Review Of Hiring And Firing Public Officials: Rethinking The Purpose Of Elections By J. Buchler

Few books can be called workmanlike as well as exciting, analytic as well as poignant. Hiring and Firing Public Officials achieves those rare pairings by methodically pursuing an academic coup. Justin Buchler aims to replace electoral theory's dominant “market paradigm”—whose pioneers include Joseph Schumpeter (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 1942) and Anthony Downs (An Economic Model of Democracy, 1957)—with a more accurate “employment model,” and to defend that new model against all manner of attack. Buchler prosecutes his goals doggedly, repetitively, and quite effectively. The result is an intelligent, important new book that may not dazzle but will challenge settled convictions and change more than a few minds. The author's occasionally defensive tone is understandable given the nature of his ambition. His book advocates paradigmatic revolution and, to borrow from Mao Zedong, revolution is not a dinner party.</jats:p

Mesino Oscillation in MFV SUSY

R-parity violating supersymmetry in a Minimal Flavor Violation paradigm can produce same-sign dilepton signals via direct sbottom-LSP pair production. Such signals arise when the sbottom hadronizes and the resulting mesino oscillates into an anti-mesino. The first bounds on the sbottom mass are placed in this scenario using current LHC results.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure

Deconstruction: Large Hadron Collider

As the world’s largest science experiment, the LHC is the subject of many interesting and unusual facts and statistics

Brief Announcement: Zero-Knowledge Protocols for Search Problems

We consider natural ways to extend the notion of Zero-Knowledge (ZK) Proofs beyond decision problems. Specifically, we consider search problems, and define zero-knowledge proofs in this context as interactive protocols in which the prover can establish the correctness of a solution to a given instance without the verifier learning anything beyond the intended solution, even if it deviates from the protocol. The goal of this work is to initiate a study of Search Zero-Knowledge (search-ZK), the class of search problems for which such systems exist. This class trivially contains search problems where the validity of a solution can be efficiently verified (using a single message proof containing only the solution). A slightly less obvious, but still straightforward, way to obtain zero-knowledge proofs for search problems is to let the prover send a solution and prove in zero-knowledge that the instance-solution pair is valid. However, there may be other ways to obtain such zero-knowledge proofs, and they may be more advantageous. In fact, we prove that there are search problems for which the aforementioned approach fails, but still search zero-knowledge protocols exist. On the other hand, we show sufficient conditions for search problems under which some form of zero-knowledge can be obtained using the straightforward way