Bethe-Salpeter studies of mesons beyond rainbow-ladder

We investigate the masses of light mesons from a coupled system of Dyson-Schwinger and Bethe-Salpeter equations. The dominant non-Abelian and sub-leading Abelian contributions to the dressed quark-gluon vertex are explicitly taken into account. We also include unquenching effects in the form of hadronic resonance contributions via the back-reaction of pions. We construct the corresponding Bethe--Salpeter kernel that satisfies the axial-vector Ward-Takahashi identity. Our numerical treatment fully includes all momentum dependencies with all equations solved completely in the complex plane. This approach goes well beyond the rainbow-ladder approximation and permits us to investigate the relative impact of different corrections beyond rainbow-ladder on the properties of mesons. We find that sub-leading Abelian corrections are further suppressed dynamically, and that our results supersede early qualitative predictions with significantly simpler truncation schemes.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables. Contributed to the 19th International IUPAP Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics, Bonn, Germany, August 31 - September 5, 200

Sharing the power : knowledge management, empowerment, employee self service and the NZDF : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Information Systems at Massey University

This thesis investigated employee views of the Defence Kiosk System (DKS) through a questionnaire, and compared the results with two empowerment methodologies. These methodologies were Spreitzer and Quinn's Five Disciplines For Empowerment, and Horibe's Employee Decision Making methodology. The DKS is the Employee Self Service (ESS) system of the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF). The DKS is a web-based system that employees can use to access their personal records, thereby empowering employees to access their own personnel information and removing the need for them to ask human resources related questions of their administration unit. This provides the NZDF with administrative savings and accurate up to date information that can be used for Knowledge Management (KM). The research begins with a literature review. The literature review established links between Empowerment, KM and ESS. It found that for ESS systems to provide benefits employees must be willing to use them. A questionnaire was developed and sent to a sample of 1000 NZDF employees who had access to the DKS. The response was 350 completed and returned questionnaires, which exceeded the 180 responses required to enable the results to be generalised for the entire NZDF population. Analysis of the questionnaire responses showed that employees believe that the DKS, as an ESS system, meets their personnel information needs and that they were willing to use the DKS. When the results of the survey were compared with the empowerment methodologies the research supported Spreitzer and Quinn's five disciplines model, particularly the fourth and fifth disciplines. The results raised questions about the suitability of using Horibe's employee decision making methodology in the field of personnel management, especially with the advent of employee self sefvice systems

The quark-gluon vertex in Landau gauge bound-state studies

We present a practical method for the solution of the quark-gluon vertex for use in Bethe--Salpeter and Dyson--Schwinger calculations. The efficient decomposition into the necessary covariants is detailed, with the numerical algorithm outlined for both real and complex Euclidean momenta. A truncation of the quark-gluon vertex, that neglects explicit back-coupling to enable the application to bound-state calculations, is given together with results for the quark propagator and quark-gluon vertex for different quark flavours. The relative impact of the various components of the quark-gluon vertex is highlighted with the flavour dependence of the effective quark-gluon interaction obtained, thus providing insight for the construction of phenomenological models within Rainbow-Ladder. Finally, we solve the corresponding Green's functions for complex Euclidean momenta as required in future bound-state calculations.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures. Version to appear in EPJ

Review of Statistics with Stata (Updated for Version 8) by Hamilton

The new book by Hamilton (2004) is reviewed.introductory, teaching

Precision and mathematical form in first and subsequent mentions of numerical facts and their relation to document structure

In a corpus study we found that authors vary both mathematical form and precision when expressing numerical quantities. Indeed, within the same document, a quantity is often described vaguely in some places and more accurately in others. Vague descriptions tend to occur early in a document and to be expressed in simpler mathematical forms (e.g., fractions or ratios), whereas more accurate descriptions of the same proportions tend to occur later, often expressed in more complex forms (e.g., decimal percentages). Our results can be used in Natural Language Generation (1) to generate repeat descriptions within the same document, and (2) to generate descriptions of numerical quantities for different audiences according to mathematical ability

Two steps forward, one step back: Achievements and limitations of university-community partnerships in addressing neighbourhood socioeconomic disadvantage

This article discusses a partnership initiative that involved a major Australian research university (University of Melbourne), a local government and a network of local community service organisations. The partnership projects aimed to promote public access to university infrastructure for poor and marginalised residents, enhance the local value of research and teaching activities, and create employment opportunities. The article draws on an evaluation of the partnership, which focused on four keynote projects. It found that the partnership appeared to achieve positive outcomes for residents but was limited by tensions associated with the university’s ambivalent commitment to the value of such partnerships. These tensions remained difficult to resolve because they signalled present contestation over the foundational values of contemporary public universities.Keywords: university-community partnerships, neoliberalism, neighbourhoods, community developmen

A fact-aligned corpus of numerical expressions

We describe a corpus of numerical expressions, developed as part of the NUMGEN project. The corpus contains newspaper articles and scientific papers in which exactly the same numerical facts are presented many times (both within and across texts). Some annotations of numerical facts are original: for example, numbers are automatically classified as round or non-round by an algorithm derived from Jansen and Pollmann (2001); also, numerical hedges such as 'about' or 'a little under' are marked up and classified semantically using arithmetical relations. Through explicit alignment of phrases describing the same fact, the corpus can support research on the influence of various contextual factors (e.g., document position, intended readership) on the way in which numerical facts are expressed. As an example we present results from an investigation showing that when a fact is mentioned more than once in a text, there is a clear tendency for precision to increase from first to subsequent mentions, and for mathematical level either to remain constant or to increase