Russian Orthodox culture or Russian Orthodox teaching? Reflections on the textbooks in religious education in contemporary Russia

A new textbook in religious education is analysed, first, in comparison to earlier ones, and, second, with respect to its content and goals. The aim of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) is threefold – to educate into religion, to foster the ethnic Russian identity and to make youngsters loyal to the state. Actually, the state rather than society is one of the major values (together with the faith) both for the ROC and for the respective textbooks. The new religious courses received the support of the Russian President in 2009, after which a new educational standard was elaborated and new textbooks were completed. Six courses were accepted: four on ‘traditional religions’, one as an introduction to world religions and one on secular ethics. Each of these six courses could be chosen voluntarily by pupils and their parents. The new courses were first introduced in 24 regions in the spring semester of 2010 as a pilot project. I will analyse the textbooks and show which particular courses were most popular in various regions of Russia.     

Using profile expansion techniques to alleviate the new user problem

Collaborative Filtering techniques have become very popular in the last years as an effective method to provide personalized recommendations. They generally obtain much better accuracy than other techniques such as content-based filtering, because they are based on the opinions of users with tastes or interests similar to the user they are recommending to. However, this is precisely the reason of one of its main limitations: the cold-start problem. That is, how to recommend new items, not yet rated, or how to offer good recommendations to users they have not information about. For example, because they have recently joined the system. In fact, the new user problem is particularly serious, because an unsatisfied user may stop using the system before it could even collect enough information to generate good recommendations. In this article we tackle this problem with a novel approach called “profile expansion”, based on the query expansion techniques used in Information Retrieval. In particular, we propose and evaluate three kinds of techniques: item-global, item-local and user-local. The experiments we have performed show that both item-global and user-local offer outstanding improvements in precision, up to 100%. Moreover, the improvements are statistically significant and consistent among different movie recommendation datasets and several training conditions.     

Biomechanical analysis of different starting strategies utilized during cross-country skiing starts

The present study was designed to analyse and compare the kinetics and kinematics associated with three different starting strategies during classic cross-country ski racing. Inside a ski tunnel, 12 elite male skiers performed three sets of three 38?m starts. Each set included one start using: double poling only (DP), diagonal stride only (DIA) and freely chosen (FREE) (i.e. where subjects used the strategy or combination of strategies they felt was fastest) in random order. The first 18?m was performed on a series of force plates that measured horizontal and vertical forces followed by 20?m of a standard snow track. Additionally, cycle characteristics and joint angles were measured. DIA and FREE were faster over 38?m than DP (P?.01). Net horizontal impulse (taking into account both positive and negative impulses) 5–10?m after the start was lower during DP than during DIA and FREE (both P?<?.05). All subjects skied faster when using only DIA for the entire 38?m. Furthermore, the sum duration and frequency of propulsive contacts over the first 18?m was less in DP than DIA and FREE (P?相似文献   

Communication’s forgotten narratives: the lost history of Charles Siepmann and critical policy research

The field of communication has much to recover from its intellectual history, particularly critical traditions that have been pushed to the margins. Such a project is inherently political: how scholars narrate the histories of their fields reflect tacit assumptions about discursive boundaries and what counts for legitimate scholarship. Prominent historical narratives typically emphasize certain sub-fields and research traditions while giving short shrift to others. Suggesting larger erasures and deeper tensions in the history of the field, this article aims to recover one such neglected thread, embodied by a reformist policy scholar who is all but forgotten in communication research: Charles Siepmann.     

Managing Architectural Records in the House that Rubber Built: A Case Study in Multi-Disciplinary Collaboration in Museum Archives

Managing architectural records presents a number of challenges, especially in museums and historic sites where a number of disciplines tend to converge. This case study will chronicle the architectural drawings project at Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens in Akron, Ohio that occurred in two phases over a fifteen-year period. It will present the situations that arose and the multi-disciplinary approaches devised to solve them. It also will illustrate how collaboration across several inherently different yet related professions—including archivists, objects curators, and restoration architects—produced the best outcome and how others can apply these methods to address similar projects.     

Stages in the History of Algebra with Implications for Teaching

In this article, we take a rapid journey through the history of algebra, noting the important developments and reflecting on the importance of this history in the teaching of algebra in secondary school or university. Frequently, algebra is considered to have three stages in its historical development: the rhetorical stage, the syncopated stage, and the symbolic stage. But besides these three stages of expressing algebraic ideas, there are four more conceptual stages which have happened along side of these changes in expressions. These stages are the geometric stage, where most of the concepts of algebra are geometric ones; the static equation-solving stage, where the goal is to find numbers satisfying certain relationships; the dynamic function stage, where motion seems to be an underlying idea, and finally, the abstract stage, where mathematical structure plays the central role. The stages of algebra are, of course not entirely disjoint from one another; there is always some overlap. We discuss here high points of the development of these stages and reflect on the use of these historical stages in the teaching of algebra. Commentary from a Mathematics Educator Bill Barton. See also the last page. Commentary from a Mathematics Educator