Coles Creek Culture and the Trans-Mississippi South

Certain Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV) traits, mostly Coles Creek ceramic traits, but also traits such as temple mounds and certain mortuary patterns, appear at Late Fourche Maline and Early Caddo sites in the Trans-Mississippi South, particularly at sites in the Red River Valley in northwest Louisiana and southwest Arkansas. Explaining how these traits got there and understanding their role in the development of Caddo culture is one of the basic problems in the archaeology of this area. The conventional explanation has long been that they represent a full scale intrusion of Coles Creek culture into the Trans-Mississippi South. Thus Michael Hoffman has created a Crenshaw phase of Coles Creek culture in the Great Bend region of the Red River Valley in southwest Arkansas, and Clarence H. Webb attributed the initial major occupation at the Mounds Plantation site in northwest Louisiana to Coles Creek peoples who laid out the plaza, possibly constructed Mound 2 as a quadrilateral temple substructure, and--at the opposite end of the plaza--established a burial area where Mound 5 sits

The Northern Caddoan Area was not Caddoan

In this paper I will challenge one of the major unexamined assumptions in the archeology of Eastern North America, the assumption that the Arkansas River Valley and Ozark Highland regions of eastern Oklahoma and western Arkansas, the so-called northern Caddoan Area, was the home of Caddo people who were closely related culturally and linguistically to the Caddo people of southwest Arkansas, northwest Louisiana, east Texas, and southeast Oklahoma. I will propose, instead, that the archeology of this locality is much more complex and interesting than the conventional wisdom would have it. What is involved here, I suggest, is not one region but parts of three, with three culturally and biologically distinct populations. Furthermore, I will propose that Spiro, the key site in this locality, is actually two sites, one Caddoan, the other Mississippian

Lepton Flavour Violation and theta(13) in Minimal Resonant Leptogenesis

We study the impact of minimal non-supersymmetric models of resonant leptogenesis on charged lepton flavour violation and the neutrino mixing angle theta(13). Possible low-scale flavour realisations of resonant tau-, mu- and e-leptogenesis provide very distinct and predictive frameworks to explain the observed baryon asymmetry in the Universe by sphaleron conversion of an individual tau-, mu- and e-lepton-number asymmetry which gets resonantly enhanced via out-of-equilibrium decays of nearly degenerate heavy Majorana neutrinos. Based on approximate flavour symmetries, we construct viable scenarios of resonant tau-, mu- and e-leptogenesis compatible with universal right-handed neutrino masses at the GUT scale, where the required heavy-neutrino mass splittings are generated radiatively. The heavy Majorana neutrinos in such scenarios can be as light as 100 GeV and their couplings to two of the charged leptons may be large. In particular, we explicitly demonstrate the compelling role that the three heavy Majorana neutrinos play, in order to obtain successful leptogenesis and experimentally testable rates for lepton flavour violating processes, such as mu --> e gamma and mu --> e conversion in nuclei.Comment: 40 pages, 9 figures, PRD versio

Attitudes of patients toward adoption of 3D technology in pain assessment: Qualitative perspective

This article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. © Fotios Spyridonis, Gheorghita Ghinea, Andrew O Frank. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (http://www.jmir.org), 10.04.2013. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Background: Past research has revealed that insufficient pain assessment could, and often, has negative implications on the provision of quality health care. While current available clinical approaches have proven to be valid interventions, they are expensive and can often fail in providing efficient pain measurements. The increase in the prevalence of pain calls for more intuitive pain assessment solutions. Computerized alternatives have already been proposed both in the literature and in commerce, but may lack essential qualities such as accuracy of the collected clinical information and effective patient-clinician interaction. In response to this concern, 3-dimensional (3D) technology could become the innovative intervention needed to support and improve the pain assessment process. Objective: The purpose of this analysis was to describe qualitative findings from a study which was designed to explore patients’ perceptions of adopting 3D technology in the assessment of their pain experience related to important themes that might positively or negatively influence the quality of the pain assessment process. Methods: The perceptions of 60 individuals with some form of pain in the area of Greater London were collected through semi-structured interviews. Of the 60 respondents, 24 (43%) produced usable responses and were analyzed for content using principles of the grounded theory approach and thematic analysis, in order to gain insight into the participants’ beliefs and attitudes towards adopting 3D technology in pain assessment. Results: The analysis identified 4 high-level core themes that were representative of the participants’ responses. These themes indicated that most respondents valued “the potential of 3D technology to facilitate better assessment of pain” as the most useful outcome of adopting a 3D approach. Respondents also expressed their opinions on the usability of the 3D approach, with no important concerns reported about its perceived ease of use. Our findings finally, showed that respondents appreciated the perceived clinical utility of the proposed approach, which could further have an influence on their intention to use it. Conclusions: These findings highlighted factors that are seen as essential for improving the assessment of pain, and demonstrated the need for a strong focus on patient-clinician communication. The participants of this analysis believed that the introduction of 3D technology in the process might be a useful mechanism for such a positive health care outcome. The study’s findings could also be used to make recommendations concerning the potential for inclusion of 3D technology in current clinical pain tools for the purpose of improving the quality of health care

Dark Matter and Lepton Flavour Violation in a Hybrid Neutrino Mass Model

We describe a hybrid model in which the light neutrino mass matrix receives both tree-level seesaw and loop-induced contributions. An additional U(1) gauge symmetry is used to stabilize the lightest right-handed neutrino as the Dark Matter candidate. After fitting the experimental neutrino data, we analyze and correlate the phenomenological consequences of the model, namely its impact on electroweak precision measurements, the Dark Matter relic abundance, lepton flavour violating rare decays and neutrinoless double beta decay. We find that natural realizations of the model characterized by large Yukawa couplings are compatible with and close to the current experimental limits.Comment: 25 pages, 9 figures. V2: references added, typos corrected, version accepted by JHE

Non-perturbative double scaling limits

Recently, the author has proposed a generalization of the matrix and vector models approach to the theory of random surfaces and polymers. The idea is to replace the simple matrix or vector (path) integrals by gauge theory or non-linear sigma model (path) integrals. We explain how this solves one of the most fundamental limitation of the classic approach: we automatically obtain non-perturbative definitions in non-Borel summable cases. This is exemplified on the simplest possible examples involving O(N) symmetric non-linear sigma models with N-dimensional target spaces, for which we construct (multi)critical metrics. The non-perturbative definitions of the double scaled, manifestly positive, partition functions rely on remarkable identities involving (path) integrals.Comment: 18 pages, one figur

Ethology and Overwintering of \u3ci\u3ePodalonia Luctuosa\u3c/i\u3e (Hymenoptera: Sphecidae)

The nesting and overwintering behavior of Podalonia luctuosa (Smith) was studied in New York and Colorado. Females provisioned shallow (ca. 2 cm deep), unicellular nests with a single cutworm (Noctuidae) during April, May, and July. Paralyzed prey were trans- ported on the ground and were cached on plants just above ground level. Prey weights averaged about 400 mg. The miltogrammine fly Hilarella hilarella Zetterstedt parasitized prey at both localities. From I to IO adult females were found to overwinter in burrows 0.5 m deep, which were dug in late summer and early fall. Collection data and field studies indicated that P. luctuosa is bivoltine in the NE U.S