Gratitude: Does it have a place within media-practice education?

Gratitude may be an important yet largely untapped aspect of media-practice education. This research uses an exploratory approach with media-practice academics and students in order to examine the evidence and nature of gratitude within media-practice education. Given the exploratory nature of the study, interim findings are reported. The research finds media-practice students to be open to gratitude having a place within their educational experiences, indeed students exclusively speak about situations in which they feel grateful, as positive aspects of their student experience. However academics see gratitude in a more varied way. For some, gratitude and its cyclical nature resonate; for others, gratitude is inappropriate and loaded with notions of power. These different perspectives may be partially explained by the different ways in which students and academics perceive gratitude. Whereas initial student voices suggest that gratitude is a positive emotion associated with a desire to reciprocate, academics’ interpretation seems to emphasise obligation. This mismatch may inhibit the current impact of gratitude within the media-practice learning context. The research suggests that gratitude may be a defining aspect of a functional, productive student experience which those working within media-practice education might usefully aim to generate

Photon, Neutrino and Charged Particle Spectra from R-violating Gravitino Decays

We study photonic, neutrino and charged particle signatures from slow decays of gravitino dark matter in supersymmetric theories where R-parity is explicitly broken by trilinear operators. Photons and (anti-)fermions from loop and tree-level processes give rise to spectra with distinct features, which, if observed, can give crucial input on the possible mass of the gravitino and the magnitude and flavour structure of R-violating operators. Within this framework, we make detailed comparisons of the theoretical predictions to the recent experimental data from PAMELA, ATIC and Fermi LAT.Comment: Version published in Phys. Lett.

Sequestered Dark Matter

We show that hidden-sector dark matter is a generic feature of the type IIB string theory landscape and that its lifetime may allow for a discovery through the observation of very energetic gamma-rays produced in the decay. Throats or, equivalently, conformally sequestered hidden sectors are common in flux compactifications and the energy deposited in these sectors can be calculated if the reheating temperature of the standard model sector is known. Assuming that throats with various warp factors are available in the compact manifold, we determine which throats maximize the late-time abundance of sequestered dark matter. For such throats, this abundance agrees with cosmological data if the standard model reheating temperature was 10^10 - 10^11 GeV. In two distinct scenarios, the mass of dark matter particles, i.e. the IR scale of the throat, is either around 10^5 GeV or around 10^10 GeV. The lifetime and the decay channels of our dark matter candidates depend crucially on the fact that the Klebanov-Strassler throat is supersymmetric. Furthermore, the details of supersymmetry breaking both in the throat and in the visible sector play an essential role. We identify a number of scenarios where this type of dark matter can be discovered via gamma-ray observations.Comment: 36 pages, 3 figures; v2: references added, v3: introduction extended and typos correcte

Astrophysical Uncertainties in the Cosmic Ray Electron and Positron Spectrum From Annihilating Dark Matter

In recent years, a number of experiments have been conducted with the goal of studying cosmic rays at GeV to TeV energies. This is a particularly interesting regime from the perspective of indirect dark matter detection. To draw reliable conclusions regarding dark matter from cosmic ray measurements, however, it is important to first understand the propagation of cosmic rays through the magnetic and radiation fields of the Milky Way. In this paper, we constrain the characteristics of the cosmic ray propagation model through comparison with observational inputs, including recent data from the CREAM experiment, and use these constraints to estimate the corresponding uncertainties in the spectrum of cosmic ray electrons and positrons from dark matter particles annihilating in the halo of the Milky Way.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figure

Two component dark matter

We explain the PAMELA positron excess and the PPB-BETS/ATIC e+ + e- data using a simple two component dark matter model (2DM). The two particle species in the dark matter sector are assumed to be in thermal equilibrium in the early universe. While one particle is stable and is the present day dark matter, the second one is metastable and decays after the universe is 10^-8 s old. In this model it is simple to accommodate the large boost factors required to explain the PAMELA positron excess without the need for large spikes in the local dark matter density. We provide the constraints on the parameters of the model and comment on possible signals at future colliders.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, discussion clarified and extende

MSSM in view of PAMELA and Fermi-LAT

We take the MSSM as a complete theory of low energy phenomena, including neutrino masses and mixings. This immediately implies that the gravitino is the only possible dark matter candidate. We study the implications of the astrophysical experiments such as PAMELA and Fermi-LAT, on this scenario. The theory can account for both the realistic neutrino masses and mixings, and the PAMELA data as long as the slepton masses lie in the $500-10^6$TeV range. The squarks can be either light or heavy, depending on their contribution to radiative neutrino masses. On the other hand, the Fermi-LAT data imply heavy superpartners, all out of LHC reach, simply on the grounds of the energy scale involved, for the gravitino must weigh more than 2 TeV. The perturbativity of the theory also implies an upper bound on its mass, approximately $6-7$TeV.Comment: Published version, figures update

Septic thrombophlebitis with acute osteomyelitis in adolescent children: a report of two cases and review of the literature

The triad of acute osteomyelitis, deep venous thrombophlebitis, and septic pulmonary embolism is a rare, but life-threatening syndrome in children that requires prompt recognition and treatment. We report two cases of acute osteomyelitis complicated by septic thrombophlebitis and pulmonary emboli. Both patients required operative drainage to remove the septic focus. Recognition of any one component of the triad should prompt a search for the other associated disorders. Aggressive management with early antibiotic administration, anticoagulation, and surgical debridement can be life saving

Dark matter and sub-GeV hidden U(1) in GMSB models

Motivated by the recent PAMELA and ATIC data, one is led to a scenario with heavy vector-like dark matter in association with a hidden $U(1)_X$ sector below GeV scale. Realizing this idea in the context of gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking (GMSB), a heavy scalar component charged under $U(1)_X$ is found to be a good dark matter candidate which can be searched for direct scattering mediated by the Higgs boson and/or by the hidden gauge boson. The latter turns out to put a stringent bound on the kinetic mixing parameter between $U(1)_X$ and $U(1)_Y$: $\theta \lesssim 10^{-6}$. For the typical range of model parameters, we find that the decay rates of the ordinary lightest neutralino into hidden gauge boson/gaugino and photon/gravitino are comparable, and the former decay mode leaves displaced vertices of lepton pairs and missing energy with distinctive length scale larger than 20 cm for invariant lepton pair mass below 0.5 GeV. An unsatisfactory aspect of our model is that the Sommerfeld effect cannot raise the galactic dark matter annihilation by more than 60 times for the dark matter mass below TeV.Comment: 1+15 pages, 4 figures, version published in JCAP, references added, minor change

Absolute electron and positron fluxes from PAMELA/Fermi and Dark Matter

We extract the positron and electron fluxes in the energy range 10 - 100 GeV by combining the recent data from PAMELA and Fermi LAT. The {\it absolute positron and electron} fluxes thus obtained are found to obey the power laws: $E^{-2.65}$ and $E^{-3.06}$ respectively, which can be confirmed by the upcoming data from PAMELA. The positron flux appears to indicate an excess at energies E\gsim 50 GeV even if the uncertainty in the secondary positron flux is added to the Galactic positron background. This leaves enough motivation for considering new physics, such as annihilation or decay of dark matter, as the origin of positron excess in the cosmic rays.Comment: Accepted by JCA