Evolutionary urban transportation planning? An exploration

For urban transportation planners these are challenging times. Mounting practical concerns are mirrored by more fundamental critiques. The latter come together in the observation that conventional approaches do not adequately account for the irreducible uncertainty of future developments. The central aim of this paper is to explore if and how an evolutionary approach can help overcome this limit. Two core-hypotheses are formulated. The first is that the urban transportation system behaves in an evolutionary fashion. The second hypothesis is that because of this, urban transportation planning needs also to focus on enhancing the resilience and adaptability of the system. Changes in transport and land use development patterns and policies and in the broader context in the post-war period in the Amsterdam region are analysed in order to illustrate the two core-hypotheses. In the conclusions more general implications are drawn.evolutionary economics, urban economics, transportation planning

Accessibility impacts of tod experiences in European metropolitan areas

The study investigates how Transit Oriented Development - TOD structure affect accessibility in cities with the aim of establishing whether TOD patterns of urban expansion, in terms of network connectivity and inhabitants and job density, could be associated with measures of rail accessibility. In particular the paper addresses the following overarching questions: is TOD informed structure related to high accessibility by rail public transport? Which features of TOD structure affect accessibility? The paper provides a cross- comparative empirical analysis of six metropolitan areas in Europe, where the TOD degree is measured as the amount of urban development clustering along rail corridors and stations; this feature is then related to cumulative opportunity measures of accessibility to jobs and inhabitants. The research demonstrate that accessibility increases in cities that are developed around the rail network and with higher value of network connectivity, but no correlation is found between accessibility and mean density values. The research furthermore provide an application of the node-place model demonstrating its useful potential in accessibility planning processes

Aspects of symmetry breaking in SO(10) GUTs

I review some recent results on the Higgs sector of minimal SO(10) grand unified theories both with and without supersymmetry. It is shown that nonsupersymmetric SO(10) with just one adjoint triggering the first stage of the symmetry breaking does provide a successful gauge unification when radiative corrections are taken into account in the scalar potential, while in the supersymmetric case it is argued that the troubles in achieving a phenomenologically viable breaking with representations up to the adjoint are overcome by considering the flipped SO(10) embedding of the hypercharge.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure; prepared for the proceedings of DISCRETE'10 - Symposium on Prospects in the Physics of Discrete Symmetrie

A comparison of four different methods to estimate population size of Alpine marmot (Marmota marmota)

Obtaining reliable information on animal abundance in mountainous landscapes is challenging. Highly heterogeneous habitats tend to reduce detection probabilities, and the three-dimensional, rugged nature of the terrain poses severe limits to the fulfilment of a number of assumptions underlying several statistical methods. In this study, we aimed to compare the performance of 4 different methods to estimate population size of Alpine marmot (Marmota marmota), a highly social semifossorial rodent widely distributed on the European Alps. Between May and August 2015, in a study area within the Stelvio National Park (Italy) we conducted 8 sessions of capture-mark-recapture, 6 sessions of mark-resight from vantage points, 8 sessions of line distance sampling along 4 transects, and 2 sessions using double-observer methods from vantage points. The minimum number of animals alive, obtained during the mark-resight surveys, was n=54 individuals. Capture-mark-recapture models estimated a population size of n=56 individuals [95% CI (45,87)]; similar, but more precise estimates were obtained with the mark-resight approach {Bowden’s estimator: n=62 [95% CI (54,71)]; Poisson log-normal estimator: n=62 [95% CI (55,69)]}. Line distance sampling and double-observer methods were severely biased low {Line distance sampling: n=24 individuals [95% CI (19,31)]; Independent double-observer: n=24 [95% CI (22, 35)]; Dependent double-observer: n=15 [95% CI (15,20)]}. Our results suggest that the probabilistic approach based on marked individuals yielded fairly robust estimates of population size. The underestimates obtained using distance sampling and double-observer methods were likely due to the violation of some underlying assumptions. While the topography of the mountainous landscape makes it difficult to randomize the sampling scheme, the semifossorial behaviour of the target species is likely to lower the detection probabilities and violate the assumption of perfect detection on the transect

Seesaw Scale in the Minimal Renormalizable SO(10) Grand Unification

Simple SO(10) Higgs models with the adjoint representation triggering the grand-unified symmetry breaking, discarded a long ago due to inherent tree-level tachyonic instabilities in the physically interesting scenarios, have been recently brought back to life by quantum effects. In this work we focus on the variant with 45_H+126_H in the Higgs sector and show that there are several regions in the parameter space of this model that can support stable unifying configurations with the B-L breaking scale as high as 10^14 GeV, well above the previous generic estimates based on the minimal survival hypothesis. This admits for a renormalizable implementation of the canonical seesaw and makes the simplest potentially realistic scenario of this kind a good candidate for a minimal SO(10) grand unification. Last, but not least, this setting is likely to be extensively testable at future large-volume facilities such as Hyper-Kamiokande.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures, 5 table

Structure and prospects of the simplest SO(10) GUTs

We recapitulate the latest results on the class of the simplest SO(10) grand unified models in which the GUT-scale symmetry breaking is triggered by an adjoint Higgs representation. We argue that the minimal survival approximation traditionally used in the GUT- and seesaw-scale estimates tends to be blind to very interesting parts of the parameter space in which some of the intermediate-scale states necessary for non-supersymmetric unification of the SM gauge couplings can be as light as to leave their imprints in the TeV domain. The stringent minimal-survival-based estimates of the B-L scale are shown to be relaxed by as much as four orders of magnitude, thus admitting for a consistent implementation of the standard seesaw mechanism even without excessive fine-tuning implied by the previous studies. The prospects of the minimal renormalizable SO(10) GUT as a potential candidate for a well-calculable theory of proton decay are discussed in brief.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures; to appear in the proceedings of the CETUP'12 worksho

Vascular and Cardiac CT in Small Animals

Computed tomography (CT) is increasingly available in veterinary practice. As for humans, CT has a tremendous potential in various clinical scenario. Oncology and traumatized dogs and cats are probably the veterinary patients that get more benefit from new CT applications. However, the most amazing progresses are in vascular and cardiac applications. The advent and rapid diffusion of advanced scanner technology (multidetector row) offer unparalleled diagnostic opportunity in daily practice for comprehensive evaluation of complex cardiovascular diseases. New skills and knowledge are necessary for radiologists and nonradiologists for understanding this revolutionary field of radiology

Direct CP Violation in B->phi K_s and New Physics

In the presence of large New Physics contributions to loop-induced b->s transitions, sizable direct CP violation in B-> phi K decays is expected on general grounds. We compute explicitly CP-violating effects using QCD factorization and find that, even in the restricted case in which New Physics has the same penguin structure as the Standard Model, the rate asymmetry can be of order one. We briefly discuss a more general scenario and comment on the inclusion of power-suppressed corrections to factorization.Comment: 3 page