A reinterpretation of the Yalta Conference with particular emphasis on the role of Franklin D. Roosevelt

We know that World War II did not bring the lasting peace everyone hoped and assumed it would bring. The United States, along with other Western powers, now finds itself in a seeming life and death struggle with the Soviet Union and its satellites, with both sides arming for another possible global war. Everyday brings new and deeper problems for the United States and the West in both Asia and Europe. The Yalta Conference was the culminating and most far-reaching of all the conferences of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill. At Yalta the basic decisions were made regarding what these leaders intended to do with the world that would be in their hands as a result of their nations’ defeat of Germany and Japan. Thus, what was decided at Yalta is greatly connected with the state of the world today

XatA, an AT-1 autotransporter important for the virulence of Xylella fastidiosa Temecula1.

Xylella fastidiosa Temecula1 is the causative agent of Pierce's disease of grapevine, which is spread by xylem-feeding insects. An important feature of the infection cycle is the ability of X. fastidiosa to colonize and interact with two distinct environments, the xylem of susceptible plants and the insect foregut. Here, we describe our characterization of XatA, the X. fastidiosa autotransporter protein encoded by PD0528. XatA, which is classified as an AT-1 (classical) autotransporter, has a C-terminal β-barrel domain and a passenger domain composed of six tandem repeats of approximately 50 amino acids. Localization studies indicate that XatA is present in both the outer membrane and membrane vesicles and its passenger domain can be found in the supernatant. Moreover, XatA is important for X. fastidiosa autoaggregation and biofilm formation based on mutational analysis and the discovery that Escherichia coli expressing XatA acquire these traits. The xatA mutant also shows a significant decrease in Pierce's disease symptoms when inoculated into grapevines. Finally, X. fastidiosa homologs to XatA, which can be divided into three distinct groups based on synteny, form a single, well-supported clade, suggesting that they arose from a common ancestor

Learning to identify reduced passive verb phrases with a shallow parser

Journal ArticleOur research is motivated by the observation that NLP systems frequently mislabel passive voice verb phrases as being in the active voice when there is no auxiliary verb (e.g., "The man arrested had a long record"). These errors directly impact thematic role recognition and NLP applications that depend on it. We present a learned classifier that can accurately identify reduced passive voice constructions in shallow parsing environments

The CP properties of the lightest Higgs boson with sbottom effects

In the framework of the recently proposed gluino-axion model, using the effective potential method and taking into account the top-stop as well as the bottom-sbottom effects, we discuss the CP--properties of the lightest Higgs boson, in particular its CP--odd composition, which can offer new opportunities at collider searches. It is found that although the CP-odd composition of the lightest Higgs increases slightly with the inclusion of the sbottom effects, it never exceeds %0.17 for all values of the renormalization scale Q ranging from top mass to TeV scaleComment: 24 pp, 12 eps fig

Metode Pembelajaran Muthala’ah Dalam Meningkatkan Kemampuan Maharah Qiraah Santri Pondok Pesantren Modern Al-Kinanah Jambi

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk untuk mengetahui metode pembelajaran apa yang diterapkan oleh guru muthala’ah dalam meningkatkan kemampuan maharah qiraah santri di pondok pesantren modern Al-Kinanah Jambi. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa 1). Metode pembelajaran yang digunakan oleh guru muthala’ah dibagi menjadi tiga metode. Metode pertama yaitu metode hikayatul qhosiroh guru menjelaskan materi dengan bercerita, Metode kedua yaitu metode tajmi guru meminta siswa untuk menyusun kata acak menjadi sebuah kalimat sempurna. Metode ketiga yaitu metode muwa’imah/muwafiqah adalah melatih penglihatan dan melakukan latihan membaca cepat. Hasil dari penggunaan metode ini, para siswa sedikit banyak dapat memahami materi bahasa Arab. 2). Kendala guru dalam penggunaan metode ini yaitu: (a) latar belakang siswa yang berbeda-beda, (b) siswa kesulitan memaknai kosa kata baru, (c) siswa mengantuk dan tertidur, (d) kurangnya minat belajar siswa (e) siswa yang masih terbata-bata dalam membaca kalimat bahasa Arab, (f) guru sulit mendapatkan perhatian siswa,(g) guru sulit menyatukan pemahaman siswa, (h) metode guru yang kurang efektif dan (i) keaktifan guru dalam mengajar juga kurang. 3). Upaya guru dalam mengatasi kendala penggunaan metode ini adalah sebagai berikut: (a) menghidupkan suasana belajar yang asik dan kondusif, (b) memberikan inovasi pada metode pembelajaran, (c) melakukan latihan membaca kalimat bahasa Arab,(d) mencari persamaan kosa kata yang lebih mudah dipahami siswa (e) memberikan sanksi kepada siswa yang mengantuk dan tertidur (f) memberikan pelajaran tambahan diluar pembelajaran kelas dan (g) komunikasi yang baik

Top-quark physics in six-quark final states at the Next Linear Collider

The processes of six-quark production with one $b\bar b$ pair are studied by means of a complete tree-level electroweak calculation. The top-quark signal is examined: the importance of electroweak backgrounds, of the order of 10% above the $t\bar t$ threshold and of about 30% of the purely electroweak signal at threshold, is further stressed by studying the dependence of the cross-section at threshold on the Higgs mass in the range between 100 GeV and 185 GeV, and finding variations of the order of 10%. In the study of some event-shape variables, a strong effect of initial-state radiation is found, in particular for the thrust distribution, which is studied for several centre-of-mass energies at the TeV scale. The effectiveness of cuts on the thrust for isolating QCD backgrounds, as pointed out by some authors, is confirmed also in the presence of electroweak backgrounds and initial-state radiation.Comment: LaTeX (using elsart.sty), 17 pages, 9 figures include

Sneutrino Mass Measurements at e+e- Linear Colliders

It is generally accepted that experiments at an e+e- linear colliders will be able to extract the masses of the selectron as well as the associated sneutrinos with a precision of ~ 1% by determining the kinematic end points of the energy spectrum of daughter electrons produced in their two body decays to a lighter neutralino or chargino. Recently, it has been suggested that by studying the energy dependence of the cross section near the production threshold, this precision can be improved by an order of magnitude, assuming an integrated luminosity of 100 fb^-1. It is further suggested that these threshold scans also allow the masses of even the heavier second and third generation sleptons and sneutrinos to be determined to better than 0.5%. We re-examine the prospects for determining sneutrino masses. We find that the cross sections for the second and third generation sneutrinos are too small for a threshold scan to be useful. An additional complication arises because the cross section for sneutrino pair to decay into any visible final state(s) necessarily depends on an unknown branching fraction, so that the overall normalization in unknown. This reduces the precision with which the sneutrino mass can be extracted. We propose a different strategy to optimize the extraction of m(\tilde{\nu}_\mu) and m(\tilde{\nu}_\tau) via the energy dependence of the cross section. We find that even with an integrated luminosity of 500 fb^-1, these can be determined with a precision no better than several percent at the 90% CL. We also examine the measurement of m(\tilde{\nu}_e) and show that it can be extracted with a precision of about 0.5% (0.2%) with an integrated luminosity of 120 fb^-1 (500 fb^-1).Comment: RevTex, 46 pages, 15 eps figure

A gobal fit to the anomalous magnetic moment, b->s gamma and Higgs limits in the constrained MSSM

New data on the anomalous magnetic moment a_mu of the muon together with the b->s gamma decay rate are considered within the supergravity inspired constrained minimal supersymmetric model. We perform a global statistical chi^2 analysis of these data and show that the allowed region of parameter space is bounded from below by the Higgs limit, which depends on the trilinear coupling and from above by the anomalous magnetic moment a_mu. The newest b->s gamma data deviate 1.7 sigma from recent SM calculations and prefer a similar parameter region as the 2.6 sigma deviation from a_mu.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figs. Refs. update

Bounds on the Higgs-Boson Mass in the Presence of Non-Standard Interactions

The triviality and vacuum stability bounds on the Higgs-boson mass are revisited in the presence of new interactions parameterized in a model-independent way by an effective lagrangian. When the scale of new physics is below 50 TeV the triviality bound is unchanged but the stability lower bound is increased by 40-60 GeV. Should the Higgs-boson mass be close to its current lower experimental limit, this leads to the possibility of new physics at the scale of a few TeV, even for modest values of the effective lagrangian parameters.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, RevTex, submitted to PR