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Building upon a famous result due to Ajtai, we propose a sequence of lattice bases with growing dimension, which can be expected to be hard instances of the shortest vector problem (SVP) and which can therefore be used to benchmark lattice reduction algorithms. The SVP is the basis of security for potentially post-quantum cryptosystems. We use our sequence of lattice bases to create a challenge, which may be helpful in determining appropriate parameters for these schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 13 of the book "Nursing Education: Foundations for Practice Excellence" is presented. It offers information on the strategies that can be applied in management of client care setting. It notes that in order to create an environment that enhances learning and promotes professional and personal development of nursing students, instructors can use different teaching strategies like enhanced discussions, participating in grand rounds and use of clinical preceptors. Expressive and reflective journaling are discussed.

This chapter examines Vygotsky's method of double stimulation as a basis for formative interventions in the workplace. I argue that double stimulation is radically different from such intervention approaches as the design experiments currently discussed in educational research. Double stimulation is, above all, aimed at eliciting new, expansive forms of agency in subjects. In other words, double stimulation is focused on making subjects masters of their own lives. First, I will present Vygotsky's double stimulation as a theoretical and methodological idea. I will then examine recent notions of “design experiments” and point out some serious limitations in these experiments. Second, I will introduce the Change Laboratory method developed in the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research and used for ten years in formative interventions in workplaces. Third, I will discuss this method as an application and expansion of double stimulation. Fourth, I will demonstrate the practical implementation of Change Laboratory with an example from a project carried out in Finnish post offices. Fifth, I will conclude the chapter with a discussion of some methodological and theoretical implications of the Change Laboratory method for further development of Vygotskian research, especially as it is applied in the context of the workplace and organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Was the issue of the development and education of children with special needs chosen by Vygotsky, or was it a chance encounter forced by circumstances? We may never be able to find a definitive answer to this question. Vygotsky left no diary, and the testimony of his colleagues does not shed much light on this issue. What is known with certainty is that young Vygotsky's original interests lay in the field of literature and humanities and apparently remained so following his graduation from Moscow University in 1917. The unmerciful reality of everyday life in his hometown of Gomel during the civil war (1918-1922), however, forced everyone - including Vygotsky - to seek any occupation that would make mere survival possible. For Vygotsky, a teacher's job, first at school and then at the Teacher Training College, was such an opportunity. It is apparently under these rather extreme circumstances that Vygotsky encountered the problem of children with special needs for the first time. As the head of the psychological laboratory at the Gomel Teacher Training College, Vygotsky was responsible both for teaching students the techniques of psychological evaluation and actually supervising these evaluations in schools (Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991; Vygodskaya & Lifanova, 1996, 1999). This link to the issue of special needs was further strengthened after Vygotsky's move to Moscow in 1924. As with his previous experiences in Gomel, we cannot be sure whether it was Vygotsky's growing interest in special-needs children or the social circumstances that led to his affiliation with the Section of Abnormal Children in the Peoples Education Commissariat of Education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two of Vygotsky's (1997) central theoretical points are that cultural- historically developed tools mediate the child's relation to the world and that the competence to handle such tools is acquired in social settings through guidance from others. His theory of concept formation for preschoolers, schoolchildren, and adolescents explains how the practice of institutional activities influences children's concept formation (Vygotsky, 1987, 1998a). Small children participate in the everyday activities at home; schoolchildren meet the academic world in school, which he points out as a necessity for schoolchildren's development of scientific concepts; and adolescents get acquainted with the activities in work life, a necessity for their development of dialectical concepts. Vygotsky describes how very young children appropriate concepts of tools and objects through interaction with their caregivers and, as an example, he exemplifies this with how a child learns to use a spoon in interaction with his caregivers (Kravtsov & Berezlizhkaya, 1999). In his theory, Vygotsky characterizes small children's and preschool children's concepts as everyday concepts developed spontaneously in collaboration with others through everyday activities. He contrasts these concepts to schoolchildren's concepts, which he characterizes as scientifically developed through systematic school instruction. Although Vygotsky describes the concept learning of preschool children as inscribed in the social practice of everyday activities, what he primarily draws on when describing preschool children's concept formation is an experiment with the double-stimulation method (Vygotsky, 1987 p. 130ff). In this experiment, children's task is to sort blocks that vary in form, size, and color, gradually finding the sorting principle because a meaningless label is attached to the bottom of each block that is turned over each time the child has chosen one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vygotsky's most popular book in the English-speaking world, Thought and Language, was first published in English in 1962. (It was originally published in Russian in 1934.) When retitled Thinking and Speech in 1987, it captured a more active notion of these interrelated processes. They are seen as activities rather than entities and the book explores the developmentally changing relationship between intellectual and verbal processes. Vygotsky viewed speaking and thinking as dynamically related and approached their connection as “The complex movement from the first vague emergence of the thought to its completion in a verbal formulation. . . . Thought is not expressed but completed in the word. . . . Any thought has movement. It unfolds. . . . This flow of thought is realized as an internal movement through several planes. As a transition from thought to word and from word to thought.” (Vygotsky, 1987, pp. 249-250) Thinking and Speech presents important distinctions between communicative language and language used for conceptual representation. By addressing such broad themes, Vygotsky's work was grounded in philosophical, psychological, and linguistic traditions that have influenced Western students of language. Within these disciplines, the relationship between thinking and speech was forged, and it is still of great concern to contemporary thinkers. Part of what is so interesting about revisiting this relationship is that it emerges repeatedly across disciplines and informs every aspect of the human sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity is a key concept in many different fields including psychology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and cultural studies. At the intersection of these fields, sociocultural research - a recent name for the interdisciplinary approach inspired by the cultural historical work of L. S. Vygotsky and others - is developing its own integrated perspective on identity. In his brief life, Vygotsky wrote down only rudimentary ideas about personality or self. Still, those he did offer, when combined with his general notions of semiotic mediation and higher-order psychological functions, formulate an important nascent understanding of identity formation and its significance for processes of social and cultural change. This chapter examines developments in relevant research and theory that have appeared, for the most part, since William Penuel and James Wertsch's key 1995 article. By adopting an expanded definition of identity, we include a wide range of research, from case studies of individual identity development to analyses of the centrality of identities in mediating response to state projects and to social movements. Concepts of identity are often (although not in Penuel and Wertsch) promiscuously mingled, producing a good bit of confusion and ambiguity. Because we concentrate on the approach to identity associated with George Herbert Mead, rather than following Penuel and Wertsch's focus on Erik Erikson's better-known concept, our first task is to clarify the differences between these two major conceptualizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National Digital Library of China Project is the biggest digital library system in China. The article presents the background of NDLCP and describes the architecture of the system. The article also presents the big challenge in NDLCP and the solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seeing Africa whole In 1873 Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days celebrated the spectacular conquest of distance, especially since about 1860, by the adaptation of the steam-engine to trans-continental and trans-oceanic transport. To the suggestion that the world was still ‘assez vaste’, Verne's hero retorted laconically: ‘Il l'était autrefois’ (‘It used to be’). The terrestrial globe had indeed suddenly contracted; and its finite dimensions had now become of practical, and not merely of ‘philosophical’, interest to the industrialised societies of the West. The planetary stock of markets and resources was evidently none too large; it seemed already possible in principle to foresee the day when its saturation and exhaustion might impose an absolute limit upon the growth of industrial economies. This ultimate catastrophe seemed indeed to be foreshadowed by the onset in the early 1870s of the so-called ‘Great Depression’, essentially the effect of the failure of domestic and foreign demand to keep pace with the productive capacity of increasingly mechanised industries. Existing markets seemed to be satiated. Prices, profits and interest-rates fell, apparently inexorably, until the mid-1890s. The overall effect was a sharp retardation in the growth-rate of the industrial economies after some twenty-five years of unprecedented acceleration, and, for some of these economies, an especially severe recession between 1878 and 1884. Moreover, the existing overseas outlets for European capital now no longer seemed sufficiently safe or remunerative. British capital export between 1875 and 1879 was negligible by comparison with the previous five-year period; and from 1880 to 1904 the average annual export of British capital was little more than half that of the period 1870–4. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]