Whose absentee votes are returned and counted: The variety and use of absentee ballots in California

Absentee voting is becoming more prevalent throughout the United States. Although there has been some research focused on who votes by absentee ballot, little research has considered another important question about absentee voting: which absentee ballots are counted and which are not? Research in the wake of the 2000 presidential election has studied the problem of uncounted ballots for precinct voters but not for absentee voters. Using data from Los Angeles County – nation's largest and most diverse voting jurisdiction – for the November 2002 general election, we test a series of hypotheses that certain types of voters have a higher likelihood that their ballots will be counted. We find that uniform service personnel, overseas civilians, voters who request non-English ballots and permanent absentee voters have a much lower likelihood of returning their ballot, and once returned, a lower likelihood that their ballots will be counted compared with the general absentee voting population. We also find that there is little partisan effect as to which voters are more likely to return their ballots or have their ballots counted. We conclude our paper with a discussion of the implications of our research for the current debates about absentee voting

The Rise and Fall of Water Net (Hydrodictyon reticulatum) in New Zealand

During the late 1980s to early 1990s a range of aquatic habitats in the central North Island of New Zealand were invaded by the filamentous green alga, water net Hydrodictyon reticulatum (Linn. Lagerheim). The alga caused significant economic and recreational impacts at major sites of infestation, but it was also associated with enhanced invertebrate numbers and was the likely cause of an improvement in the trout fishery. The causes of prolific growth of water net and the range of control options pursued are reviewed. The possible causes of its sudden decline in 1995 are considered, including physical factors, increase in grazer pressure, disease, and loss of genetic vigour

Kernel density classification and boosting: an L2 sub analysis

Kernel density estimation is a commonly used approach to classification. However, most of the theoretical results for kernel methods apply to estimation per se and not necessarily to classification. In this paper we show that when estimating the difference between two densities, the optimal smoothing parameters are increasing functions of the sample size of the complementary group, and we provide a small simluation study which examines the relative performance of kernel density methods when the final goal is classification. A relative newcomer to the classification portfolio is “boosting”, and this paper proposes an algorithm for boosting kernel density classifiers. We note that boosting is closely linked to a previously proposed method of bias reduction in kernel density estimation and indicate how it will enjoy similar properties for classification. We show that boosting kernel classifiers reduces the bias whilst only slightly increasing the variance, with an overall reduction in error. Numerical examples and simulations are used to illustrate the findings, and we also suggest further areas of research

The Superpartner Spectrum of Gaugino Mediation

We compute the superpartner masses in a class of models with gaugino mediation (or no-scale) boundary conditions at a scale between the GUT and Planck scales. These models are compelling because they are simple, solve the supersymmetric flavor and CP problems, satisfy all constraints from colliders and cosmology, and predict the superpartner masses in terms of very few parameters. Our analysis includes the renormalization group evolution of the soft-breaking terms above the GUT scale. We show that the running above the GUT scale is largely model independent and find that a phenomenologically viable spectrum is obtained.Comment: 15 page

A Complete Theory of Grand Unification in Five Dimensions

A fully realistic unified theory is constructed, with SU(5) gauge symmetry and supersymmetry both broken by boundary conditions in a fifth dimension. Despite the local explicit breaking of SU(5) at a boundary of the dimension, the large size of the extra dimension allows precise predictions for gauge coupling unification, alpha_s(M_Z) = 0.118 \pm 0.003, and for Yukawa coupling unification, m_b(M_Z) = 3.3 \pm 0.2 GeV. A complete understanding of the MSSM Higgs sector is given; with explanations for why the Higgs triplets are heavy, why the Higgs doublets are protected from a large tree-level mass, and why the mu and B parameters are naturally generated to be of order the SUSY breaking scale. All sources of d=4,5 proton decay are forbidden, while a new origin for d=6 proton decay is found to be important. Several aspects of flavor follow from an essentially unique choice of matter location in the fifth dimension: only the third generation has an SU(5) mass relation, and the lighter two generations have small mixings with the heaviest generation. The entire superpartner spectrum is predicted in terms of only two free parameters. The squark and slepton masses are determined by their location in the fifth dimension, allowing a significant experimental test of the detailed structure of the extra dimension. Lepton flavor violation is found to be generically large in higher dimensional unified theories with high mediation scales of SUSY breaking. In our theory this forces a common location for all three neutrinos, predicting large neutrino mixing angles. Rates for mu -> e gamma, mu -> e e e, mu -> e conversion and tau -> mu gamma are larger in our theory than in conventional 4D supersymmetric GUTs. Proposed experiments probing mu -> e transitions will probe the entire interesting parameter space of our theory.Comment: 51 pages, late

Rearranging Edgeworth-Cornish-Fisher Expansions

This paper applies a regularization procedure called increasing rearrangement to monotonize Edgeworth and Cornish-Fisher expansions and any other related approximations of distribution and quantile functions of sample statistics. Besides satisfying the logical monotonicity, required of distribution and quantile functions, the procedure often delivers strikingly better approximations to the distribution and quantile functions of the sample mean than the original Edgeworth-Cornish-Fisher expansions.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figure

Unifying flipped SU(5) in five dimensions

It is shown that embedding a four-dimensional flipped SU(5) model in a five-dimensional SO(10) model, preserves the best features of both flipped SU(5) and SO(10). The missing partner mechanism, which naturally achieves both doublet-triplet splitting and suppression of d=5 proton decay operators, is realized as in flipped SU(5), while the gauge couplings are unified as in SO(10). The masses of down quarks and charged leptons, which are independent in flipped SU(5), are related by the SO(10). Distinctive patterns of quark and lepton masses can result. The gaugino mass M_1 is independent of M_3 and M_2, which are predicted to be equal.Comment: revised version-to appear in PRD, 23 pages, 3 figures, ReVTeX

Constraints on R-parity violating supersymmetry from leptonic and semileptonic tau, B_d and B_s decays

We put constraints on several products of R-parity violating lambda lambda' and lambda' lambda' type couplings from leptonic and semileptonic tau, B_d and B_s decays. Most of them are one to two orders of magnitude better than the existing bounds, and almost free from theoretical uncertainties. A significant improvement of these bounds can be made in high luminosity tau-charm or B factories.Comment: 14 pages, latex. A few references added, two typos corrected. Version to be published in Physical Review

Family Unification on an Orbifold

We construct a family-unified model on a Z_2xZ_2 orbifold in five dimensions. The model is based on a supersymmetric SU(7) gauge theory. The gauge group is broken by orbifold boundary conditions to a product of grand unified SU(5) and SU(2)xU(1) flavor symmetry. The structure of Yukawa matrices is generated by an interplay between spontaneous breaking of flavor symmetry and geometric factors arising due to field localization in the extra dimension.Comment: 13 page

Strongly Coupled Grand Unification in Higher Dimensions

We consider the scenario where all the couplings in the theory are strong at the cut-off scale, in the context of higher dimensional grand unified field theories where the unified gauge symmetry is broken by an orbifold compactification. In this scenario, the non-calculable correction to gauge unification from unknown ultraviolet physics is naturally suppressed by the large volume of the extra dimension, and the threshold correction is dominated by a calculable contribution from Kaluza-Klein towers that gives the values for \sin^2\theta_w and \alpha_s in good agreement with low-energy data. The threshold correction is reliably estimated despite the fact that the theory is strongly coupled at the cut-off scale. A realistic 5d supersymmetric SU(5) model is presented as an example, where rapid d=6 proton decay is avoided by putting the first generation matter in the 5d bulk.Comment: 17 pages, latex, to appear in Phys. Rev.