346 research outputs found
Exploring Producers\u27, Staff Members\u27, and Board Members\u27 Cognitive Frame on Decision Making in an Appalachian Organic Farming Venture
Sustainable development assistance organizations (SDAOs) aim to help producers of natural resource products move their goods and services to market. This article explores how the cognitive frames held by producers, staff, and board members in an agricultural SDAO in rural Appalachia influence organizational decision-making. This study explores identity, characterization, value, and membership frames. Data collected through semi-structured interviews with growers, staff, and board members reveal that the frames these stakeholders hold lead to the institutionalization of decision-making processes that allow organizational managers to make quick, consistent, and clear decisions while avoiding conflicts among members who hold competing frames. Simultaneously, these tacitly-supported practices are exclusionary, and they limit creativity and information exchange, as well as reducing transparency. Consequently, the SDAO may face organizational challenges due to limited problem-solving and adaptive management capabilities. Additionally, the prevailing nature of some members’ frames may prevent other participants from changing their views of the SDAO, limiting the firm’s flexibility to experiment with new management and organizational structures and resilience in the face of change
New Horizons: Long-Range Kuiper Belt Targets Observed by the Hubble Space Telescope
We report on Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of three Kuiper Belt
Objects (KBOs), discovered in our dedicated ground-based search campaign, that
are candidates for long-range observations from the New Horizons spacecraft:
2011 JY31, 2011 HZ102, and 2013 LU35. Astrometry with HST enables both current
and future critical accuracy improvements for orbit precision, required for
possible New Horizons observations, beyond what can be obtained from the
ground. Photometric colors of all three objects are red, typical of the Cold
Classical dynamical population within which they reside; they are also the
faintest KBOs to have had their colors measured. None are observed to be binary
with HST above separations of ~0.02 arcsec (~700 km at 44 AU) and {\Delta}m
less than or equal to 0.5.Comment: Pages: 11, Figures: 2, Tables: 3, Icarus, available online May 2014
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2014.04.014
Lepton Flavor Violation in the Two Higgs Doublet Model type III
We consider the Two Higgs Doublet Model (2HDM) of type III which leads to
Flavour Changing Neutral Currents (FCNC) at tree level in the leptonic sector.
In the framework of this model we can have, in principle, two situations: the
case (a) when both doublets acquire a vacuum expectation value different from
zero and the case (b) when only one of them is not zero. In addition, we show
that we can make two types of rotations for the flavor mixing matrices which
generates four types of lagrangians, with the rotation of type I we recover the
case (b) from the case (a) in the limit , and with the
rotation of type II we obtain the case (b) from (a) in the limit Moreover, two of the four possible lagrangians correspond to the models
of types I and II plus Flavor Changing (FC) interactions. The analitical
expressions of the partial lepton number violating widths and are derived for the cases (a) and (b) and both
types of rotations.In all cases these widths go asymptotically to zero in
the decoupling limit for all Higgses. We present from our analysis upper bounds
for the flavour changing transition and we show that such bounds
are sensitive to the VEV structure and the type of rotation utilized.Comment: 7 pages RevTeX4, 4 figures postscript, new section added and some new
reference
Cosmic Chronometers: Constraining the Equation of State of Dark Energy. I: H(z) Measurements
We present new determinations of the cosmic expansion history from
red-envelope galaxies. We have obtained for this purpose high-quality spectra
with the Keck-LRIS spectrograph of red-envelope galaxies in 24 galaxy clusters
in the redshift range 0.2 < z < 1.0. We complement these Keck spectra with
high-quality, publicly available archival spectra from the SPICES and VVDS
surveys. We improve over our previous expansion history measurements in Simon
et al. (2005) by providing two new determinations of the expansion history:
H(z) = 97 +- 62 km/sec/Mpc at z = 0.5 and H(z) = 90 +- 40 km/sec/Mpc at z =
0.8. We discuss the uncertainty in the expansion history determination that
arises from uncertainties in the synthetic stellar-population models. We then
use these new measurements in concert with cosmic-microwave-background (CMB)
measurements to constrain cosmological parameters, with a special emphasis on
dark-energy parameters and constraints to the curvature. In particular, we
demonstrate the usefulness of direct H(z) measurements by constraining the
dark- energy equation of state parameterized by w0 and wa and allowing for
arbitrary curvature. Further, we also constrain, using only CMB and H(z) data,
the number of relativistic degrees of freedom to be 4 +- 0.5 and their total
mass to be < 0.2 eV, both at 1-sigma.Comment: Submitted to JCA
Bounds for Lepton Flavor Violation and the Pseudoscalar Higgs in the General Two Higgs Doublet Model using muon factor
Current experimental data from the muon factor, seems to show the
necessity of physics beyond the Standard Model (SM), since the difference
between SM and experimental predictions is 2.6. In the framework of
the General Two Higgs Doublet Model (2HDM), we calculate the muon anomalous
magnetic moment to get lower and upper bounds for the Flavour Changing (FC)
Yukawa couplings in the leptonic sector. We also obtain lower bounds for the
mass of the pseudoscalar Higgs () as a function of the parameters of
the model.Comment: 12 pages, RevTex4, 5 figures. Improved presentation, updated
experimental data, amplified analysis, new figures added. Subbmited to Phys.
Rev.
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