The Joint COntrols Project Framework

The Framework is one of the subprojects of the Joint COntrols Project (JCOP), which is collaboration between the four LHC experiments and CERN. By sharing development, this will reduce the overall effort required to build and maintain the experiment control systems. As such, the main aim of the Framework is to deliver a common set of software components, tools and guidelines that can be used by the four LHC experiments to build their control systems. Although commercial components are used wherever possible, further added value is obtained by customisation for HEP-specific applications. The supervisory layer of the Framework is based on the SCADA tool PVSS, which was selected after a detailed evaluation. This is integrated with the front-end layer via both OPC (OLE for Process Control), an industrial standard, and the CERN-developed DIM (Distributed Information Management System) protocol. Several components are already in production and being used by running fixed-target experiments at CERN as well as for the LHC experiment test beams. The paper will give an overview of the key concepts behind the project as well as the state of the current development and future plans.Comment: Paper from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 4 pages, PDF. PSN THGT00

The Supply of Social Insurance

We propose a theory of the welfare state, in which social transfers are chosen by a governing group interacting with non-governing groups repeatedly. Social demands from the non-governing groups are credible because these groups have the ability to generate social conflict. In this context social insurance is supplied as an equilibrium response to income risks within a self-enforcing social contract. When we explore the implications of such a view of the social contract, we find four main determinants of the welfare state: the degree of aggregate income risk; the heterogeneity of group-specific income risks; the public administration’s ability to implement group-specific transfers; and the ability of the non-governing groups to coordinate their social demands. We also analyze the link between public good provision and social insurance

Impact of two mass-scale oscillations on the analysis of atmospheric and reactor neutrino data

We study the stability of the results of 3-nu oscillation analysis of atmospheric and reactor neutrino data under departures of the one--dominant mass scale approximation. In order to do so we perform the analysis of atmospheric and reactor neutrino data in terms of three--neutrino oscillations where the effect of both mass differences is explicitly considered. We study the allowed parameter space resulting from this analysis as a function of the mass splitting hierarchy parameter alpha = Delta m^2/Delta M^2 which parametrizes the departure from the one--dominant mass scale approximation. We consider schemes with both direct and inverted mass ordering. Our results show that in the analysis of atmospheric data the derived range of the largest mass splitting, Delta M^2$, is stable while the allowed ranges of mixing angles sin^2 theta_{23} and sin^2 theta_{13} are wider than those obtained in the one--dominant mass scale approximation. Inclusion of the CHOOZ reactor data in the analysis results into the reduction of the parameter space in particular for the mixing angles. As a consequence the final allowed ranges of parameters from the combined analysis are only slightly broader than when obtained in the one--dominant mass scale approximation.Comment: Updated data, references added and typos corrected. Version to appear in Eur.Phys.J.