A New Approach to Texture Analysis of Quark Mass Matrices

The triangular basis is proposed as an efficient way of analyzing general quark mass matrices. Applying the method to hermitian hierarchical matrices with five texture zeros, analytic predictions for quark mixing can be readily obtained. One unique texture pair is found most favorable with present data. Some remarks are also made concerning parallel textures between the up and down quark mass matrices with four zeros.Comment: 4 pages, talk presented at PASCOS'99, Lake Tahoe, California, December 10-16, 199

Nonoblique Effects and Weak-Isospin Breaking from Extended Technicolor

Several aspects of the flavor-diagonal extended technicolor (ETC) gauge boson are reviewed. Among them are an increase of $R_b$ that could explain the LEP $R_b$ excess, a sizable, positive correction to the $\tau$ asymmetry parameter $A_{\tau}$, and a contribution to the weak-isospin breaking $\rho$ parameter that is just barely acceptable by present data.Comment: Talk given at the Top Quark Workshop, Iowa State University, May 25-26, 1995, 6 pages, use WSPRL.ST

Hierarchical Majorana Scales in the Seesaw Model

If the mixing angles in each of the seesaw sectors are all small, and the neutrino masses are hierarchical, we study the conditions for large neutrino mixing using triangular matrices. In particular, the implication of the neutrino oscillation data for the mass hierarchy in the heavy Majorana sector is examined, and the heavy Majorana scales are shown to depend sensitively on the solar mixing angle.Comment: 4 pages, talk presented at PASCOS'99, Lake Tahoe, California, December 10-16, 199

Does public transit improvement affect commuting behavior in Beijing, China? : A spatial multilevel approach

Developing countries like China have experienced substantial city transformations over the past decade. City transformations are characterized by transportation innovations that allow individuals to access to speedy commuting modes for work activities and offer potential influences on commuting behavior. This paper examines the potential effects of subway system expansion in Beijing on commuting behavior. Our methodological design controls for spatial effects by employing Bayesian multilevel binary logistic models with spatial random effects. Using cross-sectional individual surveys in Beijing, the results suggest that there is a significant rise in subway commuting trips while non-motorized and bus commuting trips are reduced with the new subway expansion. Model comparison results show evidence about the presence of spatial effects in influencing the role of built environment characteristics to play in the commuting behavior analysis

On deep holes of generalized Reed-Solomon codes

Determining deep holes is an important topic in decoding Reed-Solomon codes. In a previous paper [8], we showed that the received word $u$ is a deep hole of the standard Reed-Solomon codes $[q-1, k]_q$ if its Lagrange interpolation polynomial is the sum of monomial of degree $q-2$ and a polynomial of degree at most $k-1$. In this paper, we extend this result by giving a new class of deep holes of the generalized Reed-Solomon codes.Comment: 5 page