The Birth of Brand: 4000 Years of Branding History

This paper seeks to show that brands are as old as civilization. It derives evidence of branding, in various forms, from important historical periods beginning 2250 BCE in the Indus Valley through to 300 BCE Greece. This evidence is compared with modern research directed toward developing a meaning of “brand”. We observe a gradual transition from a more utilitarian provision of information regarding origins and quality to the addition of more complex brand image characteristics over time. Including status/power, added value and finally, the development of brand personality.brand; proto-brand; ancient world; brand personality

Giving top quark effective operators a boost

We investigate the prospects to systematically improve generic effective field theory-based searches for new physics in the top sector during LHC run 2 as well as the high luminosity phase. In particular, we assess the benefits of high momentum transfer final states on top EFT-fit as a function of systematic uncertainties in comparison with sensitivity expected from fully-resolved analyses focusing on $t\bar t$ production. We find that constraints are typically driven by fully-resolved selections, while boosted top quarks can serve to break degeneracies in the global fit. This demystifies and clarifies the importance of high momentum transfer final states for global fits to new interactions in the top sector from direct measurements.Comment: Published versio

Capturing and Analyzing the Execution Control Flow of OpenMP Applications

An important aspect of understanding the behavior of applications with respect to their performance, overhead, and scalability characteristics is knowledge of their execution control flow. High level knowledge of which functions or constructs were executed after which other constructs allows reasoning about temporal application characteristics such as cache reuse. This paper describes an approach to capture and visualize the execution control flow of OpenMP applications in a compact way. Our approach does not require a full trace of program execution events but is instead based on a straightforward extension to the summary data already collected by an existing profiling tool. In multithreaded applications each thread may define its own independent flow of control, complicating both the recording as well as the visualization of the execution dynamics. Our approach allows for the full flexibility with respect to independent threads. However, the most common usage models of OpenMP have threads operate in a largely uniform way, synchronizing frequently at sequence points and diverging only to operate on different data items in worksharing constructs. Our approach accounts for this by offering a simplified representation of the execution control flow for threads with similar behavior

MAGIC and the Search for Signatures of Supersymmetric Dark Matter

The 17m Imaging Air shower Cherenkov Telescope MAGIC (Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, La Palma, Canary Islands) has recently entered its commissioning phase. One of the main goals of the MAGIC telescope project is to provide an unprecedented sensitivity for the detection of gamma rays with energies as low as 30 GeV. A dedicated search for the gamma rays expected to be produced by WIMP annihilations is a prime object of the MAGIC physics program. We consider annihilating supersymmetric dark matter in M 87 and discuss a possible observation strategy. New calculations concerning the extragalactic gamma ray and neutrino backgrounds owing to cosmological neutralino annihilation are also briefly discussed.Comment: To be published in the proceedings of the "6th UCLA Symposium on Sources and Detection of Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe", Marina del Rey, 200

Results from TopFitter

We discuss a global fit of top quark BSM couplings, phrased in the model-independent language of higher-dimensional effective operators, to the currently available data from the LHC and Tevatron. We examine the interplay between inclusive and differential measurements, and the complementarity of LHC and Tevatron results. We conclude with a discussion of projections for improvement over LHC Run II.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on the CKM Unitarity Triangle, 28 November - 3 December 2016, Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, Indi

The Sacred Geography of Dawei: Buddhism in peninsular Myanmar (Burma)

The paper opens by recounting the beginnings of Buddhism in Dawei as preserved in local chronicles and sustained in stupas marking the episodes of the chronicle narrative. The chronicles start with a visit of the Buddha whose arrival triggers a series of events bringing together pre-existing tutelary figures, weiza, a hermit and offspring born of a golden fish, culminating in the establishment of the first Buddhist kingdom circa the eighth to tenth century CE. The enshrinement of sacred hairs gifted by the Buddha also includes patronage by a king of the ‘Suvannbhumi’ lineage. Associated with the monks Sona and Uttara from Sri Lanka sent by King Asoka’s son Mahinda, ‘Suvannbhumi’ literally can refer to the archaeology of Thaton, a walled site in the present day Mon State, or, as is the case here, more widely to the missionary tradition associated with Asoka (Sao Saimong Mengrai 1976). The third story in the establishment of the Buddhist king at Thagara is the longest of the chronicle, the tale of a royal hunter who failed to capture a golden peacock for the queen. The hunter became a hermit living by a pond with a golden fish and as he urinated in the pond, two children were born from the fish. The boy becomes the first Buddhist king of Thagara, 11 km north of Dawei, where artefacts from survey and excavation confirm the chronology of the chronicle, with the closest archaeological parallels found not at the ancient sites of the Mon State but to the first millennium CE Buddhist ‘Pyu’ heritage of Upper Myanmar which is notably absent in the chronicle compilation

Students’ Successes and Challenges Applying Data Analysis and Measurement Skills in a Fifth-Grade Integrated STEM Unit

An understanding of statistics and skills in data analysis are becoming more and more essential, yet research consistently shows that students struggle with these concepts at all levels. This case study documents some of the struggles four groups of fifth-grade students encounter as they collect, organize, and interpret data and then ultimately attempt to draw conclusions or make decisions based on these data. The activities in which the students engaged were part of an integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) unit that had students collecting and analyzing data both in the context of learning science concepts and in the context of evaluating prototypes for an engineering design challenge. Students were observed to struggle in a variety of ways, specifically having difficulty (1) properly using certain measurement devices, (2) coordinating quantitative data with the phenomenon being measured, and (3) properly interpreting the significance of variation, uncertainty, and error in the data. Implications for teaching and curriculum design are addressed