Lepton flavor violating processes in unparticle physics

We study the virtual effects of unparticle physics in the lepton flavor violating processes $M^0\to l^+l'^-$ and $e^+e^-\to l^+l'^-$ scattering, where $M^0$ denotes the pseudoscalar mesons: $\pi^0,K_L, D_0,B_0,B_s^0$ and $l,l'$ denote two different lepton flavors. For the decay of $B^0\to l^+l'^-$, there is no constraint from the current experimental upper bounds on the vector unparticle coupling with leptons. The constraint on the coupling constant between scalar unparticle field and leptons is sensitive to the scaling dimension of the unparticle $d_{\cal U}$. For the scattering process $e^-e^+\to l^-l'^+$, there is only constraint from experiments on the vector unparticle couplings with leptons but no constraint on the scalar unparticle. We study the $\sqrt s$ dependence of the cross section $\frac{1}{\sigma} \frac{d\sigma}{d\sqrt s}$ of $e^+e^-\to l^-l'^+$ with different values of $d_{\cal U}$. If $d_{\cal U}=1.5$, the cross section is independent on the center mass energy. For $d_{\cal U}>1.5$, the cross section increases with $\sqrt s$.Comment: 8 pages, revtex4,with 2 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Remove-Win: a Design Framework for Conflict-free Replicated Data Collections

Internet-scale distributed systems often replicate data within and across data centers to provide low latency and high availability despite node and network failures. Replicas are required to accept updates without coordination with each other, and the updates are then propagated asynchronously. This brings the issue of conflict resolution among concurrent updates, which is often challenging and error-prone. The Conflict-free Replicated Data Type (CRDT) framework provides a principled approach to address this challenge. This work focuses on a special type of CRDT, namely the Conflict-free Replicated Data Collection (CRDC), e.g. list and queue. The CRDC can have complex and compound data items, which are organized in structures of rich semantics. Complex CRDCs can greatly ease the development of upper-layer applications, but also makes the conflict resolution notoriously difficult. This explains why existing CRDC designs are tricky, and hard to be generalized to other data types. A design framework is in great need to guide the systematic design of new CRDCs. To address the challenges above, we propose the Remove-Win Design Framework. The remove-win strategy for conflict resolution is simple but powerful. The remove operation just wipes out the data item, no matter how complex the value is. The user of the CRDC only needs to specify conflict resolution for non-remove operations. This resolution is destructed to three basic cases and are left as open terms in the CRDC design skeleton. Stubs containing user-specified conflict resolution logics are plugged into the skeleton to obtain concrete CRDC designs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our design framework via a case study of designing a conflict-free replicated priority queue. Performance measurements also show the efficiency of the design derived from our design framework.Comment: revised after submissio

The Performance Practice of Buddhist Baiqi in Contemporary Taiwan

The baiqi (Buddhist percussive instruments), also known as faqi (dharma instruments), are mentioned in the Chinese Buddhist scriptures under many different terms: jianzhi, jiandi, jianzhui, or jianchi. The original function of baiqi in earlier monastic life was to gather people or to call an assembly. With the completion of monasticism and monastic institutions, baiqi have become multifunctional in monasteries, and many baiqi instruments have been developed for different monastic applications. In contemporary Buddhist monasteries in Taiwan, baiqi are used, on the one hand, to mark the time throughout the day, signal the beginning and end of monastic daily activities, and regulate the monastic order; and on the other hand, baiqi are indispensable to the musical practices of all Buddhist rituals, where they are used to accompany fanbai (Buddhist liturgical chants) and to articulate the whole ritual process. This study investigates multiple facets of Buddhist baiqi in their performance practice, function, application, notation, and transmission, exploring the interaction between baiqi and fanbai, baiqi and the practitioner, baiqi and the monastic space, and baiqi and various Buddhist contexts. I draw upon ideas from performance theory as it concerns different disciplines, but I maintain a sharper focus on the musicological dimension of performance practice when analyzing, interpreting, and explaining the performance and music of baiqi in terms of the monastic lifestyle and its rituals. The study not only uncovers the musical system of baiqi, but also encapsulates various issues of performed identity, social interaction, performer/audience, associated behaviors, the musical construction of space, and transmission

An Empirical Note on Testing the Cointegration Relationship Between the Real Estate and Stock Markets in Taiwan

This note studies the long-run relationship between real estate and stock markets in the Taiwan context over the 1986Q3 to 2006Q4 period, using standard cointegration test of Johansen and Juselius (1990) and that of Engle-Granger (1987) as well as the fractional cointegration test of Geweke and Porter-Hudak (1983). The results from both types of cointegration tests strongly indicate that these two markets are not cointegrated with each other. With respect to risk diversification, it is obvious that investors and financial institutions should have included both assets in the same portfolio during that period.

A novel computer vision based method for PDF academic literature structure understanding

The PDF format plays a crucial role in the field of electronic academic literature publishing, but due to its complicated technical rules, PDF cannot be directly read by machines, which has caused a lot of inconvenience to the research work on academic literature. This poster proposes a computer vision-based PDF document structure understanding method. This method maps visual objects and text objects in PDF academic papers and obtains geometric and text attributes of content objects, supplemented by a heuristic algorithm. The algorithm performs type classification on the content object to obtain the physical structure and logical structure of the PDF document. This method overcomes the shortcomings of other PDF analysis methods that require a large number of artificial feature construction or large-scale corpus training, difficult to identify formula tables, and success-fully constructs a structure understanding and full-text extraction of ACM's collections