5,573 research outputs found
Never Again: Lessons from Louisiana's Gustav Evacuation
A report by STAND, a grassroots project of NOWCRJ, that exposes the impact of Lousiana's unjust and inequitable evacuation policy during the Hurricane Gustav on the state's poorest evacuees, based on hundreds of interviews with evacuees.This report exposes Louisiana's differential treatment sheltering policy which directs that in disasters, the state shall segregate evacuees relying on city/ state transportation in state-run warehouse shelters separate from evacuees using their own cars. Pursuant to this policy, the state advisory system directs self-transporting evacuees to separate parish, Red Cross, and church shelters with better conditions. Those who evacuate by bus are primarily the residents who do not have the economic means (or the cars) to self-evacuate, including homeless residents, public housing residents, low-wage workers, low-income renters, and their families -- almost all African American.This report's findings are based on assessments of the state-run warehouse shelters and extensive interviews of hundreds of affected residents. The findings expose startling inequity. In the Gustav evacuation, the state's differential treatment policy subjected the most vulnerable state residents to extremely inhumane shelter conditions. In each of the four state-run warehouse shelters, over a thousand evacuees were housed in a single large one-room space. Women, infants, children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled were all using the same space, without privacy, and sharing the same bathrooms -- outdoor portable toilets. They had no access to running water inside the facilities. The only showers -- until close to the end of the evacuations -- were the portable toilets outside, in which mothers were washing themselves and their babies with bottled water. Residents had limited access to medical care, and no access to counselors or to news from the state about the hurricane and its aftermath
Semi-inclusive hadronic B decays as null tests of the Standard Model
We propose a new set of observables that can be used as experimental null
tests of the Standard Model in charged and neutral B decays. The CP asymmetries
in hadronic decays of charged B mesons into inclusive final states containing
at least one of the following mesons: K_{S,L}, eta', c\bar c bound states or
neutral K^* or D mesons, for all of which a U-spin rotation is equivalent to a
CP conjugation, are CKM suppressed and furthermore vanish in the exact U-spin
limit. We show how this reduces the theoretical error by using Soft Collinear
Effective Theory to calculate the CP asymmetries for K_{S,L} X_{s+d}, K^*
X_{s+d} and eta' X_{s+d} final states in the endpoint region. For these CP
asymmetries only the flavor and not the charge of the decaying B meson needs to
be tagged up to corrections of NLO in 1/m_b, making the measurements more
accessible experimentally.Comment: 8 pages, significantly expanded after the observation that both
neutral and charged B decays can be used, calculation for decays involving
eta' adde
Virtual RTCP: A Case Study of Monitoring and Repair for UDP-based IPTV Systems
IPTV systems have seen widespread deployment, but often lack robust mechanisms for monitoring the quality of experience. This makes it difficult for network operators to ensure that their services match the quality of traditional broadcast TV systems, leading to consumer dissatisfaction. We present a case study of virtual RTCP, a new framework for reception quality monitoring and reporting for UDP-encapsulated MPEG video delivered over IP multicast. We show that this allows incremental deployment of reporting infrastructure, coupled with effective retransmission-based packet loss repair
Strong CP, Up-Quark Mass, and the Randall-Sundrum Microscope
In the Randall-Sundrum model, setting the ratio of up and down quark masses
, relevant to the strong CP problem, does not require chiral
symmetry or fine-tuning, due to exponential bulk fermion profiles. We point out
that such geometric suppression of the mass of a fermion magnifies the masses
of its corresponding Kaluza-Klein (KK) states. In this sense, these KK states
act as "microscopes" for probing light quark and lepton masses. In simple
realizations, this hypothesis can be testable at future colliders, like the
LHC, by measuring the spectrum of level-1 KK fermions. The microscope can then
provide an experimental test for the vanishing of in the ultraviolet,
independently of non-perturbative determinations, by lattice simulations or
other means, at hadronic scales. We also briefly comment on application of our
microscope idea to other fermions, such as the electron and neutrinos.Comment: 7 pages. New discussions and references added. Main previous
conclusions unchange
Precocious Diphoton Signals of the Little Radion at Hadron Colliders
In Little Randall-Sundrum models, the bulk couplings of the radion to
massless gauge fields can yield a greatly enhanced diphoton signal at hadron
colliders. We examine the implications of the Tevatron data for the Little
radion and also show that the 7 TeV run at the Large Hadron Collider will have
an impressive reach in this channel. The diphoton signal is crucial in the
search for a light radion, or the dual dilaton, and can potentially probe the
ultraviolet scale of the theory.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. Errors in the WW and ZZ branching fraction curves
in Fig.1 and the related numerical results in Fig.2 have been corrected. New
references have been added. Our main conclusions regarding the enhanced
diphoton signal of the Little radion remain qualitatively the same and
quantitatively similar to the previous result
Synthesis and use of a stable aminal derived from TsDPEN in asymmetric organocatalysis
A stable aminal formed stereoselectively from (R,R)-N-tosyl-1,2-diphenyl-1,2-ethylenediamine (TsDPEN) is capable of asymmetric organocatalysis of Diels-Alder and alpha-amination reactions of aldehydes
The Radion as a Harbinger of Deca-TeV Physics
Precision data generally require the threshold for physics beyond the
Standard Model to be at the deca-TeV (10 TeV) scale or higher. This raises the
question of whether there are interesting deca-TeV models for which the LHC may
find direct clues. A possible scenario for such physics is a 5D warped model of
fermion masses and mixing, with Kaluza-Klein masses m_KK ~ 10 TeV, allowing it
to avoid tension with stringent constraints, especially from flavor data.
Discovery of a Standard-Model-like Higgs boson, for which there are some hints
at ~125 GeV at the LHC, would also require the KK masses to be at or above 10
TeV. These warped models generically predict the appearance of a much lighter
radion scalar. We find that, in viable warped models of flavor, a radion with a
mass of a few hundred GeV and an inverse coupling of order m_KK ~ 10 TeV could
typically be accessible to the LHC experiments -- with sqrt(s) = 14 TeV and 100
fb^-1 of data. The above statements can be applied, mutatis mutandis, to 4D
dual models, where conformal dynamics and a dilaton replace warping and the
radion, respectively. Detection of such a light and narrow scalar could thus
herald the proximity of a new physical threshold and motivate experiments that
would directly probe the deca-TeV mass scale.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures; version published in Physical Review
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