Hadronic decays

Hadronic decays and transitions are a key ingredient of hadronic physics. I discuss how hadronic decays can be explored in lattice gauge theory and review studies undertaken. I also discuss the impact of decays on masses and how lattice studies can explore the nature of a hadronic state: namely whether it is a molecular or quark-antiquark state. A brief discussion of lattice exploration of pentaquark states is presented.Comment: 14 pages, plenary talk at Lattice 2005, Dublin, July 25-3

Birds observed at Ghubrah Bowl, Saiq Plateau and Jabal Shams, Northern Oman; 19 March-26 April 2005 with comments on their status and population

The current study was part of a series of environment related studies of the Jabal Akhdar sponsored by the Sultan Qaboos University, Al Khoud, Sultanate of Oman. The present study aimed to establish the range, habitat, status and population of breeding species in the area, review the historical perspective and list migrant and visitor species noted during the survey

Lattice sum rules for the colour fields

We analyse the sum rules describing the action and energy in the colour fields around glueballs, torelons and static potentials.Comment: 9 pages LATEX, (typos corrected, to appear in Phys Rev D

The Mass Spectrum of a Static Adjoint Particle

The bound states of fermions in the adjoint representation are of interest in supersymmetric models. We investigate the energy spectrum of the simplest -- the gluino-gluon bound states -- on several lattices in the quenched approximation. We use a static approximation for the gluino propagator. We find continuum limits of the splitting between the few lowest states, with the energy difference between the two lowest states of $354 \pm 9$ MeV.Comment: 3 pages, Latex, to appear Lattice 97 proceding

A Double Machine Learning Approach to Estimate the Effects of Musical Practice on Student's Skills

This study investigates the dose-response effects of making music on youth development. Identification is based on the conditional independence assumption and estimation is implemented using a recent double machine learning estimator. The study proposes solutions to two highly practically relevant questions that arise for these new methods: (i) How to investigate sensitivity of estimates to tuning parameter choices in the machine learning part? (ii) How to assess covariate balancing in high-dimensional settings? The results show that improvements in objectively measured cognitive skills require at least medium intensity, while improvements in school grades are already observed for low intensity of practice