Next Big Thing? Methamphetamine in the United States

A new major study disproving the popular belief that there exists a growing methamphetamine "epidemic" within the United States. 41 page

A Decade of Reform: Felony Disenfranchisement Policy in the United States

Findings published in "A Decade of Reform: Felony Disenfranchisement Policy" in the United States disclose that since 1997, sixteen states have implemented policy reforms that have reduced the restrictiveness of these laws, and more than 600,000 people in seven states have regained their voting rights

Atmospheric and Solar Neutrinos with a Heavy Singlet

We follow a minimalistic approach to neutrino masses, by introducing a single heavy singlet $N$ into the standard model (or supersymmetric standard model) with a heavy Majorana mass $M$, which couples as a single right-handed neutrino in a Dirac fashion to leptons, and induces a single light see-saw mass $m_{\nu}\sim 5\times 10^{-2} eV$, leaving two neutrinos massless. This trivial extension to the standard model may account for the atomospheric neutrino data via $\nu_{\mu}\to \nu_{\tau}$ oscillations with near maximal mixing angle $\theta_{23}\sim \pi/4$ and $\Delta m_{\mu \tau}^2 \sim 2.5\times 10^{-3} eV^2$. In order to account for the solar neutrino data the model is extended to SUSY GUT/ string-inspired type models which can naturally yield an additional light tau neutrino mass $m_{\nu_{\tau}}\sim few \times 10^{-3} eV$ leading to $\nu_{e L}\to (\cos \theta_{23}{\nu}_{\mu L} -\sin \theta_{23}{\nu}_{\tau L})$ oscillations with $\Delta m_{e1}^2\sim 10^{-5} eV^2$ and a mixing angle $\sin^2 2 \theta_1 \approx 10^{-2}$ in the correct range for the small angle MSW solution to the solar neutrino problem. The model predicts $\nu_{e L}\to (\sin \theta_{23}{\nu}_{\mu L} +\cos \theta_{23}{\nu}_{\tau L})$ oscillations with a similar angle but a larger splitting $\Delta m_{e2}^2 \sim 2.5\times 10^{-3} eV^2$.Comment: 10 pages, Latex. Expanded discussion of mixing angles mainly in an Appendi

Flavour from the Planck scale to the electroweak scale

We discuss a theory of flavour in which Higgs Yukawa couplings are related to those of the new scalar triplet leptoquark and/or $Z'$ responsible for $R_{K^{(*)}}$, with all couplings arising effectively from mixing with a vector-like fourth family, whose mass may be anywhere from the Planck scale to the electroweak scale for the leptoquarks explanation, but is pinned down to the TeV scale if the $Z'$ exchange plays a role. However, in this particular model, only leptoquark exchange can contribute significantly to $R_{K^{(*)}}$, since $Z'$ exchange is too constrained from $B_s$ mixing and $\tau \rightarrow 3 \mu$, although other Higgs Yukawa matrix structures may allow it.Comment: 6 pages, 11 figures. Contribution to the 2019 EW session of the 54th Rencontres de Morion

Minimal see-saw model predicting best fit lepton mixing angles

We discuss a minimal predictive see-saw model in which the right-handed neutrino mainly responsible for the atmospheric neutrino mass has couplings to (nu_e, nu_mu, nu_tau) proportional to (0,1,1) and the right-handed neutrino mainly responsible for the solar neutrino mass has couplings to (nu_e, nu_mu, nu_tau) proportional to (1,4,2), with a relative phase eta = -2pi/5. We show how these patterns of couplings could arise from an A_4 family symmetry model of leptons, together with Z_3 and Z_5 symmetries which fix eta = -2pi/5 up to a discrete phase choice. The PMNS matrix is then completely determined by one remaining parameter which is used to fix the neutrino mass ratio m_2/m_3. The model predicts the lepton mixing angles theta12=34 degrees, theta23=41 degrees, theta13=9.5 degrees, which exactly coincide with the current best fit values for a normal neutrino mass hierarchy, together with the distinctive prediction for the CP violating oscillation phase delta =106 degrees.Comment: 15 pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1304.626

The structure of degradable quantum channels

Degradable quantum channels are among the only channels whose quantum and private classical capacities are known. As such, determining the structure of these channels is a pressing open question in quantum information theory. We give a comprehensive review of what is currently known about the structure of degradable quantum channels, including a number of new results as well as alternate proofs of some known results. In the case of qubits, we provide a complete characterization of all degradable channels with two dimensional output, give a new proof that a qubit channel with two Kraus operators is either degradable or anti-degradable and present a complete description of anti-degradable unital qubit channels with a new proof. For higher output dimensions we explore the relationship between the output and environment dimensions ($d_B$ and $d_E$ respectively) of degradable channels. For several broad classes of channels we show that they can be modeled with a environment that is "small" in the sense $d_E \leq d_B$. Perhaps surprisingly, we also present examples of degradable channels with ``large'' environments, in the sense that the minimal dimension $d_E > d_B$. Indeed, one can have $d_E > \tfrac{1}{4} d_B^2$. In the case of channels with diagonal Kraus operators, we describe the subclass which are complements of entanglement breaking channels. We also obtain a number of results for channels in the convex hull of conjugations with generalized Pauli matrices. However, a number of open questions remain about these channels and the more general case of random unitary channels.Comment: 42 pages, 3 figures, Web and paper abstract differ; (v2 contains only minor typo corrections

The Blizzard Challenge 2009

The Blizzard Challenge 2009 was the fifth annual Blizzard Challenge. As in 2008, UK English and Mandarin Chinese were the chosen languages for the 2009 Challenge. The English corpus was the same one used in 2008. The Mandarin corpus was provided by iFLYTEK. As usual, participants with limited resources or limited experience in these languages had the option of using unaligned labels that were provided for both corpora and for the test sentences. An accent-specific pronunciation dictionary was also available for the English speaker. This year, the tasks were organised in the form of ‘hubs ’ and ‘spokes ’ where each hub task involved building a general-purpose voice and each spoke task involved building a voice for a specific application. A set of test sentences was released to participants, who were given a limited time in which to synthesise them and submit the synthetic speech. An online listening test was conducted to evaluate naturalness, intelligibility, degree of similarity to the original speaker and, for one of the spoke tasks, “appropriateness.