their social entrepreneurial ventures.

A novel, chemical-free method for extracting gold from gravity middlings is described. This method exploits the differences in relative malleability, rather than density, of gold and waste products by submitting concentrates to grinding in a rod mill. The grind products are separated through a sieve, where flattened gold particles are captured on the oversize while brittle waste reports to the fines. This paper presents the results of a field tour of this method throughout the Yukon placer gold fields, where gold was extracted from difficult to process stockpiled middlings. Recoveries were often well over 90%, with nearly pure raw gold effectively separated after only minutes of grinding in a batch mill. Gold remaining in the fine and evenly classified loss material is now more amenable to gravity processing than similarly sized unground concentrate. Further lab testing indicated that gold recoveries were most sensitive to the mill charge amount and total grind time. While these results are based on placer properties, the method has potential in any mill involving a gravity recovery circuit.

To explain resource heterogeneity, past research focuses on how rivals' resources are hidden from firms and firms accordingly have difficulties accessing them. We argue that resource heterogeneity may also arise when firms are deterred from a technological space upon being shown what resources rivals already possess within that space. To illustrate this deterrence effect, we use patent reexamination certificates, which indicate strategic stakes within a technological space without materially disclosing additional details of the underlying technologies and hence avoid the confounding effect of attracting competition through disclosure. We demonstrate how rivals' reexamination certificates within a technological space induce a firm to subsequently allocate less inventive effort in that space, based on two mechanisms—indications of rivals' developmental speed and exclusionary ability. We further develop these two mechanisms by arguing that the deterrence effect is stronger when rivals' speed is enhanced by their downstream capabilities, or when rivals' exclusion is enhanced by their litigation experiences. Findings suggest that a firm's path of resource accumulation evolves through avoidance of rivals' paths, and deterrence may constitute a viable alternative theory of resource heterogeneity. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In 1886, the US Supreme Court wrote that, for Indian tribes, “the people of the states where they are found are often their deadliest enemies.” Recently, state agencies and regulators have continued that tradition of hostility by improperly attempting to regulate electronic commerce businesses operated by tribal governments that are more properly subject to regulations established by tribal law and subject to federal oversight. Despite the fact that these online businesses operate exclusively under tribal law and make their tribal affiliation clear to customers, certain state regulators have demanded absolute compliance with state law, even when such laws are from states thousands of miles away. Not only does this overreaching by uninformed state regulators limit the products available to consumers but it also severely undercuts on-reservation economic development, imperils tribal electronic commerce, and challenges basic notions of tribal sovereignty.Businesses and consumers entering into commercial contracts rely heavily on consistency and predictability in contracting, including when the parties mutually agree to apply tribal law or utilize tribal courts to resolve disputes. Uniform interpretation and enforcement of such agreements are critical to ensuring continued investment in tribal businesses. With over one quarter of American Indians living in poverty, nearly twice the national average, it has never been more important to promote confidence in the Indian economy. When courts do not give full force and effect to contracting parties’ desire to resolve their private disputes using tribal courts and tribal law, this confidence is threatened. While it is unclear how this controversy will ultimately play out, one thing is certain: states are not only undermining tribal innovation and harming tribal economies but also attacking tribal sovereignty itself.Perhaps lost in the legal rancor, however, are the very real human and economic consequences of the loss of tribal revenues from e-commerce business, as well as the potential damage to tribal e-commerce as a whole. In this article, we present results of our empirical research into the economic impact of tribal online lending in Indian Country. We first frame the issue with a brief summary of the legal foundations for tribal e-commerce and tribal lending in particular. We then present several case studies of tribes that have engaged in online lending, focusing on the direct economic impact to those tribal communities. We conclude the article with policy arguments as to why state and federal regulators should support rather than suppress tribal e-commerce, including tribal small-dollar online lending.

In this paper we examine a number of methods for probing and understanding the large-scale structure of networks that evolve over time. We focus in particular on citation networks, networks of references between documents such as papers, patents, or court cases. We describe three different methods of analysis, one based on an expectation-maximization algorithm, one based on modularity optimization, and one based on eigenvector centrality. Using the network of citations between opinions of the United States Supreme Court as an example, we demonstrate how each of these methods can reveal significant structural divisions in the network, and how, ultimately, the combination of all three can help us develop a coherent overall picture of the network's shape., Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures; journal names for 4 references fixed

Patent thickets are unintentionally dense webs of overlapping intellectual property rights owned by different companies that can retard progress. This article begins with a review of existing research on patent thickets, focusing in particular on the problem of patent thickets in nanotechnology, or nanothickets. After presenting visual evidence of the presence of nanothickets using a network analytic technique, it discusses potential organizational responses to patent thickets. It then reviews the existing research on patent pools and discusses pool formation in the shadow of antitrust enforcement. Based on recent research on patent pool formation, it examines the divergent fate of two recent pools and discusses the prospects for the future formation of nanotechnology patent pools, or nanopools.

Economic leakage occurs when money leaves or “leaks” away from the local economy sooner than expected and sooner than is optimal. From an ideal economic perspective, money should circulate in the local economy where it was received or earned five to seven times before leaving that community. When consumers cannot buy the goods and services they desire in their local areas, however, they are forced to spend their money outside their communities, and that money rarely cycles back. On some reservations, nearly 80% of the dollars flow out of the tribal economy without cycling even once, resulting in substantial economic leakage. This article argues that a primary cause for the lack of on-reservation consumer options is the cumbersome and onerous policy of the United States government holding tribal land in trust. An artifact of a long since discredited congressional policy called Allotment, federally-imposed restrictions on trust land make it nearly impossible for on-reservation entrepreneurs to secure startup financing, as they cannot borrow against the equity they have in their homes. As a result, fewer entrepreneurial ventures exist on reservations and thus fewer options are available for on-reservation consumers to spend their money on reservation. The inevitable consequence of such a lack of consumer spending options on reservations is leakage. This article also argues that title to trust land can and should be returned to tribes and individuals in fee under a new tribal status that confers permanent jurisdiction to the tribe, complete with full taxation powers. Such a system will end a primary cause of economic leaking while ensuring that the newly transferred land will always be subject to tribal jurisdiction regardless of the race of the landowner.

Before contributing new knowledge, individuals must attain requisite background knowledge or skills through schooling, training, practice, and experience. Given limited time, individuals often choose either to focus on few areas, where they build deep expertise, or to delve less deeply and distribute their attention and efforts across several areas. In this paper we measure the relationship between the narrowness of focus and the quality of contribution across a range of both traditional and recent knowledge sharing media, including scholarly articles, patents, Wikipedia, and online question and answer forums. Across all systems, we observe a small but significant positive correlation between focus and quality., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures

BackgroundHuman knowledge and innovation are recorded in two media: scholarly publication and patents. These records not only document a new scientific insight or new method developed, but they also carefully cite prior work upon which the innovation is built.MethodologyWe quantify the impact of information flow across fields using two large citation dataset: one spanning over a century of scholarly work in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, and second spanning a quarter century of United States patents.ConclusionsWe find that a publication's citing across disciplines is tied to its subsequent impact. In the case of patents and natural science publications, those that are cited at least once are cited slightly more when they draw on research outside of their area. In contrast, in the social sciences, citing within one's own field tends to be positively correlated with impact.

Property rights provide incentives to create information but also incentives to hoard it before award of protection. Even after award, others who might supplement that idea lack bargaining power until they too secure property rights. An unintended consequence is to slow, not hasten, progress when innovation hinges on combining disparate private ideas. We show formally that fairness can increase innovation. Welfare improves both in the absolute sense of enabling new projects and in the relative sense of reordering projects that people undertake. Second, in contrast to models of "other regarding'' preferences, we show how self-interest alone is sufficient to justify fairness in a one-time encounter. Third, we show how the hold-up problem is worse for information than for tangible goods. Fourth, we sketch a practical way to promote fairness using liability rules rather than property rights. Liability rules give idea-developers greater flexibility and incentives while protecting idea-originators from exploitation.

Indian Country is America's domestic emerging market, and as in a number of emerging markets, many successful businesses in Indian Country are starving for expansion capital. The US Treasury estimates that the private equity deficit in Indian Country is $44 billion. While the handful of wealthier tribes might be logical investors in private equity funds deploying capital in Indian Country, the existing securities laws present a significant impediment. In particular, Regulation D of the Securities Act of 1933 does not treat tribes as "accredited investors," thus denying those tribes the ability to participate in the private equity market. Since there is no principled reason to exclude tribes from the list of accredited investors, this article makes the case for extending accredited investor status to tribes.

Certain default rules for adjudicating property rights disputes retard innovation by discouraging information sharing. Reasons, identified as far back as Arrow 1962, include inspecting the value of information and uncertainty over future contingent claims. In response, we propose a solution based on a simple definition of "fairness." This unblocks innovation by increasing willingness to share private information

Although some of the most important elements of a knowledge-based economy in the coming century will be intellectual asset transactions, the current marketplace for intellectual asset transactions is murky at best. With patent litigation costs skyrocketing, most organizations have only recently begun licensing and cross-licensing their intellectual asset portfolios. Because robust valuation metrics for intellectual assets have not been fully developed, most licensing negotiations are based on rules of thumb rather than quantitative methods, rules of thumb that can often be economically disadvantageous to either the licensee or the licensor. With only two percent of the millions of innovations created in this country utilized under license, billions of dollars worth of intellectual assets are underutilized. Economic theory might suggest that the information necessary for quantitative analysis is too costly to acquire (i.e., difficult to obtain or not available at all), resulting in a relatively small number of market transactions involving intellectual assets, with valuations generally covered by rules of thumb. Different organizational behavior theories would probably suggest that some forms of bounded rationality are responsible for the use of these rules of thumb. The true answer probably lies somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between those perspectives. This article explores the nature of intellectual assets and the dynamics of intellectual asset transactions. After examining various organizational behavior and economic perspectives in search of an explanation for the current state of the marketplace for intellectual asset transactions, the article concludes by proposing valuation metrics that might better inform the negotiations surrounding an intellectual asset transaction.

This paper focuses on two related questions at the intersection of antitrust and intellectual property law. First, under what circumstances must the holder of a patent or a copyright or the owner of a trade secret allow others to use that intellectual property? Second, under what circumstances can the holder of an intellectual property right use that right to make it difficult for another party to succeed in a related market? These questions have vexed antitrust and intellectual property scholars alike ever since the Federal Circuit ruled in 2000 that patent holders “may enforce the statutory right to exclude others from making, using, or selling the claimed invention free from liability under the antitrust laws,” a ruling that directly contradicted the Ninth Circuit ruling that antitrust liability could be imposed for almost identical conduct, depending on the motivations of the patent holder. The various proceedings in United States v. Microsoft only added fuel to the firestorm of controversy.After briefly retracing the jurisprudential path to see how this situation arose, we propose a solution that primarily involves a variation on the real property concept of adverse possession for the intellectual property space along with a slight extension of the Essential Facilities Doctrine for industries that exhibit network effects. We examine, both for firms with and without market power, how our proposal would resolve the situations presented by large fixed asset purchases, the introduction of entirely new products, and operating systems with network effects. We also demonstrate how our proposal could be applied in the European antitrust enforcement context.