Substantially Justified? The U.S. Government’s Use of Name-Check Technologies in Naturalization Procedures

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services relies upon the Federal Bureau of Investigation to administer the National Name Check Program, which conducts background checks on applicants for naturalization. Backlogs have led to long delays for aspiring citizens and significant legal problems for the government. This iBrief examines the First Circuit’s ruling in Aronov v. Napolitano that an eighteen-month delay in adjudicating a naturalization application was substantially justified. While the government’s inefficiency can be explained partly by an understaffed bureaucracy, overwhelming evidence suggests that these problems are exacerbated by a technological infrastructure that is ill-equipped to handle the scope of the backlog. This iBrief argues that the government should be held liable for its failures; and that long-overdue technological improvements should be implemented to prevent these issues from recurring in the future

Looking for new gluon physics at the Tevatron

The impact of nonrenormalizable gluon operators upon inclusive jet cross sections is studied. Such operators could arise in an effective strong interaction Lagrangian from gluon substructure and would induce observable cross section deviations from pure QCD at high transverse jet energies. Comparison of the theoretical predictions with recent CDF data yields a lower limit on the gluon compositeness scale $\Lambda$. We find \Lambda > 2.03 \TeV at $95\%$~CL

Anomalous Gluon Self-Interactions and ttˉt \bar{t} Production

Strong-interaction physics that lies beyond the standard model may conveniently be described by an effective Lagrangian. The only genuinely gluonic CP-conserving term at dimension six is the three-gluon-field-strength operator $G^3$. This operator, which alters the 3-gluon and 4-gluon vertices form their standard model forms, turns out to be difficult to detect in final states containing light jets. Its effects on top quark pair production hold the greatest promise of visibility.Comment: Latex file using [aps,aipbook,floats,epsf]{revtex}. 12 pages, 4 Postscript figures. Full PS copy at http://smyrd.bu.edu/htfigs/htfigs.html Talk presented by EHS at the International Symposium on Vector Boson Self-Interactions, UCLA, Feb. 1-3, 199

Existence of compatible contact structures on G₂ -manifolds

In this paper, we show the existence of (co-oriented) contact structures on certain classes of G(2)-manifolds, and that these two structures are compatible in certain ways. Moreover, we prove that any seven-manifold with a spin structure (and so any manifold with G(2)-structure) admits an almost contact structure. We also construct explicit almost contact metric structures on manifolds with G(2)-structures