Black Hole Tunneling Entropy and the Spectrum of Gravity

The tunneling approach for entropy generation in quantum gravity is applied to black holes. The area entropy is recovered and shown to count only a tiny fraction of the black hole degeneracy. The latter stems from the extension of the wave function outside the barrier. In fact the semi-classical analysis leads to infinite degeneracy. Evaporating black holes leave then infinitely degenerate "planckons" remnants which can neither decay into, nor be formed from, ordinary matter in a finite time. Quantum gravity opens up at the Planck scale into an infinite Hilbert space which is expected to provide the ultraviolet cutoff required to render the theory finite in the sector of large scale physics.Comment: 26 pages + 3 figures, phyzzx macropackage, figures available from Author

Internet based molecular collaborative and publishing tools

The scientific electronic publishing model has hitherto been an Internet based delivery of electronic articles that are essentially replicas of their paper counterparts. They contain little in the way of added semantics that may better expose the science, assist the peer review process and facilitate follow on collaborations, even though the enabling technologies have been around for some time and are mature. This thesis will examine the evolution of chemical electronic publishing over the past 15 years. It will illustrate, which the help of two frameworks, how publishers should be exploiting technologies to improve the semantics of chemical journal articles, namely their value added features and relationships with other chemical resources on the Web. The first framework is an early exemplar of structured and scalable electronic publishing where a Web content management system and a molecular database are integrated. It employs a test bed of articles from several RSC journals and supporting molecular coordinate and connectivity information. The value of converting 3D molecular expressions in chemical file formats, such as the MOL file, into more generic 3D graphics formats, such as Web3D, is assessed. This exemplar highlights the use of metadata management for bidirectional hyperlink maintenance in electronic publishing. The second framework repurposes this metadata management concept into a Semantic Web application called SemanticEye. SemanticEye demonstrates how relationships between chemical electronic articles and other chemical resources are established. It adapts the successful semantic model used for digital music metadata management by popular applications such as iTunes. Globally unique identifiers enable relationships to be established between articles and other resources on the Web and SemanticEye implements two: the Document Object Identifier (DOI) for articles and the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI) for molecules. SemanticEye’s potential as a framework for seeding collaborations between researchers, who have hitherto never met, is explored using FOAF, the friend-of-a-friend Semantic Web standard for social networks

Moneyball in the Era of Biometrics: Who Has Ownership Rights Over the Biometric Data of Professional Athletes?

The 2003 release of Michael Lewis’s book, Moneyball, brought into the mainstream a new paradigm for professional sports management: the use of statistical analysis to identify currently undervalued athletes in an effort to gain a competitive advantage. This pressure to accurately value athletes has led, in part, to the widespread collection of professional athletes’ biometric data. While biometric data can create many benefits, its misuse can lead to detrimental outcomes for the athletes, including inequitable contract negotiations, loss of potential revenue from monetization of said data, and a loss of privacy. Thus, this paper seeks to determine who holds the ownership rights over biometric data collected from professional athletes. I argue that the question of ownership is unanswered by the collective bargaining agreements and standard player contracts for professional sports leagues in North America, as well as by the Personal Health Information Protection Act and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. I turn to the precedent set by the Supreme Court of Canada regarding ownership of patient medical records to conclude that ownership rights over the biometric data belong to the party collecting such data, and not the athletes themselves. Nevertheless, the collective bargaining agreements and relevant legislation afford athletes some protections against the misuse of their biometric data

Next-to-leading Order Parton Model Calculations in the Massless Schwinger Model

We carry out next-to-leading order (NLO) parton model calculations for the standard hard ``QCD'' processes in the massless Schwinger model. The asymptotic expansion of the exact result for the deep inelastic cross section is used to infer the NLO distribution function. These distribution functions are then used to calculate the NLO Drell-Yan parton model cross section and it is found to agree with the corresponding term in the expansion of the exact result for the Drell-Yan cross section. Finally, by using the bosonization formula and the exact solutions we study the interference between different partonic processes.Comment: UCSD/PTH/93-4