Neutrino Dark Energy and Baryon Asymmetry from Higgs Sector

We propose a new model to explain the neutrino masses, the dark energy and the baryon asymmetry altogether. In this model, neutrinos naturally acquire small Majorana masses via type-II seesaw mechanism, while the pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone bosons associated with the neutrino mass-generation mechanism provide attractive candidates for dark energy. The baryon asymmetry of the universe is produced from the Higgs triplets decay with CP-violation.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. Version accepted by PL

Students\u27 attitudes, knowledge, and commitment to implementation of multicultural education in a teacher education program

In recent years, there are more research studies in the field of teacher education. These research studies examine the effects of multicultural education initiatives on the change of students\u27 attitudes and perspectives on multicultural education in teacher education programs. The results of there research studies have revealed that further studies are called for in this area of study, because the results of the previous studies are not always positive and clear. The purpose of this study is to see if there is any attitude change during the program, how the five-year teacher education program enhances the pre-service teacher education experience by examining diversity issues from various perspectives and how the program helps pre-service teachers to apply what they have learned from the courses to modify instruction appropriately.;This study uses a mixed method of both quantitative and qualitative research approaches to examine the there research questions. The quantitative data was collected by using the Diversity Questionnaire . The qualitative data was obtained through the analysis of the responses from a set of Cultural Diversity Essay Questions and questions of there Case Studies .;The results of T-Test for Diversity Questionnaire indicate that there is no much evidence showing the students\u27 attitude change between Year 3 and Year 4 groups. The reason for this result might be that the one-year difference between the two groups is not sufficient or long enough to see the differences of attitude change. Two instruments---the Essay Questions and Case Studies were used for measurement qualitatively to access what the students have learned from the diversity strand in the teacher education program and to answer the second and the third research questions. The data reveals that the multicultural/diversity perspectives the participants have learned from the courses really help them to understand their students\u27 situations better. This study also suggests that the students have developed and formed their positive attitudes toward diversity with the progress of their teacher education program and their field experiences. The effectiveness of the Teacher Education Diversity Strand , the implications for teacher education curriculum and teaching, and the implications for further study are discussed

More is simpler : effectively and efficiently assessing node-pair similarities based on hyperlinks

Similarity assessment is one of the core tasks in hyperlink analysis. Recently, with the proliferation of applications, e.g., web search and collaborative filtering, SimRank has been a well-studied measure of similarity between two nodes in a graph. It recursively follows the philosophy that "two nodes are similar if they are referenced (have incoming edges) from similar nodes", which can be viewed as an aggregation of similarities based on incoming paths. Despite its popularity, SimRank has an undesirable property, i.e., "zero-similarity": It only accommodates paths with equal length from a common "center" node. Thus, a large portion of other paths are fully ignored. This paper attempts to remedy this issue. (1) We propose and rigorously justify SimRank*, a revised version of SimRank, which resolves such counter-intuitive "zero-similarity" issues while inheriting merits of the basic SimRank philosophy. (2) We show that the series form of SimRank* can be reduced to a fairly succinct and elegant closed form, which looks even simpler than SimRank, yet enriches semantics without suffering from increased computational cost. This leads to a fixed-point iterative paradigm of SimRank* in O(Knm) time on a graph of n nodes and m edges for K iterations, which is comparable to SimRank. (3) To further optimize SimRank* computation, we leverage a novel clustering strategy via edge concentration. Due to its NP-hardness, we devise an efficient and effective heuristic to speed up SimRank* computation to O(Knm) time, where m is generally much smaller than m. (4) Using real and synthetic data, we empirically verify the rich semantics of SimRank*, and demonstrate its high computation efficiency