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This edited volume offers an insightful theoretical conceptualization of issues central to 21st century foreign language learning and teaching. Drawing on research results obtained in the fields of pedagogy, social psychology and sociology of education, this book provides a comprehensive practical exploration of issues experienced by researchers in Poland and in Europe, and which can easily find far-reaching implications in other educational contexts. Part I, "Focus on the Teacher," includes seven texts discussing topics relevant to teacher initial and in-service education, as well as the functioning of foreign language instructors in educational systems. The eight contributions included in Part II, "Focus on the Learner," explore learner-internal and learner-external factors that affect the effectiveness of the language learning process. The exploration of key contemporary topics and the wide range of methodologies applied make this book of high relevance to Second Language Acquisition scholars, teacher educators, teachers, and language education policy makers.

The definition of education and learning has been changing in recent years, as the field experienced, and is still experiencing, many changes. One of those changes is a rise in adult learners in higher education. In order to cope with this particular change and set their classrooms up for success, it is vital for educators to be aware of and fluent in adult instructional strategies. "Outcome-Based Strategies for Adult Learning" provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of nontraditional education and applications within curriculum development and instructional design. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as experiential learning, instructional design, and formative assessment, this book is ideally designed for educators, academicians, educational professionals, researchers, and upper-level students seeking current research on how instructional strategies can be tied to assessment. This book contains the following chapters: (1) Making Instruction Work for Adult Learners (Mitra Fallahi); (2) Teaching the Adult Learner: Building Trust and Motivation (Mette L. Baran); (3) Arts Integration Techniques in the Adult Learning Environment (Eric J. Dimmitt); (4) Putting Paint to Canvas: Artful Teaching Strategies for Teachers of Adult Learners (Clavon Byrd and Sean T. Lansing); (5) Effective Teaching Strategies to Connect With the Adult Learners' Worldview (Janice E. Jones, Mette L. Baran, and Julie Ann Steuber); (6) Theories and Practice of Humor for Adult Instruction (Peter M. Jonas); (7) Effective Online Learning for Adults: Ragan's Principles Applied (Darnell J. Bradley); (8) Professional Learning Communities and Adult Learning and Teaching: Best Practices in Building a Community of Learners (Eric J. Dimmitt); (9) Application of Digital Technologies, Multimedia, and Brain-Based Strategies: Nurturing Adult Education and Lifelong Learning (Meei Tyng Chai, Aamir Saeed Malik, Mohamad Naufal Mohamad Saad, and Mohammad Abdul Rahman); (10) Adult Learners: Standards for Teacher Effectiveness and Conditions for Optimal Learning (Freda R. Russell); (11) Assessment of Learning in Higher Education (Mitra Fallahi); and (12) Creating Connections: Competency-Based Degree Programs and Undergraduate Capstone Courses for Adult Learners (Carolyn N. Stevenson).

The collection of selected papers of Joseph T. Impellitteri reprints in full, or excerpts from, 46 unpublished position and conference papers, research and program proposals, and project reports, and from 20 published articles, chapters from edited collections, bulletins and special studies which Impellitteri authored or co-authored. The papers are presented chronologically for the years 1963 to 1972. The papers deal generally with the following subjects: vocational development, occupational guidance (especially that which is computer assisted), occupational competency assessments, instructional media, self-concepts of vocational students, graduate vocational education at Pennsylvania State University, vocational education research, and professional teacher education. (JR)

Imagine an evening sky just before sunset as one gazes into the dark blue sky whilst lying in a country field surrounded by bird song, there often appears high in the sky wispy thin fibrous clouds. These innocuous-looking clouds are called cirrus. A non-specialist might be forgiven for thinking that such insubstantial-looking clouds are unimportant to the climate system. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth, as this chapter will demonstrate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freeze storage of human embryonic stem (hES) cells has not proven effective using the methods employed for mouse ES (mES) cells, while rhesus ES (rhES) cells are only modestly effectively frozen using common mES cell methods. Because human and rhES cells are passaged and frozen in clusters that approximate the size of embryos, we employed a mammalian embryo freezing method to cryopreserve primate ES cells. This protocol involves freezing in a dimethylsulfoxide cryoprotectant using straws. An ice crystal seed is induced at −10°C followed by controlled cooling at −1°C per minute down to −33°C with a plunge from there directly into liquid nitrogen (LN2) at −196°C. Thaw is effected rapidly by moving the frozen cells directly from LN2 into a water bath and placing directly into culture medium without step-wise cryoprotectant removal. Using this protocol, we have increased the survival of human ES cells from ≤ 1 to ~ 80% and rhES cells from ~ 30 to ≥ 90%. Thus, this protocol describes a technically simple but effective means of long-term storage of primate ES cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to explore user behaviors in instructional environments combining multimodal presentation of information. Cognitive load theory and dual coding theory were taken as the theoretical perspectives for the analyses. For this purpose, user behaviors were analyzed by recording participants' eye movements while they were using an instructional material with synchronized video and PowerPoint slides. 15 participants' eye fixation counts and durations for specific parts of the material were collected. Findings of the study revealed that the participants used the slide and video presentations in a complementary way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose of the study is to investigate how adults solve tangram based geometry problems on computer screen.Two problems with different difficulty levels were presented to 20 participants. The participants tried to solve problems by placing seven geometric objects into correct locations. In order to analyze the process, the participants and their eye movements were recorded by an Tobii Eye Tracking device while solving the problems. The results showed that the participants employed different strategies while solving problems with different difficulty levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the problem of approximately integrating a Lipschitz function f (with a known Lipschitz constant) over an interval. The goal is to achieve an error of at most ε using as few samples of f as possible. We use the adaptive framework: on all problem instances an adaptive algorithm should perform almost as well as the best possible algorithm tuned for the particular problem instance. We distinguish between and , the performances of the best possible deterministic and randomized algorithms, respectively. We give a deterministic algorithm that uses samples and show that an asymptotically better algorithm is impossible. However, any deterministic algorithm requires samples on some problem instance. By combining a deterministic adaptive algorithm and Monte Carlo sampling with variance reduction, we give an algorithm that uses at most samples. We also show that any algorithm requires samples in expectation on some problem instance (f,ε), which proves that our algorithm is optimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spinodal instability in nuclear matter and finite nuclei is investigated. This instability occurs in the low-density region of the phase diagram. The thermodynamical and dynamical analysis is based on Landau theory of Fermi liquids. It is shown that asymmetric nuclear matter can be characterized by a unique spinodal region, defined by the instability against isoscalar-like fluctuation, as in symmetric nuclear matter. Everywhere in this density region the system is stable against isovector-like fluctuations related to the species separation tendency. Nevertheless, this instability in asymmetric nuclear matter induces isospin distillation leading to a more symmetric liquid phase and a more neutron-rich gas phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We obtain subquadratic algorithms for 3SUM on integers and rationals in several models. On a standard word RAM with w-bit words, we obtain a running time of . In the circuit RAM with one nonstandard AC0 operation, we obtain . In external memory, we achieve O(n2 / (MB)), even under the standard assumption of data indivisibility. Cache-obliviously, we obtain a running time of . In all cases, our speedup is almost quadratic in the parallelism the model can afford, which may be the best possible. Our algorithms are Las Vegas randomized; time bounds hold in expectation, and in most cases, with high probability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the poem "Lent's Contemplation," by Józef Baran. First Line: nothing is less difficult; Last Line: that there is nothing more simple.

This article provides information on the rotary system illustrated in the novel War and Peace, by Lev Tolstoi. A critic has noted that there are two repetitive elements in War and Peace pertaining to rotation. One is connected with an ironical remark about a Soirée of Anna Scherer. As she observes some flagging of excitement in the conversation of her guests, she approaches the given circle and sets the conversational machine in steady, proper and regular motion. An instance of the second is the lathe in old Prince Bolkonskii's workshop, whose wheel he is rotating every time his daughter enters the room.

This section presents endnotes on the book Jakobsonian Poetics and Slavic Narrative, by Krystyna Pomorska.

This article features Russian thinker Roman Jakobson and his friends and collaborators in the field. Jakobson's discoveries in the domain of linguistics returned to art as a creative impulse, and his entire spiritual orientation must be viewed as both a result and a corrective of avant-garde art and avant-garde science. As early as 1911-12 Jakobson became friends with Adol'f Mil'man, a landscape painter of the Derain style. It was Mil'man who brought Jakobson to see the collection belonging to Shchukin, one of the Moscow millionaires at the beginning of the century who were enthusiasts of French avant-garde painting. In 1913, Jakobson became personally acquainted with the painters Mikhail Larionov and Natal'ia Goncharova. He later used to meet with the couple in Paris, France.

This section provides information on the correspondence of scholar Nikolai Trubetzkoy with Russian thinker Roman Jakobson. Trubetzkoy's eighteen-year-long correspondence with Jakobson represents a truly remarkable epistolary legacy. The correspondence began soon after Trubetzkoy moved from Constantinople to Sofia in the summer of 1920. His first letter is an answer to a letter from Jakobson, who immediately upon arriving in Prague in July had inquired as to his whereabouts and written to him in Sofia. Because Trubetzkoy and Jakobson shared each new idea with each other so systematically, Letters and Notes, written by Trubetzkoy, is a valuable monograph on the process by which their collaboration developed into organization of the new science on a European scale.

This article focuses on published works about Russian thinker Roman Osipovich Jakobson. Jakobson's negative attitude toward memoirs was based on several key premises. The element obviously unacceptable to Jakobson was the tense of the genre: memoirs belong to the past tense; they push one's life into the past, thus putting an end to one's biography and consequently, to one's life. Jakobson presented his life exclusively in terms of his work. Thus he did not follow the traditional dichotomy between facts of life and creativity. This was no doubt caused by the author's particular attitude to life and by his temperament. C. Lévi-Strauss, put it succinctly in the Tribute to Roman Jakobson: "What struck those who approached Roman Jakobson was the extraordinary kinship between the man and his work.

This article examines the influence of Polish culture on the linguistics studies conducted by Russian thinker Roman Osipovich Jakobson. Special ties connected Roman Jakobson with Polish linguistics. Since his university years this particular linguistic tradition shaped his own ideas because his teacher, L. V. Shcherba, was a pupil of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay. Jakobson's phonological theory and his general approach to language owe much to the young Baudouin, especially of the Kazan' period. The year 1958 became a turning point in Jakobson's revaluation of Polish linguistics from a historical perspective. A paper he presented that year at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw gave the impulse to his further studies on the Polish contribution to the world science of language.

This article analyzes the problems of parallelism in the poetry of Russian writer Nikolay Vasilevich Gogol. Gogol's prose is populated by some very peculiar couples. The peculiarities of the action are due to the fact that the two Ivans are absurdly identical; in fact, they may be viewed as two hypostases of the same idea of absurdity and stupidity. The two heroes are doubles, and they are connected by all three relations: similarity, symbiosis and struggle; the three relations overlap. Gogol presents these relations in the form of a parody of parallelism appropriated from the folkloric archetype.

This article examines parallelism in Ukrainian erotic folk songs. Basic parallelism in folklore represents a fixed inner symbolic pattern. Although not perceived by the general participant, this pattern is nevertheless very old and universal in the Slavic folk heritage. Due to the symbolic nucleus of the parallelism, all elements acquire a figurative tinge; in other words, they become polysemantic. The special attraction of Ukrainian folklore was responsible for the creation of a Ukrainian school in Polish romanticism that included poets such as Bohdan Zaleski, and Antoni Malczewski.

This article discusses the semiotic implications of the poetry of Alexander Pushkin. Pushkin's use of rhymes in the poem "Byl i ia sredi donstov..." is so unusual and so encoded that one can decode it only with a biographical key. The use of grammatical gender adds a special importance to the rhymes and to their capacity for carrying the theme of the poem. All these factors make the rhymes so striking that they become estranged. Usually Pushkin achieves the effect of estrangement by a purely metalinguistic operation, namely, by speaking about the rhymes.

This article analyzes Tat'iana's letter in the poem Eugene Onegin. Onegin witnesses and even translates genuine documents, and thus he is himself one of the characters, even if he does not participate directly in events on the story line. Tat'iana's letter not only marks a new dramatic relationship between Tat'iana and Onegin that is vital to both story line and plot, but it also reveals the heroine's true and complex essence and defines the poet's various functions with respect to her. Tat'iana's letter contains stylistic manifestations of components, literariness and sincere, original touching nonsense, as the poet calls it.

This article focuses on avant-garde movements in Russian art and literature as it relates to the poetry of Vladimir Maiakovskii. The Russian avant-garde struggled essentially with the same problems that Aleksandr Blok lamented and Lev Tolstoi attacked. These creators of visual and verbal art proposed a radical solution to the relation of art and reality: they considered art larger than life. In their view, the role art had been playing proved that it transcends the phenomenal world. Maiakovskii's first long poem, A Cloud in Trousers, contains important passages expressing the difficulties of finding proper words or actually creating them. Maiakovskii further urged his fellow poets not to simplify their task by choosing words from the existing language of the streets.

This article focuses on the novel Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak. Doctor Zhivago is a historiosophic and a symbolic novel as well. For such a genre it was necessary to find new compositional principles. The structure of Pasternak's earlier prose, in which the plot plays an insignificant role or, more often is almost completely muffled, could not be applied. The capacity of the novel, or simply its length, forced Pasternak to introduce more qualitative shifts besides those already mentioned. Doctor Zhivago ends with two elements: the epilogue and the collection of poems ascribed to the main hero. Epilogues belong to the tradition of the big epic novel, but using a group of poems as the last chapter of the book is unique in the history of the epic genre.

This article examines the poems in the book Second Birth describing the fate of the artist. There are interesting similarities between the poem Summer and the poem about classical composer Johannes Brahms in the book. The first similarity is the rhythmical patter, amphibrachic tetrameter. On the thematic level there is also the motif of reminiscences. Moreover, the very nature of the reminiscences is the same. But the most interesting are the last three stanzas of Summer, in which Plato's Symposium and Aleksandr Pushkin's A Feast During the Plague. What unifies both works is not only the title, but their shared theme of love.

This article examines the cycle of poems in the book Second Birth devoted to the problem of art and to the fate of the artist, particularly the pieces describing the music of Chopin. Chopin's ballad is first presented as the flight of an eagle and compared to a story. The next simile, parallel to the first, brings a modification of the word story. The parable tells about heroic daring, about the creative innovator's sacrifice and personal tragedy. Such is the content of Chopin's music, and such also is its fate. The second poem about Chopin continues the same theme and repeats some of the symbols in a new variant. Unlike the first poem, which is a ballad containing only five stanzas, the second has a touch of the epic. The poem reveals the symbolic content of the artist's biography.

This article provides information on the depiction of futurism in the works of author Boris Pasternak. While retaining his originality, Pasternak was yet within the orbit of futurism, and some measure of its inspiration was as necessary for him as it was for many others close to it. Pasternak believed in another order of life's facts, events and phenomena: parallels, co-positions, pure contiguity in time and space, where things can be swung like sand in an hourglass. The events of our lives are comparable to the pure forms of the universe, which Pasternak saw as obscure agglomerations without name.

This article profiles author and philosopher Lev Tolstoi. Tolstoi was a marked example of the type of person who is profoundly conscious of his life. This awareness was manifested in several aspects of his activity. The very pattern of his life path is the simplest and most palpable proof of his self-awareness. Tolstoi attempted to carefully form his life path, yet he was never fully satisfied with any of the roles he imposed on himself. The prominent position of Tolstoi's own biography shows, in purely statistical terms, his sensitivity to his own self. In his fiction of the entire period before the novel War and Peace, he plays in his stories the simultaneous role of protagonist and writer.

This article analyzes the views of author and philosopher Lev Tolstoi on the artificial and the natural and the role of semiosis in gaining knowledge. In his attempt to delimit the artificial and the natural, the mediated and the intuitive codes of communication, Tolstoi faced the same difficulties that have beset all philosophers who have asked fundamental question about the role of semiosis in the acquisition of knowledge. Two basic issues have been raised: Is all our knowledge mediated by signs? And what is the relation between the sign and the thing?

This article features twentieth-century critic Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his analyses of the crisis of twentieth-century civilization. Like many other critics, Solzhenistyn points the two world wars, systems of tyranny, and systems of regimentation as leading ultimately to the alienation and destruction of man. Any mechanical object is evil for Solzhenitsyn, even if its actual role is neutral. In Solzhenitsyn's lower depths, natural man is recreated. He has to build himself anew. Such is the return to nature in the twentieth century.

This article compares the books War and Peace, by Lev Tolstoi, and Nights and Days, by Maria Dabrowska. On the surface, Tolstoi's great historical and historiosophic epic and Dabrowska's family novel have nothing in common. Dabrowska's family novel revolves around matters that are strictly private and emphatically minor. In War and Peace the problem is presented differently because of the different range and context of this work. In both works the conception of life and history is correlated with a specific type of protagonist, a figure with a correct attitude toward life. Obviously, in the case of Dabrowska this role is played by Bogumil Niechcic, while in Tolstoi Pierre Bezukhov and Platon Karataev bear the ideal.

This article focuses on the segmentation of narrative prose as examined in the books A Journey to Arzrum, Safe Conduct, and Nights and Days, by Maria Dabrowska. All three works have to do with a linguistic model of reality and, consequently, with two structural axes: the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic. Dabrowska's novel is a classic example of narrative prose: proversa. Its fundamental principle is forward movement, which is needed to create the illusion of movement in time. It is no coincidence that in Nights and Days, almost no one reminisces or tells about their past. The novel therefore lacks reverse movement in time.

This article examines continuity and simultaneity in the structural components of prose in reference to Jakobsonian poetics. Jakobson established that both prose and poetry, as the fundamental forms of verbal art, depend on two basic axes at work in every type of discourse: the axis of selection and the axis of combination. These two axes are related, respectively, to the principles of similarity and contiguity. In prose the reverse process is at work: successivity prevails over simultaneity. The force of simultaneity, of repetitive, equivalent elements, coexists in it. The equivalent elements, however, are simply distributed differently than in poetry.

This section features author and teacher Krystyna Pomorska and her literary analyses, particularly Jakobsonian Poetics and Slavic Narrative. There are several factors that distinguished Pomorska as a teacher of literature. She had a sense: that the literary work has a special status, that it is an object different from others and requires and approach all its own; that this approach should be rigorous; that such a study of literature is an intellectually exciting enterprise, among others. Pomorska displays her ability to isolate a unifying principle within a multiplicity of facts, and alternatively, to apply a fundamental concept as an organizing device.

This section presents information on the book Jakobsonian Poetics and Slavic Narrative, by Krystyna Pomorska. This volume presents twenty studies by the late Krystyna Pomorska on the problems of poetics, on the relationship between biography and personal myth, on folklore and literature, and on the variegated intellectual legacy of Roman Jakobson and, by extension, of Russian-Czech structuralism in its various stages of development. Four articles that appear in this volume have been translated into English for the first time. Readers familiar with Krystyne Pomorska's writings will note one significant omission: the volume does not include any portion of her monograph Russian Formalist Theory and Its Poetic Ambiance.

A systematic study of the phase behavior of chlorinated hydrocarbons with various surfactant species in aqueous solution is discussed. Chlorinated hydrocarbons are more polar and better solvents than hydrocarbons and therefore require more hydrophilic surfactants in order to exhibit classical Winsor type phase behavior. These chlorocarbons and surfactants still obey the mathematical relationships for mixing that we previously established for hydrocarbons. Mass-transport calculations show that surfactants should drastically decrease the time required to clean up toxic spills involving chlorocarbons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of charge-transfer and rydberg (fn−1d) states on the luminescence of lanthanides and actinides (more specifically hexavalent uranium) is demonstrated. Optical transitions between the ground state and these excited states, and their dependence on electron configuration and crystallographic surroundings of the complex involved, are discussed first. The influence of charge-transfer and fn−1d states on emission spectra is dealt with. It is shown that the characteristics of emission spectra are often very sensitive to the energetic position of these states. Even more drastic is their influence on the temperature quenching of these emissions. Especially the case of the Eu3+ ion in oxysulfides is reviewed extensively. Direct feeding of the 5D levels of Eu3+ by charge-transfer states occurs, but the reverse process is also possible. The spectral position of transitons to charge-transfer and fn−1d states can influence energy transfer probabilities. Metal ion-metal ion charge transfer states are also of great importance in this field. Finally some luminescence properties of hexavalent uranium are discussed. It is shown that often this emission is due to an octahedral UO66− group and not to the well-known uranyl (UO22+) group. Charge-transfer states involving 5/ and possibly 6d levels determine the dependence of the emission characteristics on the host lattice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to study the effect of the tensile plastic deformation on the microstructure parameters of the 15Kh13MF and 25Kh1M1F steels, and to establish the relationship between the material hardness, microhardness and the dislocation density and plastic strain. The above steels are used for manufacturing bimetallic rolls of billet continuous casting machines [1]. Specimens (5x6x30 mm) were cut out from a bimetallic roll band along the axial direction and subjected to uniaxial tension loading at a temperature of +6000 corresponding to the temperature of the roll surface at the area of contact with the slab billet. Tests were performed on a servo-hydraulic machine of the type STM-100 equipped with an IBM computer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the poem "Worlds," by Józef Baran. First Line: it's possible to be the discoverer; Last Line: wandering around the world.

The article presents the poem "Ballad on the Day of the Dead," Józef Baran. First Line: more often I meet my dead; Last Line: red-handed in the blink of an eye.

The article presents the poem "Mother," by Józef Baran. First Line: she held his hand in her warm palm; Last Line: holding his mother's hand.

The article presents the poem "Contemporary Poetry," by Józef Baran. First Line: they disputed about millions; Last Line: triumphed in their words.