ALTERNATIVE ENERGY SOURCES AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONFLICT

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Mapping the geographies of luxury cognitive “purity”

This study aims to profile the cognitive and perceptual constructs on place and luxury products shared by individuals on the Internet. A netnographic study was conducted on selected digital platforms (Q&A websites, Forum Groups, Blogs), with further engagement in interviews, participant and non-participant observation. Building upon a corpus of about 3,000 posts, a specific interpretive framework was devised, based on “purity”. The findings indicate that, when referring to luxury goods in relation to places, the sampled individuals rely on a clear set of assumptions. This framework is put to the test when they are called to discuss specific issues related to the contemporary reality of the luxury industry, such as delocalization. In confronting these ambiguities and/or anomalies, they react in different ways. Some of them become sceptical and question the essence of luxury. Some loosen or stretch their expectations, thus coming to terms with the fragmented reality of luxury, while others positively suggest new criteria to re-define “pure” luxury. Further researchers can focus on specific luxury sectors or brands. In addition, the study can be quantified by measuring patterns of recurrence, correlations of variables, and moderation effects from other products’ indicators. Practical implications of the research include the observation that cognitive “purity” adds to the analytical tools of customer-based brand equity. By profiling consumers’ “pure maps” around brands and/or products, brand managers can monitor their evolution and act against potentially disruptive factors. This work builds on the constructionist approach to “place”, and provides an anthropological account on how individuals build, negotiate and act upon their views on “place” in relation to luxury

Vevacious: A Tool For Finding The Global Minima Of One-Loop Effective Potentials With Many Scalars

Several extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics contain additional scalars implying a more complex scalar potential compared to that of the Standard Model. In general these potentials allow for charge and/or color breaking minima besides the desired one with correctly broken SU(2)_L times U(1)_Y . Even if one assumes that a metastable local minimum is realized, one has to ensure that its lifetime exceeds that of our universe. We introduce a new program called Vevacious which takes a generic expression for a one-loop effective potential energy function and finds all the tree-level extrema, which are then used as the starting points for gradient-based minimization of the one-loop effective potential. The tunneling time from a given input vacuum to the deepest minimum, if different from the input vacuum, can be calculated. The parameter points are given as files in the SLHA format (though is not restricted to supersymmetric models), and new model files can be easily generated automatically by the Mathematica package SARAH. This code uses HOM4PS2 to find all the minima of the tree-level potential, PyMinuit to follow gradients to the minima of the one-loop potential, and CosmoTransitions to calculate tunneling times.Comment: 44 pages, 1 figure, manual for publicly available software, v2 corresponds to version accepted for publication in EPJC [clearer explanation of scale dependence and region of validity, explicit mention that SLHA files should have blocks matching those expected by model files, updated references

Constraining the Natural MSSM through tunneling to color-breaking vacua at zero and non-zero temperature

We re-evaluate the constraints on the parameter space of the minimal supersymmetric standard model from tunneling to charge- and/or color-breaking minima, taking into account thermal corrections. We pay particular attention to the region known as the Natural MSSM, where the masses of the scalar partners of the top quarks are within an order of magnitude or so of the electroweak scale. These constraints arise from the interaction between these scalar tops and the Higgs fields, which allows the possibility of parameter points having deep charge- and color-breaking true vacua. In addition to requiring that our electro-weak-symmetry-breaking, yet QCD- and electromagnetism-preserving vacuum has a sufficiently long lifetime at zero temperature, also demanding stability against thermal tunneling further restricts the allowed parameter space.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, software available from http://vevacious.hepforge.org/ - version 2 matches that accepted for publication in Phys. Lett.

A robust procedure for the measurement of Serum Magnesium on the Hitachi 704 using Calmagite

peer-reviewedA robust procedure for measurement of magnesium in serum is described using calmagite in CAPS buffer at pH 11.5. Interference from other magnesium reagents was reduced and evaluated for chromophoric interference. The procedure was not effected by bilirubin or hemoglobin in serum samples