Post-Racial Ideology and Implicit Racial Bias

This study assesses college students from the University of New Hampshire (UNH) and their attitudes and opinions toward people of color, specifically looking at racial/ethnic identity and campus social climate. With 362 respondents from the University of New Hampshire who answered our online survey, it looked at the participants’ post-racial ideologies and the participant’s racial/ethnic identity. This study finds that there is a correlation between racial identity and post-racial beliefs. The study found that 82 percent of the student respondents did not believe that we, as a society, lived in a post-racial America. It was also discovered that the student respondents who did believe we live in a post-racial society (eighteen percent) were almost primarily White participants. The research also shows that in comparison to students of color, White students are more likely to believe that there is little to no racial prejudice or discrimination on UNH’s campus. While this data gives important insight into the racial attitudes at UNH, having a more diverse demographic and a larger sample size would improve the research

Partially Strong WW Scattering

What if only a light Higgs boson is discovered at the CERN LHC? Conventional wisdom tells us that the scattering of longitudinal weak gauge bosons would not grow strong at high energies. We show that this is not always true. In some composite models, two-Higgs-doublet models, or even supersymmetric models, the presence of a light Higgs boson does not guarantee the complete unitarization of the $WW$ scattering. After the partial unitarization by the light Higgs boson, the $WW$ scattering becomes strongly interacting until it hits one or more heavier Higgs bosons or other strong dynamics. We analyze how the LHC experiments can reveal this interesting possibility of partially strong $WW$ scattering.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures; updated reference information and added a referenc

A Putative Inventor’s Remedies to Correct Inventorship on a Patent

Inventorship is a required component of patents issued in the United States, and the penalty for filing a patent with incorrect inventorship is harsh: possible invalidation of the entire patent. This iBrief explores the background on inventorship in the United States patent system, and various remedies such as 35 U.S.C. §116, 35 U.S.C. §256, and interference proceedings in correcting errors in inventorship. This iBrief will then discuss the usefulness of these various remedies to a putative inventor who was left off the inventorship of a patent

Bounds on Heavy-to-Heavy Weak Decay Form Factors

We provide upper and lower bounds on the semileptonic weak decay form factors for $B \to D^(*)$ and $\Lambda_b \to \Lambda_c$ decays by utilizing inclusive heavy quark effective theory sum rules. These bounds are calculated to second order in $\Lambda_{QCD}/m_Q$ and first order in $\alpha_s$. The $O(\alpha_s^2 \beta_0)$ corrections to the bounds at zero recoil are also presented.Comment: 3 pages, talk given at DPF 2000, Columbus, OH, August 9, 2000; reference adde

A Collisional Family in the Classical Kuiper Belt

The dynamical evolution of Classical Kuiper Belt Objects (CKBOs) divides into two parts, according to the secular theory of test particle orbits. The first part is a forced oscillation driven by the planets, while the second part is a free oscillation whose amplitude is determined by the initial orbit of the test particle. We extract the free orbital inclinations and free orbital eccentricities from the osculating elements of 125 known CKBOs. The free inclinations of 32 CKBOs strongly cluster about 2 degrees at orbital semi-major axes between 44 and 45 AU. We propose that these objects comprise a collisional family, the first so identified in the Kuiper Belt. Members of this family are plausibly the fragments of an ancient parent body having a minimum diameter of \~800 km. This body was disrupted upon colliding with a comparably sized object, and generated ejecta having similar free inclinations. Our candidate family is dynamically akin to a sub-family of Koronis asteroids located at semi-major axes less than 2.91 AU; both families exhibit a wider range in free eccentricity than in free inclination, implying that the relative velocity between parent and projectile prior to impact lay mostly in the invariable plane of the solar system. We urge more discoveries of new CKBOs to test the reality of our candidate family and physical studies of candidate family members to probe the heretofore unseen interior of a massive, primitive planetesimal.Comment: final revised version, accepted to ApJ Letters, includes minor caveat regarding Koronis asteroid famil