Guidelines for Corporate Trademark Licensing

Licensing a trademark in many firms, if it occurs at all, is an incidental ad hoc arrangement. An unorganized approach can mean trouble. It can also mean the firm is losing an opportunity to exploit fully a valuable asset. Tom Meyer, Cathie Tinney, and Terry Tinney argue that trademark licensing is deserving of careful attention and planning.     

Veld products and income generation in the southern Cape Strandveld

Only marginal farming activities take place in the Cape Strandveld area south of Alber‐tinia. While income from farming and wages are low, coloured families in the district are still making a living from traditional, informal occupations. Over a period of one year the activities of roughly fifty coloured families in the Albertinia Strandveld area were studied. These people being mostly illiterate, no formal questionnaire was used, but the author directly participated in their various activities and asked informal questions about their occupations. A questionnaire was sent out by Du Preez (1988) to about 150 white landowners in the area and we discussed these findings in relation to the informal sector study. Activities included thatch reed cutting, mole catching, honey collecting, aloe juice tapping, firewood cutting, hunting, fishing, breaking in horses, picking wild flowers and collecting sour figs. Higher incomes would be generated by improved techniques and expanded markets, but these activities should not be absorbed into the modern and formal economic system.     

A Formal Study of Distributed Meeting Scheduling

Automating routine organizational tasks, such as meeting scheduling, requires a careful balance between the individual (respecting his or her privacy and personal preferences) and the organization (making efficient use of time and other resources). We argue that meeting scheduling is an inherently distributed process, and that negotiating over meetings can be viewed as a distributed search process. Keeping the process tractable requires introducing heuristics to guide distributed schedulers' decisions about what information to exchange and whether or not to propose the same tentative time for several meetings. While we have intuitions about how such heuristics could affect scheduling performance and efficiency, verifying these intuitions requires a more formal model of the meeting schedule problem and process. We present our preliminary work toward this goal, as well as experimental results that validate some of the predictions of our formal model. We also investigate scheduling in overconstrained situations, namely, scheduling of high priority meetings at short notice, which requires cancellation and rescheduling of previously scheduled meetings. Our model provides a springboard into deeper investigations of important issues in distributed artificial intelligence as well, and we outline our ongoing work in this direction.