The Foreign Policy of Cities

Over the last decade, cities have gained increasing prominence on the world stage. Simon Curtis and Michele Acuto show how and why cities are increasingly flexing their economic and political muscles, and discuss some of the constraints cities face in developing their own foreign policies, as well as the differences between city-based diplomatic activity and traditional state foreign policy. Finally, they discuss the significance of city diplomacy trends for thinking about the international system

An almost elementary Higgs: theory and practice

We study models that interpolate between an elementary and a composite Higgs boson. Such models, arising in theories with new vector-like fermions with electro-weak quantum numbers and charged under a confining gauge interaction, are entirely compatible with current data, with only weak bounds from flavor, CP-violation and precision tests. After classifying the models from the point of view of symmetries, we study their collider phenomenology at LHC. In the most relevant scenarios, bounds from present searches exclude heavy scalar isospin triplets and quintuplets up to 3c200GeV and we show how dedicated searches of simple signals such as pp\u21923\u3b3W could improve the reach by at least a factor of 2 with present data, reaching O(1TeV) with higher integrated luminosities. States that mix with the SM Higgs can be tested in a variety of final states, such as 2b2\u3b3 searches relevant for double Higgs production

LHC13: The Showdown of Particle Physics

Con il recente riavvio dell’esperimento al Large Hadron Collider (LHC) del CERN ha inizio una nuova fase per la fisica delle particelle. Dopo due lunghi anni di silenzio la comunità dei fisici delle particelle è in trepidante attesa per i risultati di questo nuova fase di LHC (run II) con 13 TeV di energia nel centro di massa, che saranno cruciali per il futuro del settore. Grandi aspettative e grandi sfide ci aspettano.With the recent restart of the LHC experiment at CERN a new phase for particle physics has begun. After two long years of silence, the particle physics community is eagerly awaiting the results from run II of the LHC at 13 TeV center of mass energy, which will be crucial for the future of the field. Great expectations and challenges are before us

Achieving Behavioral Health Care Integration in Rural America

Integrating primary care services and treatment for mental health and substance use conditions not only enhances patients' access to needed care but also improves health outcomes in a cost-effective way. Yet the barriers to integrated care are substantial, and it is even more difficult to achieve in rural and frontier communities, which are home to 1 in 7 Americans.Our current work focuses on breaking down the barriers to integration in rural America, where the health care infrastructure and provider composition vary in distinct ways from urban and suburban areas. Americans in rural areas face significant shortages of psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical social workers, and other behavioral health specialists. More than 60% of nonmetropolitan counties lack a psychiatrist, and almost half of nonmetropolitan counties do not have a psychologist, compared with 27% and 19% of urban counties, respectively. These gaps in specialty care force rural residents to rely heavily on primary providers for much of their care

Generalized Species Sampling Priors with Latent Beta reinforcements

Many popular Bayesian nonparametric priors can be characterized in terms of exchangeable species sampling sequences. However, in some applications, exchangeability may not be appropriate. We introduce a {novel and probabilistically coherent family of non-exchangeable species sampling sequences characterized by a tractable predictive probability function with weights driven by a sequence of independent Beta random variables. We compare their theoretical clustering properties with those of the Dirichlet Process and the two parameters Poisson-Dirichlet process. The proposed construction provides a complete characterization of the joint process, differently from existing work. We then propose the use of such process as prior distribution in a hierarchical Bayes modeling framework, and we describe a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler for posterior inference. We evaluate the performance of the prior and the robustness of the resulting inference in a simulation study, providing a comparison with popular Dirichlet Processes mixtures and Hidden Markov Models. Finally, we develop an application to the detection of chromosomal aberrations in breast cancer by leveraging array CGH data.Comment: For correspondence purposes, Edoardo M. Airoldi's email is [email protected]; Federico Bassetti's email is [email protected]; Michele Guindani's email is [email protected] ; Fabrizo Leisen's email is [email protected]. To appear in the Journal of the American Statistical Associatio

IRAC and MIPS Observations of the Interacting Galaxies IC 2163 and NGC 2207: Clumpy Emission

IC 2163 and NGC 2207 are interacting galaxies that have been well studied at optical and radio wavelengths and simulated in numerical models to reproduce the observed kinematics and morphological features. Spitzer IRAC and MIPS observations reported here show over 200 bright clumps from young star complexes. The brightest IR clump is a morphologically peculiar region of star formation in the western arm of NGC 2207. This clump, which dominates the Halpha and radio continuum emission from both galaxies, accounts for ~12% of the total 24mu m flux. Nearly half of the clumps are regularly spaced along some filamentary structure, whether in the starburst oval of IC 2163 or in the thin spiral arms of NGC 2207. This regularity appears to influence the clump luminosity function, making it peaked at a value nearly a factor of 10 above the completeness limit, particularly in the starburst oval. This is unlike the optical clusters inside the clumps, which have a luminosity function consistent with the usual power law form. The giant IR clumps presumably formed by gravitational instabilities in the compressed gas of the oval and the spiral arms, whereas the individual clusters formed by more chaotic processes, such as turbulence compression, inside these larger-scale structures.Comment: 49 pages, 18 figures, ApJ, 642, 15