The Strong Coupling and the Bottom Mass in Supersymmetric Grand Unified Theories

We apply the full one-loop corrections to the masses, gauge couplings, and Yukawa couplings in the minimal supersymmetric standard model. We focus on predictions for the strong coupling and the bottom-quark pole mass in the context of SU(5) supersymmetric grand unification. We discuss our results in both the small and large $\tan\beta$ regimes. We demonstrate that the finite (non-logarithmic) corrections to the weak mixing angle are essential in determining $\alpha_s$ and $m_b$ when some superpartner masses are light. Minimal SU(5) predicts acceptable $\alpha_s$ and $m_b$ only at small $\tan\beta$ with SUSY masses of $\cal O$(TeV). The missing doublet model accommodates gauge and Yukawa coupling unification for small or large $\tan\beta$, and for any SUSY mass scale. In the large $\tan\beta$ case, the bottom mass is acceptable only if the Higgsino mass parameter $\mu$ is positive.Comment: 10 pages, epsf, 7 figures included. Talk given at the PASCOS Symposium/Johns Hopkins Workshop, Baltimore, MD, March 22-25, 199

Race Course

BMW Driving Performance Schoo

Mill Valley Evacuation Study

Traffic evacuation planning can be essential in saving lives in case of natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods and wildfires. We build on a case study of traffic evacuation planning for the city of Mill Valley, CA. We run a microscopic traffic simulator to examine various evacuation scenarios. We modify some crucial aspects of a previous study to make the simulation more pertinent. For a citywide evacuation, we quantify the importance of decreasing the number of vehicles per household. We find a set of changes that can significantly reduce the evacuation time by routing more traffic to the least-used highway on-ramps. We show results when evacuating various areas of the city one at a time.Comment: 9 page

Enhanced Security for Preventing Man-in-the-Middle Attacks in Authentication, DataEntry and Transaction Verification

There is increasing coverage in the literature highlighting threats to online financial systems. Attacks range from the prevalent reverse social engineering technique known as phishing; where spam emails are sent to customers with links to fake websites, to Trojans that monitor a customer’s account log on process that captures authentication details that are later replayed for financial gain. This ultimately results in loss of monetary funds for affected victims. As technological advances continue to influence the way society makes payment for goods and services, the requirement for more advanced security approaches for transaction verification in the online environment increases. This paper has three main purposes. The first is to detail the current threats and vulnerabilities to online financial systems and in particular online banking, from the selected literature. The second is to present the known prevention techniques for protecting against these attacks. The third is to present a conceptual model for authentication, data entry and transaction verification. It is suggested that the design adds another layer of security to existing methods to either prevent a MitM attack or to make the procedure of capturing and reassembling customer log on and transaction details more computationally and time intensive than what it is worth to an attacker. The model is based on a graphical authentication application previously developed called Authentigraph