More Than Just Food: The Diverse Effects of Food Assistance Programs

Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty, I18, I38, Q18,

The status of the white seabass resource and its management

White seabass, Cynoscion nobilis, have been fished in California since late in the ninteenth century. At present the commercial fishery is stable, landing about 8 hundred thousand pounds per year, but the sport fishing has declined to the poorest catch on record. (Document has 11 pages.

More Than Just Food: The Diverse Effects of Food Assistance Programs

For decades, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the goal of U.S. food and nutrition assistance programs seemed clear: to make sure low-income Americans could afford enough food. By pursuing this goal, the programs would protect program participants from hunger and also support demand for farm products. Today, about one in five Americans receives benefits from at least one of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) food programs. The major programs include the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), school meals programs—lunch and breakfast, and the Child and Adult Care Food Program. Despite the food programs’ goal of reducing hunger and improving nutrition, rising concern about overweight and obesity for all Americans has triggered arguments that targeted food benefits could be counter-productive. As a recent retrospective on a century of food and consumer economics explained, “The policy context for food assistance programs has changed in the past three decades.” (Unnevehr et al. 2010, p. 512)

Possible tsunami along the northwestern coast of the United States inferred from Indian traditions

Subduction of the Juan de Fuca and Gorda plates beneath western North America presents a paradox; despite the fact that there is good evidence of 3 to 4 cm/yr of ongoing convergence, there is a remarkable paucity of either historic or instrumentally recorded shallow subduction earthquakes. Steady aseismic slip along the entire Cascadia subduction zone provides one explanation for this seismic quiescence. However, the Cascadia subduction zone shares many features, including temporal quiescence, with other subduction zones that have experienced very large shallow subduction earthquakes (Heaton and Kanamori, 1984). Yet, there is no direct geologic or historical evidence presently available to confirm that great shallow subduction earthquakes have occurred along the coast of Washington, Oregon, and northern California. However, there are reports describing Indian legends of great sea-level disturbances that may be related to large nearby earthquakes. In this letter, we briefly review the history of exploration and settlement of this region by nonnative people and then discuss legends from Indians in northern Washington and northern California

Scaling ansatz, four zero Yukawa textures and large θ13\theta_{13}

We investigate 'Scaling ansatz' in the neutrino sector within the framework of type I seesaw mechanism with diagonal charged lepton and right handed Majorana neutrino mass matrices ($M_R$). We also assume four zero texture of Dirac neutrino mass matrices ($m_D$) which severely constrain the phenomenological outcomes of such scheme. Scaling ansatz and the present neutrino data allow only Six such matrices out of 126 four zero Yukawa matrices. In this scheme, in order to generate large $\theta_{13}$ we break scaling ansatz in $m_D$ through a perturbation parameter and we also show our breaking scheme is radiatively stable. We further investigate CP violation and baryogenesis via leptogenesis in those surviving textures.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figures, Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Determining Neutrino Mass Hierarchy by Precision Measurements in Electron and Muon Neutrino Disappearance Experiments

Recently a new method for determining the neutrino mass hierarchy by comparing the effective values of the atmospheric \Delta m^2 measured in the electron neutrino disappearance channel, \Delta m^2(ee), with the one measured in the muon neutrino disappearance channel, \Delta m^2(\mu \mu), was proposed. If \Delta m^2(ee) is larger (smaller) than \Delta m^2(\mu \mu) the hierarchy is of the normal (inverted) type. We re-examine this proposition in the light of two very high precision measurements: \Delta m^2(\mu \mu) that may be accomplished by the phase II of the Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) experiment, for example, and \Delta m^2(ee) that can be envisaged using the novel Mossbauer enhanced resonant \bar\nu_e absorption technique. Under optimistic assumptions for the systematic uncertainties of both measurements, we estimate the parameter region of (\theta_13, \delta) in which the mass hierarchy can be determined. If \theta_13 is relatively large, sin^2 2\theta_13 \gsim 0.05, and both of \Delta m^2(ee) and \Delta m^2(\mu \mu) can be measured with the precision of \sim 0.5 % it is possible to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy at > 95% CL for 0.3 \pi \lsim \delta \lsim 1.7 \pi for the current best fit values of all the other oscillation parameters.Comment: 12 pages, 6 postscript figure

The Complementarity of Eastern and Western Hemisphere Long-Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Experiments

We present a general formalism for extracting information on the fundamental parameters associated with neutrino masses and mixings from two or more long baseline neutrino oscillation experiments. This formalism is then applied to the current most likely experiments using neutrino beams from the Japan Hadron Facility (JHF) and Fermilab's NuMI beamline. Different combinations of muon neutrino or muon anti-neutrino running are considered. To extract the type of neutrino mass hierarchy we make use of the matter effect. Contrary to naive expectation, we find that both beams using neutrinos is more suitable for determining the hierarchy provided that the neutrino energy divided by baseline ($E/L$) for NuMI is smaller than or equal to that of JHF. Whereas to determine the small mixing angle, $\theta_{13}$, and the CP or T violating phase $\delta$, one neutrino and the other anti-neutrino is most suitable. We make extensive use of bi-probability diagrams for both understanding and extracting the physics involved in such comparisons.Comment: 21 pages, Latex, 3 postscript figure

Heavy Top Quark Searches in the Di-Lepton Mode at the Tevatron

We present the results of a detailed study of the effects of $b$-tagging on the heavy top-quark signal and backgrounds for the modes of the di-lepton plus two high transverse energy jets at the Fermilab Tevatron. The general characteristics of the heavy top-quark signal events are also discussed so that a comparison can be made between $b$-tagging and imposing stringent kinematical cuts to eliminate backgrounds.Comment: uses PHYZZX and TABLES macros, 10 pages, four figures not included (available by request), FERMILAB-Pub-93/105-