Friedberg-Lee symmetry and tri-bimaximal neutrino mixing in the inverse seesaw mechanism

The inverse seesaw mechanism with three pairs of gauge-singlet neutrinos offers a natural interpretation of the tiny masses of three active neutrinos at the TeV scale. We combine this picture with the newly-proposed Friedberg-Lee (FL) symmetry in order to understand the observed pattern of neutrino mixing. We show that the FL symmetry requires only two pairs of the gauge-singlet neutrinos to be massive, implying that one active neutrino must be massless. We propose a phenomenological ansatz with broken FL symmetry and exact \mu-\tau symmetry in the gauge-singlet neutrino sector and obtain the tri-bimaximal neutrino mixing pattern by means of the inverse seesaw relation. We demonstrate that non-unitary corrections to this result are possible to reach the percent level and a soft breaking of \mu-\tau symmetry can give rise to CP violation in such a TeV-scale seesaw scenario.Comment: RevTeX 16 pages. Minor changes. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Sustainable Approaches to Food Production

Permaculture is a system of ecological design that aims to create more sustainable communities: its principles reinforce to participants understanding patterns of nature, learning food production, managing water catchment and storage, utilizing renewable energy, and building communities. A permaculture system is the exemplary sustainable approach to food production systems that the Campus Garden aims to bring to the University at Buffalo. The belief is that through the building of this garden, we have created a community at UB that has a heightened understanding of where its food comes from (fair share), how that food affects individuals’ bodies (people care), and how food production affects the environment (earth care). With the framework of “Grow better, not bigger” in mind, the ultimate goal of this research is to double the amount of food production to forty-pounds, in the same 20’x20’ plot of the UB Campus Garden. To advance the Garden’s vision and further emphasize the importance of sustainability, it is our goal to explore different gardening techniques for implementation during the growing season. The four components to this alternative growing research include: 1) Community engagement and education; 2) Permaculture and companion planning; 3) Container gardening; and, 4) Vertical gardening. This research allows us to utilize the Garden’s space as best possible and be a representation to the campus community of how food production can occur despite space constraints. Wholly, we aim to educate individuals on alternative gardening techniques, prove that implementation of these techniques is plausible at other sites, and expand the campus community’s understanding of the importance of food production processes

Roles and recommendations from primary care physicians towards managing low-risk breast cancer survivors in a shared-care model with specialists in Singapore-a qualitative study.

BackgroundBreast cancer is prevalent and has high cure rates. The resultant increase in numbers of breast cancer survivors (BCS) may overwhelm the current oncology workforce in years to come. We postulate that primary care physicians (PCPs) could play an expanded role in comanaging survivors, provided they are given the appropriate tools and training to do so.ObjectiveTo explore the perspectives of PCPs towards managing BCS in a community-based shared-care programme with oncologists.MethodsEleven focus groups and six in-depth interviews were conducted with seventy PCPs recruited by purposive sampling. All sessions were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and coded by three independent investigators. Thematic data analysis was performed and the coding process facilitated by NVivo 12.ResultsMajority of PCPs reported currently limited roles in managing acute and non-cancer issues, optimizing comorbidities and preventive care. PCPs aspired to expand their role to include cancer surveillance, risk assessment and addressing unmet psychosocial needs. PCPs preferred to harmonize cancer survivorship management of their primary care patients who are also BCS, with defined role distinct from oncologists. Training to understand the care protocol, enhancement of communication skills, confidence and trust were deemed necessary. PCPs proposed selection criteria of BCS and adequacy of their medical information; increased consultation time; contact details and timely access to oncologists (if needed) in the shared-care programme.ConclusionsPCPs were willing to share the care of BCS with oncologists but recommended role definition, training, clinical protocol, resources and access to oncologist's consultation to optimize the programme implementation

Actuarial Analysis of Retirement Income Replacement Ratios

A measure of level of post-retirement standard of living is the replacement ratio, i.e., percentage of final salary received as annual retirement income derived from savings. The replacement ratio depends on many factors including salary, salary increases, investment returns, and post-retirement mortality. Elementary life contingencies techniques are used to develop a replacement ratio formula and analyze its sensitivity to these factors

A decision-directed adaptive gain equalizer for assistive hearing instruments

Assistive hearing instruments have a significant impact on speech enhancement when the signal-to-noise ratio is low. These instruments are usually developed using the conventional adaptive gain equalizer (AGE), which has low computational complexity and low distortion in real-time speech enhancement. The conventional AGEs are intended to boost the speech segments of speech signals but they are incapable of suppressing noise segments. The overall speech quality of the assistive hearing instruments may be reduced, as the noise segments still cannot be filtered out. In this paper, a decision-directed AGE is proposed for assistive hearing instruments. It aims to overcome the limitation of the conventional AGE, which is capable only of boosting speech segments in noisy speech but incapable of suppressing noise segments. The proposed approach simultaneously boosts the speech segments and suppresses noise segments in noisy speech. Experimental results with different types of real-world noise indicate that the proposed method achieves better speech quality than does the conventional AGE. The resulting method provides an improved functionality for assistive hearing instruments

Actuarial Analysis of Retirement Income Replacement Ratios

A measure of level of post-retirement standard of living is the replacement ratio, i.e., percentage of final salary received as annual retirement income derived from savings. The replacement ratio depends on many factors including salary, salary increases, investment returns, and post-retirement mortality. Elementary life contingencies techniques are used to develop a replacement ratio formula and analyze its sensitivity to these factors

Les enjeux actuels des débats sur la mémoire et la réparation pour l’esclavage à l’île Maurice

Dans l’île Maurice plurielle, les débats autour de la mémoire et de la réparation pour l’esclavage se déroulent sur fond de « malaise créole », résultant d’une perception de marginalisation et d’exclusion de cette communauté des fruits du développement économique. L’émergence du discours du malaise créole est étroitement associée à une tentative de ce groupe, majoritairement de foi catholique, de se forger une nouvelle identité ethnique à l’intérieur d’un système hautement ethnicisé, comme prélude à la mobilisation sociopolitique. Le groupe créole va ainsi se (re)fonder autour de l’esclavage et de la commémoration du 1er février, date anniversaire de son abolition, pour réclamer un programme d’empowerment tant au niveau culturel, social et économique comme réparation pour les torts causés par l’esclavage. Si les demandes identitaires ont été prises en compte à la fois par l’État et par la hiérarchie de l’Église catholique, les demandes de réparation économique, voire de compensation financière individuelle, suscitent en revanche controverses et questionnements dans une société pluriethnique qui a connu à la fois l’esclavage et l’engagisme indien. Cependant, les émeutes sanglantes de février 1999 ont démontré clairement l’urgente nécessité d’élaborer de nouvelles solidarités entre l’État, le secteur privé et la société civile dans son ensemble pour combattre l’exclusion de groupes vulnérables dans une société inégalitaire à l’heure de la globalisation.In the plural context of Mauritius, the debates over memory and reparation for slavery are unfolding against a backdrop of “malaise créole”, itself the result of a perception of marginalization and exclusion of the creole community from the fruits of economic development. The emergence of the discourse of “malaise créole” is closely associated with an attempt of the creole community, catholic in its great majority, to forge a new ethnic identity within a highly ethnicised system for the purpose of socio-political mobilization. The creole community has thus reconstructed itself by reappropriating its slave past and around the commemoration of the abolition of slavery on 1st February of each year in order to fight for a program of cultural, economic and social empowerment. The state and church hierarchy have since taken measures to satisfy most of the cultural demands of the creole community. However, its demand for economic reparation, albeit monetary compensation for each descendant of slave, have raised controversies and major objections in a society that have been constructed by slaves as well as Indian indentured laborers. Yet, the tragic event of February 1999 have revealed to each and every one the urgent need to forge a new solidarity among state, private sector and civil society at large in the struggle against the exclusion of vulnerable groups in an era of globalisation

Error Voltage Components in Quantitative Voltage Contrast Measurement Systems

This paper presents the results of computer simulation studies into the respective contributions of the potential barrier, the off-normal incidence injection of secondary electrons (SEs) into the retarding field and analyser geometry on Types I and II local field error voltages for a practical 20 mm wide planar retarding field energy analyser. Results show that the error voltage component due to the off-normal incidence injection effect of SEs into the retarding field dominates the Type I local field error. For type II LFE, the error voltage component due to analyser geometry effect is the higher contributing factor. The presence of a neighbouring electrode voltage tends to draw SEs away from the central axis of the energy analyser, thus causing the electron trajectories to be more sensitive to the influence of the analyser geometry

Mannose binding lectin (MBL) codon 54 gene polymorphism and susceptibility to infection in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE)

published_or_final_versio

Speech recognition enhancement using beamforming and a genetic algorithm

This paper proposes a genetic algorithm (GA) based beamformer to optimize speech recognition accuracy for a pretrained speech recognizer. The proposed beamformer is designed to tackle the non-differentiable and non-linear natures of speech recognition by employing the GA algorithm to search for the optimal beamformer weights. Specifically, a population of beamformer weights is reproduced by crossover and mutation until the optimal beamformer weights are obtained. Results show that the speech recognition accuracies can be greatly improved even in noisy environments