Joanna Brooke

© 2015.This document a59Summary of the discussions and conclusions following from Dark Matter @ LHC 2014, held at Merton College, Oxford, on September 25-27, 2014. outlines a set of simplified models for dark matter and its interactions with Standard Model particles. It is intended to summarize the main characteristics that these simplified models have when applied to dark matter searches at the LHC, and to provide a number of useful expressions for reference. The list of models includes both s-channel and t-channel scenarios. For s-channel, spin-0 and spin-1 mediations are discussed, and also realizations where the Higgs particle provides a portal between the dark and visible sectors. The guiding principles underpinning the proposed simplified models are spelled out, and some suggestions for implementation are presented.

In the early 1990s, managers at Exxon decided to seek lower cost disposal in Louisiana for oil-field wastes declared hazardous in Alabama. This decision resulted in injuries to the residents of Grand Bois, Louisiana; the disposal company; Exxon; and the oil industry in the state. Given the need for business and society to manage business operations for mutual benefit, it is essential to understand why businesses injure the public so that similar incidents do not happen again. The authors use three analytical perspectives to suggest how corporations may make unethical decisions without purposefully setting out to do so: their managers may fail to understand changing social expectations for corporate behavior; they may adopt organizational structures, policies, and procedures that block ethical action in the name of efficiency; and they may follow unwritten rules of behavior for career success that exclude ethics. These perspectives suggest that individual Exxon managers may not have been making greed-based decisions, weighing corporate gains against harms to others. The situation more likely involved a failure, for the reasons discussed, to raise ethics questions in making business decisions. This explanation does not make much difference to those injured nor does it absolve those who made the decisions. It does make a difference to society and to companies seeking to understand factors that have to be overcome in any large corporation that wishes to prevent such events from occurring.

The far reaching effects of the genetic revolution on our lives as a whole make it difficult to separate the secular and sacred issues involvedIn accepting this opportunity to comment on Dr Polkinghorne’s Templeton Prize lecture, I recognise that there is a significant division between those who would see religious beliefs as irrelevant in the ethical debates concerning new biotechnologies and those who, with Dr Polkinghorne, are willing to look to the major faith traditions for insight into the nature of human identity and selfhood. In secular discourse, the intrusion of religious language has long been resisted on many grounds: that sound ethical principles do not need transcendent ratification; that those who presume a privileged moral discernment derived from their religion frequently fail to appreciate the complexity of genetic and medical science; and that internecine disputes within faith communities and historically rooted incommensurabilities between them seriously compromise any prospect of consensus. This problem is tacitly acknowledged by Dr Polkinghorne himself when he notes that his willingness to accept the 14 day threshold before which certain forms of experimentation on embryos are deemed permissible would not be congenial to Roman Catholic officialdom, for whom the destruction of one life cannot be condoned even if it were to make possible the creation of another.Dialogue traversing a secular/sacred divide can be thwarted for other reasons. Those sympathetic to religious voices may concede that claims for privileged discernment are unhelpful but still insist that secular ethicists too readily fail to appreciate that religious beliefs can be constructive in strengthening motivation and in deepening commitment on ethical issues. Theologians who have served on ethics committees have sometimes expressed a sense of frustration accompanying their attempts to explain that they are starting from a different point, and working from different presuppositions, than those who …