When America Fights: The Uses of U.S. Military Force

“Timing is everything,” so the saying goes. Timing was certainly a factor in de- veloping a fair and reasoned review for this book; it arrived in this reviewer’s mailbox on 12 September 2001. Since the major thesis of Donald Snow’s concise and cogent work is that peacekeeping will be the most likely type of early twenty-first century military operation for the United States, the book initially appeared quaint and somewhat nostalgic: how nice and simple it would be to deal with questions of how to bring and sus- tain peace to other lands

The scalar unparticle effect on the charged lepton electric dipole moment

We study the charged lepton electric dipole moment which is induced by the scalar unparticle mediation and we predict the appropriate range for the free parameters appearing in the effective lagrangian which drives the unparticle-standard model lepton interactions. We observe that the charged lepton electric dipole moment is strongly sensitive to the scaling dimension d_u of the unparticle and the new couplings in the effective interaction. Furthermore, we see that the current experimental limits of charged lepton electric dipole moments can ensure an appropriate range for these free parameters.Comment: 19 pages, 13 Figure

Semileptonic b --> u decays: lepton invariant mass spectrum

We compute O(alpha_s^2) QCD corrections to the lepton invariant mass spectrum in the decay b --> u l nu_l, relevant for the determination of the CKM matrix element |V_{ub}|. Our method can also be used to evaluate moments of the lepton energy distribution with an O(alpha_s^2) accuracy. The abelian part of our result gives the neutrino invariant mass spectrum in the muon decay and, upon integration, the O(alpha^2) correction to the muon lifetime.Comment: 5 pages, revte

On the QCD corrections to the charged Higgs decay of a heavy quark

Using dimensional regularization for both infrared and ultraviolet divergences, we confirm that the QCD corrections to the decay width $\Gamma(t\to H^+b)$ are equal to those to $\Gamma(t\to W^+b)$ in the limit of a large $t$ quark mass.Comment: 6 pages, report Alberta Thy-25-9

QCD corrections to the t-->H+b decay within the minimal supersymmetric standard model

I present the contribution of gluinos and scalar quarks to the decay rate of the top quark into a charged Higgs boson and a bottom quark within the minimal supersymmetric standard model, including the mixing of the scalar partners of the left- and right-handed top quark. I show that for certain values of the supersymmetric parameters the standard QCD loop corrections to this decay mode are diminished or enhanced by several 10 per cent. I show that not only a small value of 3 GeV for the gluino mass (small mass window) but also much larger values of several hundreds of GeV's have a non-neglible effect on this decay rate, against general belief. Last but not least, if the ratio of the vacuum expectation values of the Higgs bosons are taken in the limit of $v_1\ll v_2$ I obtain a drastic enhancement due to a $\tan\beta$\ dependence in the couplings.Comment: UQAM-PHE-94/01, 6 pages, plain tex, 4 figures not included, available under request via mail or fa

Evolving a DSL implementation

Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are small languages designed for use in a specific domain. DSLs typically evolve quite radically throughout their lifetime, but current DSL implementation approaches are often clumsy in the face of such evolution. In this paper I present a case study of an DSL evolving in its syntax, semantics, and robustness, implemented in the Converge language. This shows how real-world DSL implementations can evolve along with changing requirements

An estimate of the QCD corrections to the decay Z --> W u d

We present an estimate of perturbative QCD corrections to the decay $Z \to Wu\bar d$. A simple approximate approach is described in detail. The difference of masses of $M_Z$ and $M_W$ is used as an expansion parameter. A complete analytical formula for a part of the corrections is also presented.Comment: 9 pages, late