Measurements of properties of the Higgs-like Particle at 125 GeV by the CMS collaboration

CMS results on the measurement of properties of the Higgs-like particle discovered last summer with a mass near 126 GeV are presented. The results are based on a data samples corresponding to an integrated luminosity of up to 5.1 fb-1 at 7 TeV and up to 19.6 fb-1 at 8 TeV in proton-proton collisions at the LHC. Five decay modes are studied: gamma-gamma, ZZ, WW, tau-tau and bb. The event yields obtained by different analyses targeting specific decay modes and production mechanisms are consistent with those expected for the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson. The mass of the new boson is measured to be 125.7 +- 0.4 GeV. The best-fit signal strength for all channels combined, expressed in units of the SM Higgs boson cross section, is 0.80 +- 0.14 at the measured mass. A discussion on the consistency of the couplings and the spin-parity properties of the observed boson with those predicted for the SM Higgs boson is presented, updated with the most recent results. No significant deviations are found

Financial Fitness Education for Potential Homebuyers: A Start-Up Guide for NeighborWorks Organizations

Financial fitness education is a critical piece of community development, given today's socioeconomic climate consisting of the deregulation of government institutions and the increasing complexity of financial services. These changes are occurring when personal savings are low and bankruptcy rates are high, with 1.35 million filings in 1997.[1] Twelve million households, one-half of which receive public assistance, do not have bank accounts.[2] Subsequently, in an ever more difficult financial system through which to navigate, there remains a significant number of novice consumers, who would benefit greatly from financial fitness education.The financial system is not only complex but also laden with institutional barriers and potential pitfalls. Over the years, access to legitimate financial institutions and credit in low-income neighborhoods has become increasingly limited, whereby local bank branches have been replaced by expensive fringe banking outlets, such as check-cashing stores, payday loan outlets and pawnshops.Moreover, some residents face cultural or language barriers that prevent them from fully accessing appropriate financial services. Other dangers include consumer scams and schemes, as well as predatory lending practices -- high-cost loans targeted to people who cannot afford to repay them. Financial fitness education can help families become more aware of common pitfalls and thus avoid them while helping them to learn the financial management and planning skills needed to make the most of their income, savings and assets. Such education is vital for low- and moderate-income families who are fulfilling basic needs currently but are precariously positioned to overestimate the reach of their income, with little or no savings as a cushion.Recent changes in the national economy and public policy have led to a rise in the number of organizations developing and delivering financial fitness education. Approximately 20 formal curricula are in circulation around the country, being used by Cooperative Extension and education organizations; government agencies; consumer, nonprofit and community organizations; as well as private financial institutions and credit agencies. These organizations often share the objective of helping people to choose and use financial services successfully.Developing an effective financial fitness education program that will help local constituents move beyond fulfilling basic needs to accumulating savings -- and even assets -- while avoiding all of the perils along the way requires careful planning. Since each community has a unique target population, goals and resources, there cannot be a "one size fits all" program. Rather, an organization needs to develop a program that matches its goals along with the needs of the target population. This start-up guide is designed to help NeighborWorks organizations analyze the local need and their internal capacity for developing a financial fitness education program to increase consumers' money management skills, and in turn, to enable previously underserved markets to attain homeownership

Perturbative Unitarity of Inflationary Models with Features

We consider the pertubative consistency of inflationary models with features with effective field theory methods. By estimating the size of one-loop contributions to the three-point function, we find the energy scale where their contribution is of the same order of the tree-level amplitude. It is well-known that beyond that scale, perturbative unitarity is lost and the theory is no more under theoretical control. Requiring that all the relevant energy scales of the problem are below this cutoff, we derive a strong upper bound on the sharpness of the feature, or equivalently on its characteristic time scale, which is independent on the amplitude of the feature itself. We point out that the sharp features which seem to provide better fits to the CMB power spectrum are already outside this bound, questioning the consistency of the models that predict them