Collective treatment of High Energy Thresholds in SUSY - GUTs

Supersymmetric GUTs are the most natural extension of the Standard model unifying electroweak and strong forces. Despite their indubitable virtues, among these the gauge coupling unification and the quantization of the electric charge, one of their shortcomings is the large number of parameters used to describe the high energy thresholds (HET), which are hard to handle. We present a new method according to which the effects of the HET, in any GUT model, can be described by fewer parameters that are randomly produced from the original set of the parameters of the model. In this way, regions favoured by the experimental data are easier to locate, avoiding a detailed and time consuming exploration of the parameter space, which is multidimensional even in the most economic unifying schemes. To check the efficiency of this method, we directly apply it to a SUSY SO(10) GUT model in which the doublet-triplet splitting is realized through the Dimopoulos-Wilczek mechanism. We show that the demand of gauge coupling unification, in conjunction with precision data, locates regions of the parameter space in which values of the strong coupling \astrong are within the experimental limits, along with a suppressed nucleon decay, mediated by a higgsino driven dimension five operators, yielding lifetimes that are comfortably above the current experimental bounds. These regions open up for values of the SUSY breaking parameters m_0, M_1/2 < 1 TeV being therefore accessible to LHC.Comment: 21 pages, 8 figures, UA-NPPS/BSM-10/02 (added

HOLIDAY ATTACHMENT: THE CONSTRUCT AND ITS MEASUREMENT

Given that it is not the individual components constituting a holiday in isolation or in simple additive relationship that determines tourists’ sense of satisfaction with that holiday, the absence of an instrument to capture the effect of the holiday experience in its entirety is but odd. Not only that, the current approach of inferring the whole complex of holiday experience as the simple additive sum of the knowledge of its constituent parts is epistemologically problematic, too. Beginning with a brief inventorying of the current approaches to the measurement of place attachment, which is being used by researchers to assess tourists’ attachment to holiday destinations, the present paper attempts to develop a more holistic instrument, Holiday Attachment, which can comprehensively measure tourists’ attachment with the composite holiday experience. The holiday attachment instrument has successfully demonstrated the essential tests of validity and reliability. The paper is concluded with a brief discussion of the current limitations and the developmental dimensions of the instrument, as well as its implications and potential applications.Holiday attachement; Holiday utility; Holiday identity; Implications of the scale.

ACTIVITY BASED COSTING FOR BETTER COST MANAGEMENT

Implementing change in management, successfully and profitably, is the greatest challenge for modern enterprises. Innovation in strategies, marketing performance, role of competition, change in technology, change in customer needs, management initiatives are all facts of life in the global environment today. Cost management works with its customer to manage change more profitably. Activity-Based Costing (ABC) is a new methodology of product costing which measures the cost of products more accurately. Overhead allocation is much more sophisticated under this system. This paper attempts to highlight the need, importance and methodology of ABC for better Cost Management in modern enterprises.Cost management; Cost and activity drivers; Activity based costing (ABC); ABC implementation; ABC applications

Optimization Methods for Designing Sequences with Low Autocorrelation Sidelobes

Unimodular sequences with low autocorrelations are desired in many applications, especially in the area of radar and code-division multiple access (CDMA). In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to design unimodular sequences with low integrated sidelobe level (ISL), which is a widely used measure of the goodness of a sequence's correlation property. The algorithm falls into the general framework of majorization-minimization (MM) algorithms and thus shares the monotonic property of such algorithms. In addition, the algorithm can be implemented via fast Fourier transform (FFT) operations and thus is computationally efficient. Furthermore, after some modifications the algorithm can be adapted to incorporate spectral constraints, which makes the design more flexible. Numerical experiments show that the proposed algorithms outperform existing algorithms in terms of both the quality of designed sequences and the computational complexity