Theory of Rare B Decays

Theoretical aspects of rare $B$ decays are reviewed. The focus is on the relation between short-distance interactions and physical observables. It is argued that there remain significant uncertainties in the theoretical treatment of certain important quantities. (Talk presented at the International Symposium on Vector Boson Interactions, University of California, Los Angeles, February 1-3, 1995)Comment: 12 pages, uses REVTeX with aps.sty, epsf.sty, floats.sty; 10 uuencoded .eps figures include

Who Put the \u3ci\u3eQuo\u3c/i\u3e in Quid Pro Quo?: Why Courts Should Apply \u3ci\u3eMcDonnell\u3c/i\u3e ’s “Official Act” Definition Narrowly

Federal prosecutors have several tools at their disposal to bring criminal charges against state and local officials for their engagement in corrupt activity. Section 666 federal funds bribery and § 1951 Hobbs Act extortion, two such statuary tools, have coexisted for the past thirty-six years, during which time § 666 has seen an increasing share of total prosecutions while the Hobbs Act’s share of prosecutions has fallen commensurately. In the summer of 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court decided McDonnell v. United States—a decision that threatens to quicken the demise of Hobbs Act extortion in favor of § 666. If McDonnell is interpreted to apply to Hobbs Act extortion but not to § 666, we can expect the latter to become the unchallenged favorite of federal prosecutors as well as increased litigation over whether § 666 bribery contains a quid pro quo requirement. This is likely to occur given § 666’s coverage of the same corrupt behavior, expansive jurisdictional hook, and, following McDonnell, lower difficulty of proving violations within some circuits. To avoid this eventuality, lower courts should distinguish McDonnell because of its unique procedural posture and continue to apply the existing quid pro quo framework. Before meaningful change to our federal bribery statutes can take place, the courts of appeals must first find consensus over whether and when § 666 requires the government to prove the existence of a quid pro quo

New Predictions for Charmed and Bottom Baryons

I review the recent proposal that there are new isotriplet heavy baryons with masses approximately 2380 MeV and 5760 MeV. This prediction follows from the application of heavy spin-flavor and light $SU(3)$ symmetries to the observed charmed and bottom baryon states. It also entails assumptions about the spin and parity quantum numbers of the observed states which are different than is commonly supposed. The discovery of such states would imply that the nonrelativistic constituent quark model is a poor predictor of heavy baryon spectroscopy. I update the analysis in light of new data which have become available.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX, to appear in the Proceedings of the University of Illinois, Chicago, Quarkonium Workshop, June 13-15, 1996; typo on page 6 correcte

Crowdsourced real-world sensing: sentiment analysis and the real-time web

The advent of the real-time web is proving both challeng- ing and at the same time disruptive for a number of areas of research, notably information retrieval and web data mining. As an area of research reaching maturity, sentiment analysis oers a promising direction for modelling the text content available in real-time streams. This paper reviews the real-time web as a new area of focus for sentiment analysis and discusses the motivations and challenges behind such a direction