Exploring Holographic General Gauge Mediation

We study models of gauge mediation with strongly coupled hidden sectors, employing a hard wall background as an holographic dual description. The structure of the soft spectrum depends crucially on the boundary conditions one imposes on bulk fields at the IR wall. Generically, vector and fermion correlators have poles at zero momentum, leading to gauge mediation by massive vector messengers and/or generating Dirac gaugino masses. Instead, non-generic choices of boundary conditions let one cover all of GGM parameter space. Enriching the background with R-symmetry breaking scalars, the SSM soft term structure becomes more constrained and similar to previously studied top-down models, while retaining the more analytic control the present bottom-up approach offers.Comment: 28 pages, 4 figures; v2: typos corrected and refs adde

Planning for peak oil: learning from Cuba's special period

It is against recent experiences of proliferative consumption of the earth’s resources that planners and politicians must confront the challenge of peak oil over the coming years. With so few examples of peak oil available worldwide, this paper explores the realities of this in Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 – the so-called special period, which decimated the country’s imports of energy, food and other vital supplies. Drawing on primary research collected in Cuba during 2008 and in an attempt to stimulate debate about how western countries and cities might respond to future losses of global resources, this paper examines the policy responses implemented in Cuba in the fields of transport, spatial planning, agriculture and energy. Despite the Cuban situation being politically different from other countries and the fact that the loss of resources during the special period were abrupt and unplanned, it is argued that there is still considerable scope for a wider application of the concepts to other towns and cities, if not countries and cultures

Collaborative Brazilian Pediatric Renal Transplant Registry (cobrazped-rtx): A Report From 2004 To 2013.

The Collaborative Brazilian Pediatric Renal Transplant Registry started in 2004 as a multicenter initiative aiming to analyze, report, and share the results of pediatric kidney transplantation in Brazil. Data from all pediatric kidney transplants performed between January 2004 and December 2013 were recorded electronically and periodically updated. All patients under 18 years old from the participating centers were enrolled. Demographic data, etiology of chronic kidney disease, and patient and graft survival were analyzed. From a total of 2443 pediatric kidney transplants performed in Brazil during the study period, we report data from 1751 pediatric renal transplants performed in 13 centers enrolled in the collaborative study. Median age at transplantation was 12.4 years, and most of recipients were male (56%). The most common underlying renal etiologies were obstructive uropathy (31%) and glomerulopathy (26%). According to donor source, 1155 (66%) of transplants were performed with deceased donors (DD). Initial immunosuppression consisted mainly of tacrolimus, mycophenolate, steroids, and induction therapy with anti-IL-2R antibodies. One-year graft survival (death-censored) was 93% and 90% (log rank test, P < .01), respectively, for living donor (LD) and DD. Graft losses (15%) were most frequently caused by vascular thrombosis, chronic allograft nephropathy, death with functioning kidney, acute rejection, and recurrent renal disease. Recipients of DD had 2.02 (95% confidence interval: 1.14-3.59) times the hazard of graft loss compared with those of LD (P = .015). Patient survival rates at 1 and 5 years were 98% and 97% for LD and 97% and 93% for DD, respectively. The mortality rate was 3.8%, mainly as the result of infection and cardiovascular disease. The results of this collaborative pediatric transplant study are comparable to international registries. Our effort has been able to maintain an exchange of information, both among the participating centers and with other international registries.47950-95