5,489 research outputs found
Federalism, Liberty, and Equality in United States v. Windsor
This essay argues that federalism played a profoundly important role in the Supreme Court\u27s decision in United States v. Windsor, which struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Arguments to the contrary have failed to appreciate how Justice Kennedy\u27s opinion employed federalism not as a freestanding argument but as an essential component of his rights analysis. Far from being a muddle, as many have claimed, Justice Kennedy\u27s analysis offered one of the most sophisticated examples to date of the interconnections between federalism, liberty, and equality
Searches for Clean Anomalous Gauge Couplings effects at present and future colliders
We consider the virtual effects of a general type of Anomalous (triple) Gauge
Couplings on various experimental observables in the process of
electron-positron annihilation into a final fermion-antifermion state. We show
that the use of a recently proposed "-peak subtracted" theoretical
description of the process allows to reduce substantially the number of
relevant parameters of the model, so that a calculation of observability limits
can be performed in a rather simple way. As an illustration of our approach, we
discuss the cases of future measurements at LEP2 and at a new 500 GeV linear
collider.Comment: 23 pages incl. 5 figures (e-mail [email protected]
Future neutrino oscillation facilities
The recent discovery that neutrinos have masses opens a wide new field of
experimentation. Accelerator-made neutrinos are essential in this program.
Ideas for future facilities include high intensity muon neutrino beams from
pion decay (`SuperBeam'), electron neutrino beams from nuclei decays (`Beta
Beam'), or muon and electron neutrino beams from muon decay (`Neutrino
Factory'), each associated with one or several options for detector systems.
Each option offers synergetic possibilities, e.g. some of the detectors can be
used for proton decay searches, while the Neutrino Factory is a first step
towards muon colliders.
A summary of the perceived virtues and shortcomings of the various options,
and a number of open questions are presented.Comment: Originally written for the CERN Strategy Grou
Cram\'er-Rao bounds for synchronization of rotations
Synchronization of rotations is the problem of estimating a set of rotations
R_i in SO(n), i = 1, ..., N, based on noisy measurements of relative rotations
R_i R_j^T. This fundamental problem has found many recent applications, most
importantly in structural biology. We provide a framework to study
synchronization as estimation on Riemannian manifolds for arbitrary n under a
large family of noise models. The noise models we address encompass zero-mean
isotropic noise, and we develop tools for Gaussian-like as well as heavy-tail
types of noise in particular. As a main contribution, we derive the
Cram\'er-Rao bounds of synchronization, that is, lower-bounds on the variance
of unbiased estimators. We find that these bounds are structured by the
pseudoinverse of the measurement graph Laplacian, where edge weights are
proportional to measurement quality. We leverage this to provide interpretation
in terms of random walks and visualization tools for these bounds in both the
anchored and anchor-free scenarios. Similar bounds previously established were
limited to rotations in the plane and Gaussian-like noise
Impact of Farmland Preservation Programs on the Rate of Urban Development
Due to high losses of agricultural land in urbanizing areas over the past several years, state and local governments have adopted zoning regulations, right-to-farm ordinances, preferential property tax programs, and other means to protect agricultural land resources. Critics of the farmland preservation efforts note that these programs may only delay the ultimate conversion of farmland to urban uses and may simply shift urban development to neighboring areas (positive spillover effects). An alternative means of permanently protecting farmland is provided by purchase of development rights (PDR) programs, which enroll acreage from landowners who voluntarily sell the development rights to their farmland. Although ownership and all other property rights are retained by the owner, the option to develop the land for urban uses is removed from the current and all subsequent landowners. The purpose of this paper is to develop an empirical model of the impact of PDR programs on urban land development rates. To estimate the empirical model, we form a dependent variable based on county level rates of urban development from the USDA National Resources Inventory (NRI) data base for nine states in the Northeast US that have adopted farmland protection measures during the sample period (1982-1997). The set of explanatory variables include dummy variables for the existence of an active PDR program in the county and active PDR programs in adjacent counties plus measures of demographics, farm returns, population growth, income, and site-specific factors gathered from several sources (e.g., Census of Agriculture, Census of Population, and USDA). The model is estimated using the ordinary least squares technique. Two key policy-relevant hypotheses: (1) PDR programs did not reduce the rate of urban development and (2) PDR programs did not induce positive spillover effects on neighboring counties. The test results suggest that PDRs may have had important more significant impact in the earlier years and did not cause positive spillover effects.Land Economics/Use,
Physics opportunities with future proton accelerators at CERN
We analyze the physics opportunities that would be made possible by upgrades
of CERN's proton accelerator complex. These include the new physics possible
with luminosity or energy upgrades of the LHC, options for a possible future
neutrino complex at CERN, and opportunities in other physics including rare
kaon decays, other fixed-target experiments, nuclear physics and antiproton
physics, among other possibilities. We stress the importance of inputs from
initial LHC running and planned neutrino experiments, and summarize the
principal detector R&D issues.Comment: 39 page, word document, full resolution version available from
http://cern.ch/pofpa/POFPA-arXive.pd
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