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Analyzing the sentiments of people from social media content through text, speech, and images is becoming vital in a variety of applications. Many existing research studies on sentiment analysis rely on textual data, and similar to the sharing of text, users of social media share more photographs and videos. Compared to text, images are said to exhibit the sentiments in a much better way. So, there is an urge to build a sentiment analysis model based on images from social media. In our work, we employed different transfer learning models, including the VGG-19, ResNet50V2, and DenseNet-121 models, to perform sentiment analysis based on images. They were fine-tuned by freezing and unfreezing some of the layers, and their performance was boosted by applying regularization techniques. We used the Twitter-based images available in the Crowdflower dataset, which contains URLs of images with their sentiment polarities. Our work also presents a comparative analysis of these pre-trained models in the prediction of image sentiments on our dataset. The accuracies of our fine-tuned transfer learning models involving VGG-19, ResNet50V2, and DenseNet-121 are 0.73, 0.75, and 0.89, respectively. When compared to previous attempts at visual sentiment analysis, which used a variety of machine and deep learning techniques, our model had an improved accuracy by about 5% to 10%. According to the findings, the fine-tuned DenseNet-121 model outperformed the VGG-19 and ResNet50V2 models in image sentiment prediction.

Education in Western democratic societies is broadly focused on combining the goals of providing theoretical and practical knowledge with acquiring and practicing the skills of citizenship. In this context, teaching history is more than a linear narration of events, and includes themes and stories reflecting individuals and movements that fought for and helped bring social justice and political equality to their respective countries. In contrast, societies exiting the totalitarian Soviet system perceive education as liberated from government political and ideological interference where teaching history had been made to serve the interests of the party. This freedom, however, is itself problematic: how to teach the past and, particularly, the immediate past. Teaching controversial aspects of a society's history can pose difficult questions even in democratic settings. Many Americans still feel uncomfortable discussing the history of slavery or the treatment of Native Americans. However, in Eastern Europe the debate of the recent communist past raises even more delicate dilemmas since many of the victims and perpetrators are alive and, in the case of the latter, many continue to be influential. The case of teaching history in post-communist Romania represents an illustration of an ongoing discussion of confronting the past and building democracy in which educators introduce a pedagogy of truth and justice in the classroom. This essay describes the Sighet Memorial School (Sighet, Romania), which became a nontraditional classroom setting that provided teenagers between 14 and 18 years old with a unique opportunity to learn about Romania under communism. The format of the school is organized through conferences, roundtables, workshops, documentaries, and music concerts. Since its aim is more ambitious than re-creating a local/national memory of communism, but also to engage in a global dialogue, the pool of guest lecturers transcends national boundaries. (Contains 1 figure.)

From the Soviet Bloc to the European Union: The Economic and Social Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, by Ivan T. Berend. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2009. xv, 299 [...]

Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi's Spy-Tech World, by Kristie Macrakis. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008. xv, 370 pp. $28.00 US (cloth). Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin [...]

Due to the fact that the abstract mathematical notions are often hard to grasp by students, without linking them to a specific physical representation or correlate them with regular facts, our team came up with the idea to create and implement a set of interactive teaching tool packages (ITTPs) to help them overcome such issues. The ITTPs consist of theoretical modules and applications in the framework of a Hungarian - Romanian cross-border project, developed with the aid of existing open source software and technologies. The focus of the Romanian team was on basic elements of linear algebra and analytic geometry, showcased using an auto-stereoscopic display for the purpose of image visualization. This paper presents an overview of similar technologies and the applications developed for representing pseudo-holographic images of geometric objects, namely vectors, straight lines, planes and conics. One of the developed packages was written using web technologies in order to make the applications available on mobile devices, as well as to eliminate the need to install any additional software. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this article is to assess the relationship between transitional justice and democratization in post-communist Eastern Europe since the fall of communism in 1989. The analysis is focused on the role of lustration and the opening of communist secret police files in encouraging accountability and promoting the rule of law. An overview of these developments in the countries of the region -- including Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia -- emphasizes the different approaches undertaken in dealing with the abuses and crimes committed by previous non-democratic governments. These differences are examined in relationship to three interrelated variables: (1) the exit mode from communism; (2) the nature of the communist regime; and (3) the politics of the present. The second part of the article provides an extensive analysis of the Romanian case, whose specificity lies in its violent and abrupt exit from communism. The unfinished reckoning with the past in Romania leads us to two main conclusions. First, the nature of communist elites and the opposition to them are of equal importance in understanding how the politics of the present shapes the way in which the past is addressed. Second, in the absence of any real possible reconciliation through public exposure -- at least symbolically -- of those involved in repression, delayed transitional justice is ineffective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]