Charm and Beauty Photoproduction at HERA

After the completion of data taking at HERA-2, a large data set is at hand to study the photoproduction of charm and beauty quarks in ep collisions. New measurements of charm production based on D^* meson tagging and beauty production based on muon and electron reconstruction test perturbative QCD calculations with improved accuracy. In general, QCD calculations at NLO describe the data well. The scale uncertainties are, however, large and dominate over the experimental uncertainties, calling for more precise calculations.Comment: Parallel talk at ICHEP08, Philadelphia, USA, July 2008. 4 pages, LaTeX, 3 eps figure

The ILC Potential for Discovering New Particles

The LHC did not discover new particles beyond the Standard Model Higgs boson at 7 and 8 TeV, or in the first data samples at 13 TeV. However, the complementary nature of physics with $e^+e^-$ collisions still offers many interesting scenarios in which new particles can be discovered at the ILC. These scenarios take advantage of the capability of $e^+e^-$ collisions to observe particles with missing energy and small mass differences, to observe mono-photon events with precisely controlled backgrounds, and to observe the full range of exotic decay modes of the Higgs boson. The searches that an $e^+e^-$ collider makes possible are particularly important for models of dark matter involving a dark sector with particles above the modest energy reach of fixed-target experiments. In this talk, we will review the opportunities that the ILC offers for new particle discovery.Comment: on behalf of the LCC Physics W

Complex Collective Decisions and the Probability of Collective Inconsistencies

Many groups are required to make collective decisions over multiple interconnected propositions. The "doctrinal paradox" or "discursive dilemma" shows that propostionwise majority voting can lead to inconsistent collective outcomes, even when the judgments of individual group members are consistent. How likely is the occurence of this paradox? This paper develops a simple model for determining the probability of the paradox's occurrence, given various assumptions about the probability of different individual judgments. Several convergence results will be proved, identifying conditions under which the probability of the paradox's occurrence converges to certainty as the number of individuals increases, and conditions under which that probability vanishes. The present model will also be used for assessing the "truth-tracking" performance of two escape-routes from the paradox, the premise- and conclusion-based procedures. Finally, the results on the probability of the doctrinal paradox will be compared with existing results on the probability of Condorcet's paradox of cyclical preferences. It will be suggested that the doctrinal paradox is more likely to occur than Condorcet's paradox.

Distributional National Accounts (DINA) for Austria, 2004-2016

This paper constructs distributional national accounts for Austria for the period 2004-2016. We enrich survey data with tabulated tax data and make it fully consistent with national accounts data. The comprehensive dataset allows us to analyse the distribution of macroeconomic growth across the income distribution and to explore the evolution of income inequality in pre-tax income over time. Our results suggest that the distribution of growth has changed over time, which had considerable repercussions on inequality. Inequality started to decline at the very beginning of the economic and financial crisis in 2007, however it has increased again after 2012. We further provide novel insights into the evolution of capital income for top income groups and explore redistribution mechanisms that operated in Austria. Government spending was found to play a key role for redistributive effects across the income distribution. In particular, the transfer system redistributes pre-tax income to a large extent.Series: INEQ Working Paper Serie

Polarimetry at the ILC

At the ILC, the luminosity-weighted average polarization at the IP needs to be determined at the permille-level. In order to reach this goal, the combined information from the polarimeter and the collision data is required. In this study, a unified approach will be presented, which for the first time combines the cross section measurements with the expected constraints from the polarimeters. Hereby, the statistical and systematical uncertainties are taken into account, including their correlations. This study shows that a fast spin flip frequency is required because it easily reduces the systematic uncertainty, while a non-perfect helicity reversal can be compensated for within the unified approach. The final goal is to provide a realistic estimation of the luminosity-weighted average polarization at the IP to be used in the physic analyses.Comment: 8 pages, conference proceedings LCWS 2016 Morioka Japa

Group deliberation and the transformation ofjudgments: an impossibility result

While a large social-choice-theoretic literature discusses the aggregation ofindividual judgments into collective ones, there is relatively little formalwork on the transformation of individual judgments in group deliberation. Idevelop a model of judgment transformation and prove a baselineimpossibility result: Any judgment transformation function satisfying someinitially plausible condition is the identity function, under which no opinionchange occurs. I identify escape routes from this impossibility result andargue that successful group deliberation must be 'holistic': individualscannot generally revise their judgments on a proposition based on judgmentson that proposition alone but must take other propositions into account too. Idiscuss the significance of these findings for democratic theory.group deliberation, judgment aggregation, judgmenttransformation, belief revision

What is special about the proportion? A research report on special majority voting and the classical Condorcet jury theorem

It is known that, in Condorcet’s classical model of jury decisions, the proportion of jurors supporting a decision is not a significant indicator of that decision’s reliability: the probability that a particular majority decision is correct given the size of the majority depends only on the absolute margin between the majority and the minority, and is invariant under changes of the proportion in the majority if the absolute margin is held fixed. Here I show that, if we relax the assumption that juror competence is independent of the jury’s size, the proportion can be made significant: there are then conditions in which the probability that a given majority decision is correct depends only on the proportion of jurors supporting that decision, and is invariant under changes of the jury size. The proportion is significant in this way if and only if juror competence is a particular decreasing function of the jury size. However, the required condition on juror competence is not only highly special – thereby casting doubt on the significance of the proportion in realistic conditions – but it also has an adverse implication for the Condorcet jury theorem. If the proportion is significant, then the Condorcet jury theorem fails to hold; and if the Condorcet jury theorem holds, the proportion is not significant. I discuss the implications of these results for defining and justifying special majority voting from the perspective of an epistemic account of voting.Condorcet jury theorem, special majority voting, proportion, decreasing juror competence

What Normative Facts Should Political Theory Be About? Philosophy of Science meets Political Liberalism

Just as different sciences deal with different facts—say, physics versus biology—so we may ask a similar question about normative theories. Is normative political theory concerned with the same normative facts as moral theory or different ones? By developing an analogy with the sciences, we argue that the normative facts of political theory belong to a higher— more coarse-grained—level than those of moral theory. The latter are multiply realizable by the former: competing facts at the moral level can underpin the same facts at the political one. Consequently, some questions that moral theories answer are indeterminate at the political level. This proposal offers a novel interpretation of John Rawls’s idea that, in public reasoning, we should abstract away from comprehensive moral doctrines. We contrast our distinction between facts at different levels with the distinction between admissible and inadmissible evidence and discuss some implications for the practice of political theory

The relation between degrees of belief and binary beliefs: A general impossibility theorem

Agents are often assumed to have degrees of belief (“credences”) and also binary beliefs (“beliefs simpliciter”). How are these related to each other? A much-discussed answer asserts that it is rational to believe a proposition if and only if one has a high enough degree of belief in it. But this answer runs into the “lottery paradox”: the set of believed propositions may violate the key rationality conditions of consistency and deductive closure. In earlier work, we showed that this problem generalizes: there exists no local function from degrees of belief to binary beliefs that satisfies some minimal conditions of rationality and non-triviality. “Locality” means that the binary belief in each proposition depends only on the degree of belief in that proposition, not on the degrees of belief in others. One might think that the impossibility can be avoided by dropping the assumption that binary beliefs are a function of degrees of belief. We prove that, even if we drop the “functionality” restriction, there still exists no local relation between degrees of belief and binary beliefs that satisfies some minimal conditions. Thus functionality is not the source of the impossibility; its source is the condition of locality. If there is any non-trivial relation between degrees of belief and binary beliefs at all, it must be a “holistic” one. We explore several concrete forms this “holistic” relation could take