Sliding manifold design for linear systems with unmatched disturbances

This paper offers an efficient sliding manifold design method that minimizes the impact of unmatched disturbances onto SM dynamics and system accuracy. System sensitivity upon unmatched constant or slowly varying external disturbance vector is evaluated by the steady-state dependent criterion function. An infinite set of sliding manifolds that minimize the chosen optimization criterion is determined and a way of selecting a manifold out of that set that provides adopted SM dynamics is suggested. The proposed approach has been demonstrated on numerical examples and verified by simulations.     

Who is responsible for vulnerable pupils? The attitudes of teacher candidates in Serbia and Slovenia

In the ongoing trend towards inclusive education, initial teacher education programmes must ensure that prospective teachers are prepared to teach all pupils effectively. The study presented in this paper aimed to explore the attitudes of teacher candidates in Serbia and Slovenia towards responsibility for the teaching and learning of vulnerable pupils in mainstream elementary schools. Using a quantitative approach, the study sought to elicit teacher candidates’ views about division of responsibility for the academic achievement and additional support of vulnerable pupils and their views on the factors that most affect learning difficulties in those pupils. Our findings indicate that teacher candidates’ feelings of responsibility are unlikely to help when instructing vulnerable pupils. The implications of these findings are discussed and we suggest several ways to improve teacher education programmes to promote inclusive education based on the concept of quality education for all.     

Use of evaluative devices by youth for sense-making of culturally diverse interpersonal interactions

Building upon recent research that defines psychological development as a continuous process of sense-making situated within a cultural and historical context, this paper explores how culturally diverse youth growing up in New York City use evaluative language to enact relational complexity as they make sense of technologically mediated interpersonal interactions with their peers. Forty-four individuals (ages 15–20) participated in a quasi-experimental research workshop that engaged them in the process of sense-making by asking them to write projective narratives toward a vignette depicting text-massage mediated interpersonal interaction embedded among monocultural and bicultural group of peers. Data analyses focus on evaluative devices used by youth and manifest the relational flexibility of sense-making by immigrant youth and their U.S. born peers across diverse relational dimensions. Results suggest that immigrant youth are able to coordinate diverse ways of interpreting interpersonal interactions across relational dimensions, manifest by varied use of logical/hypothetical, causal and affective evaluative devices. In contrast U.S. born youth largely use same frequency of evaluative devices across two relational dimensions. Statistical analysis highlights the use of affect in projective narratives by exploring a discursive learning hypothesis: that higher use of emotions in the process of sense-making by U.S. born youth gradually scaffolds the use of emotions in narrative by immigrant youth.     

Policy makers’ rhetoric of educational change: A critical analysis

Reforms in education often fail due to insufficient time to implement them, too few charismatic leaders, the influence of the preceding culture, scarce resources or an incapacity to comprehend the complexity of the education system. Most studies dealing with the cognitive aspects of educational change investigate the meaning of change through the lens of the educators and principals and there is not as much research available on the perception and interpretation of change by policy makers and the language they use to communicate messages about policy that affect sensemaking–sensegiving during the process of learning about the changes. Guided by the premise that the language of a reform movement is shaped by its ideology, this article illustrates how press releases of the Ministry of Education in Canton Sarajevo in Bosnia–Herzegovina reflect an exploitation-oriented dominant reform logic. The results of frequency analysis, hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling imply that MoE is driven by a top-down perspective to educational change, with a focus on the procedural, organizational and collaborational aspects of reforms that primarily alter the structure of the education system but not its internal substance. We end this paper by suggesting that educational system as complex adaptive system cannot be controlled, but effectively managed through distribution of control and creation of few attractors, benefiting from self-organization in the technical core and making change in the official top-down rhetoric.     

Resolution of parent–child conflicts in the adolescence

The aims of the study were: (1) to examine whether adolescents’ attachment and the perceived quality of the communication with their parents relate to effective resolution of parent–child conflicts and (2) to determine whether the pattern of associations changes with adolescents’ gender and age. The sample consisted of 295 adolescents who filled the questionnaires. Structural Equations Models showed that secure attachment predicted a positive communicative climate, which in turn, predicted a more frequent use of negotiation. Secure attachment was related to the use of withdrawal strategies. Anxious attachment was related to high levels of criticism and disputes with parents, which, in turn, predicted the use of all conflict resolution styles. Avoidant attachment was not related to any of the conflict resolution styles. No differences were found in the pattern of associations by gender and age. The relevance of the findings for the social relational perspective to conflict resolution is discussed.     

The Croatian Collection at The New York Public Library

It is generally known that the New York Public Library (NYPL) is one of the most important repositories of Slavic intellectual and cultural documents, literature, and scholarly writings outside Europe. The specifics of the Croatian collection are not so well known, however. In an attempt to provide scholars with an overview of the NYPL's resources, this report describes the holdings of three of the Library's research divisions: the Slavic and Baltic Division, the General Research Division, and the Map Division, which are located at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan. Although the divisions function autonomously and are at a physical remove from each other within the institution, their Croatian holdings are uniformly cataloged within one electronic database (CATNYP), which can be accessed via the web at http://catnyp.nypl.org.     

Acquisitions Trip to the Three Baltic States: Estonia,Latvia, and Lithuania,June 3–June 14, 2009

After giving a brief history of Yale University Library's Baltic collection, the author reports on her acquisitions trip to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. She visited exchange partner libraries, bookstores, and book dealers in Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn, and Tartu. One of her goals for the trip was to set up approval plans with in‐country vendors and exchange partners. She also met with a number of alumni of the Baltic Library Internship at Yale, and some of the librarians who were competing for future internships.     

L'universite ouvriere de Zagreb

Sans résumé