B meson decays to baryons in the diquark model

We study B meson decays to two charmless baryons in the diquark model, including strong and electroweak penguins as well as the tree operators. It is shown that penguin operators can enhance \bar{B} \to \Bb_s \bar{\Bb} considerably, but affect \bar{B} \to \Bb_1 \bar{\Bb}_2 only slightly, where \Bb_{(1,2)} and \Bb_s are non-strange and strange baryons, respectively. The $\gamma$ dependence of the decay rates due to tree-penguin interference is illustrated. In principle, some of the \Bb_s \bar{\Bb} modes could dominate over \Bb_1 \bar{\Bb}_2 for $\gamma > 90^\circ$, but in general the effect is milder than their mesonic counterparts. This is because the $O_6$ operator can only produce vector but not scalar diquarks, while the opposite is true for $O_1$ and $O_4$. Predictions from diquark model are compared to those from the sum rule calculation. The decays \bar{B} \to \Bb_s \bar{\Bb}_s and inclusive baryonic decays are also discussed.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, Revte

The Determinants of Price in Online Auctions: More Evidence from Quantile Regression

This study explores how seller reputations affect auction prices, and concludes that earlier findings may be biased due to the misspecification of seller reputation. This paper contributes to the literature by offering significant empirical evidence using Taiwanese Internet auction data. Our study reveals that the influence of seller reputations on auction prices is significant, irrespective of the assumptions of linear and non-linear relationships with price. However, failure to consider the non-linear setting of seller reputation would have led us to overestimate the impact of reputations on prices because marginal returns to an incremental increase in reputation declines rapidly for sellers who have more than 15 scores. In addition, using quantile regression, this study finds evidence of considerable differences in their impact on auction prices dependent on the distribution of price levels.Internet auction, reputation, Taiwan, Yahoo! Kimo, quantile regression

A Globally Flexible, Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System: An Application for Meat Demand in Taiwan

A new demand system, combining the quadratic almost ideal demand system and the Fourier expenditure system, is introduced. An application for meat consumption in Taiwan indicates that the new demand system fits the data well and that the restriction to the usual specifications, such as locally flexible functional form, linear Engel curve, and both, are rejected.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Estimating fixed-effect panel stochastic frontier models by model transformation

Traditional panel stochastic frontier models do not distinguish between unobserved individual heterogeneity and inefficiency. They thus force all time-invariant individual heterogeneity into the estimated inefficiency. Greene (2005) proposes a true fixed-effect stochastic frontier model which, in theory, may be biased by the incidental parameters problem. The problem usually cannot be dealt with by model transformations owing to the nonlinearity of the stochastic frontier model. In this paper, we propose a class of panel stochastic frontier models which create an exception. We show that first-difference and within-transformation can be analytically performed on this model to remove the fixed individual effects, and thus the estimator is immune to the incidental parameters problem. Consistency of the estimator is obtained by either N→∞ or T→∞, which is an attractive property for empirical researchersStochastic frontier models; Fixed effects; Panel data

Vector Quark Model and B to X_s gamma Decay

We study the $B$ meson radiative decay $B \to X_s \gamma$ in the vector quark model. Deviation from the Standard Model arises from the non-unitarity of the charged current KM matrix and related new FCNC interactions. We establish the relation between the non-unitarity of charged current mixing matrix and the mixing among the vector quark and the ordinary quarks. We also make explicitly the close connection between this non-unitarity and the flavor changing neutral currents. The complete calculation including leading logarithmic QCD correction is carefully carried out. Using the most updated data and the NLO theoretical calculation, the branching fraction of the observed $B$ meson radiative decay places a limit on the mixing angles as stringent as that from the process $B\to X \mu\bar\mu$.Comment: Published version including detailed QCD evolutio

Data-Driven and Deep Learning Methodology for Deceptive Advertising and Phone Scams Detection

The advance of smartphones and cellular networks boosts the need of mobile advertising and targeted marketing. However, it also triggers the unseen security threats. We found that the phone scams with fake calling numbers of very short lifetime are increasingly popular and have been used to trick the users. The harm is worldwide. On the other hand, deceptive advertising (deceptive ads), the fake ads that tricks users to install unnecessary apps via either alluring or daunting texts and pictures, is an emerging threat that seriously harms the reputation of the advertiser. To counter against these two new threats, the conventional blacklist (or whitelist) approach and the machine learning approach with predefined features have been proven useless. Nevertheless, due to the success of deep learning in developing the highly intelligent program, our system can efficiently and effectively detect phone scams and deceptive ads by taking advantage of our unified framework on deep neural network (DNN) and convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed system has been deployed for operational use and the experimental results proved the effectiveness of our proposed system. Furthermore, we keep our research results and release experiment material on http://DeceptiveAds.TWMAN.ORG and http://PhoneScams.TWMAN.ORG if there is any update.Comment: 6 pages, TAAI 2017 versio