Notes from the Periphery: History and Methods

A comparative comprehensive analysis of the socio-pedagogical problem field of modernization of the educational system of Ukraine and the EU in the context of administrative reform and taking into account economic needs and the establishment of universal democratic values has been conducted. A comparative pedagogical study of the theoretical, organizational, methodological and regulatory principles of reforming the educational system of Ukraine, which is currently acquiring national features and integrated into the world educational space, has been carried out. Conceptual principles of reforming the educational system of Ukraine as a basis for improving the quality of life of citizens from the standpoint of an innovative educational project in the context and professional psychological and pedagogical aspects of training in the field of educational policy have been theoretically substantiated. The provision is that education, like other institutions of public life, requires operational and strategic management actions, aimed at its modernization and renewal. A conceptual integral dynamic model of reforming educational policy in Ukraine with substantiation of methodological approaches and theoretical positions has been developed on the basis of comparative pedagogical research. A necessity of expansion and qualitative improvement of the network of preschool educational institutions has been proved. There are trends that Ukrainian secondary education will eventually become on a par with the world standards of secondary school. A need to create and coordinate a strong system of out-of-school education in Ukraine has been justified, as the mass unemployment of children and youth in out-of-school time entails huge negative consequences. Peculiarities of reforming the system of training of working professions and vocational education in Ukraine have been specified. A strategic issue is the state policy on teacher training. Ukrainian origins of the phenomenon of pedagogical skill as a fundamental basis of the theory and practice of educational policy to improve the quality of teaching and learning in EU countries have been revealed. A necessity of development of a target program of professional and pedagogical selection and preparation of experts in the field of educational policy for Ukraine and an algorithm of estimation of its efficiency on the basis of the comparative analysis has been proved. The content of the concept of "educational policy" has been clarified, knowledge of the regulatory framework for reforming educational policy in the EU has been deepened.

Specific principles of organization of cultural and educational space of university were chosen and characterized in this article with the theoretical and methodological positions. Cultural conformity, environmentalism, homeostasis and anthropologies are investigated in the field of modern integrative scientific and pedagogical approach.

This essay examines the debate between the mainstream and critical scholars on new communication technologies and Third World development. It concludes that these perspectives, with contrasting epistemological, theoretical, and methodological positions, are incompatible. The writer suggests the construction of a theoretical model of new communica tion technologies and development based on the critical perspective.

А high theoretical and methodological level of bibliography and the validity of its object, subject and research methods were ascertained. The main social functions of bibliographic information were determined — namely search, communicative and evaluative. It was indicated that they are projections of the philosophical categories of the General, the Special, and the Individual onto the bibliography. Differences in the definition of the term "bibliometry" by modern specialists, which indicates the need to improve the scientific level of bibliometric studies, were examined. It was proposed to study the co-evolution of bibliography and bibliometry in the aspect of involving the theoretical base of bibliography in determining the social functions of bibliometry. It was found that these are the functions of scientific declaration, structural analysis and scientometric function. In bibliometry, their analogs are search, communication, and evaluation functions, respectively. It was noted that the triad of social functions of bibliometric information should be considered both from theoretical and methodological positions, and in the applied aspect. Their scientific value is undoubted, since a certain set of functions increases the role and status of bibliometry in the system of social communications. The bibliometric profiles of researchers created and accumulated in the international scientometric platforms Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science are tools for the practical use of the public functions of bibliometric information for the needs of science and education. It was concluded that it is advisable to implement a national project to consolidate bibliometric information from the aforementioned scientometric platforms on the basis of the information-analytical system "ibliometrics of Ukrainian Science" created in the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to encourage a critical dialogue within the realm of Journal of Islamic Marketing. It invites marketing scholars and practitioners working on various topics related to Islam and Muslim societies to adopt fresh theoretical and methodological positions that would enhance the understanding of multiple marketing and market dynamics in Muslim societies.Design/methodology/approachThe author uses a critical approach.FindingsThe author suggests that the advancement of knowledge in the area of Islamic marketing requires reflexivity and self‐critique.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper highlights the constructive value of critical approach to the development of marketing theory and practice.Originality/valueThis paper reflects the author's personal viewpoint on the production of knowledge and improving practice in the realm of Islamic marketing.

The paper shows that the discourse is inherent, performing several related functions that are subject to discrimination and study. The research’s aim is to study discourse and text, which are social practices, when language is used to create and maintain power relations and, as a result, is a means of controlling and handling society. A matter of determine the theoretical and methodological options for studying a language in the controlling process is to clarify the initial properties of its genesis, features of functioning, everything that makes the language as a tool of power relations. The authors consider the process of control and society manipulating and implementing feedback as the most important function of the language, from theoretical and methodological positions and the addendum to the legislation of several foreign countries.

This article is devoted to the effectiveness of administrative acts of customs authorities, which are investigated in the context of general theoretical and methodological positions on efficiency in law as a whole. Taking into account the specifics of the functionality and powers of the customs authorities, the author formulates the key parameters of the effectiveness of the relevant administrative acts and their conditioning on the implementation of public declarations of the goals and objectives of the Federal Customs Service of Russia, arising from the acts of the President of the Russian Federation on the national goals and objectives of development and acts of departmental strategic planning, compliance and security with domestic and supranational agreements, participation in the development and coordination of acts on customs regulation issues.

Reviewed by: Mental Disorders in Ancient Philosophy by Marke Ahonen Chiara Thumiger Marke Ahonen. Mental Disorders in Ancient Philosophy. Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, 13. Heidelberg: Springer, 2014. Pp. xi, 265. $129.00. ISBN 978–3–319–03430–0. This book tackles the topic of mental disorder and its representations, a fundamental one in cultural studies, by clearly delimiting its territory to a more technical, and so far a less explored, area: how ancient philosophers identified and interpreted mental disorder, its causes, cures, and status in human moral and spiritual life. Ahonen’s material ranges from Plato to the late antique, and follows a chronological order. Ahonen’s dedicated focus on philosophy is indeed missing from scholarship on mental pathology in the ancient world, at least in monographic form, with Jackie Pigeaud’s important La maladie de l’âme. Étude sur la relation de l’âme et du corps dans la tradition médico-philosophique antique (Paris 1981) being the nearest predecessor to the present work. This book therefore falls in an area in which comprehensive discussions are much needed. Ahonen’s program is both more systematic and inclusive and less deep than Pigeaud’s, which explains also her lack of engagement (at first sight surprising) with this important book. While Pigeaud explored in depth the relationship between medicine and philosophy, in her survey Ahonen focuses on philosophical sources somehow traditionally defined. She includes two chapters (neatly confined to Hippocratic texts and Galen) and an appendix discussing medical texts; she is not, however, so interested in interrogating the exchanges or areas of contact between medicine and philosophy (a topic that has attracted much scholarly attention lately). The simplifications I have just underlined, however, are in my view imposed by what is the real strength of the book, its completeness in reviewing the relevant philosophical figures and texts. If we judge it on this criterion, this book is indeed a precious instrument for scholars in the history of philosophy and the history of medicine, but also an instructive survey for cultural historians dealing with the ancient world, cataloguing for the first time with such a degree of thoroughness the key philosophical developments on the topic. The intended audience is in fact not necessarily philosophical: helpful introductions and summaries are offered, and Greek words are transliterated, making this material accessible outside the narrower world of classicists and ancient historians. In terms of content, the book is divided into six main chapters discussing the topic of mental disorder in various philosophical figures (and, partly, in the medical tradition), and is complemented by two appendices. The introduction widely surveys the previous scholarly literature, without engaging deeply with its theoretical and methodological positions but succeeding in offering a clear bibliographical status quaestionis. The second chapter explores the “medical background,” Hippocratic and nontechnical ideas on mental disorder: this section [End Page 436] was not entirely justified by the concept of the monograph, given its distinction between “philosophy” and “medicine,” and so it remains somewhat unintegrated within the rest of the discussion. It offers useful information, however: readers from exclusively philosophical backgrounds will find here a valuable contextualization. Chapter 3 discusses key Platonic texts on our topic (Phaedrus, Timaeus, Republic, and Laws). Chapter 4 moves on to Aristotle, surveying his categories of melancholikoi and manikoi, his discussion of akrasia in EN 7, and Probl. 31.1 on melancholia. Chapter 5 is devoted to the Stoics, and the idea of a “madness of all mankind” which is more metaphorical and less directly medical than that of the thinkers surveyed thus far. The following chapter returns to a fully medical perspective, discussing Galen and his ideas on mental disturbances and their physiology (as well as philosophical therapies of the flaws of the soul). Chapter 7 focuses on discussions of “other philosophical traditions”: Skeptic, Epicurean, Middle- and Neo-platonic authors, and commentators on Aristotle. This is rather succinct and useful especially as a stocktaking of key references. The book ends with two appendices, one on homosexuality in Aristotle and Caelius Aurelianus, and one on the topos of madness in the tradition of biographies of philosophers. The first is informative on a very rich cultural document; it would...

Guidance can be considered on a broad continuum - from the daily activities of friendly people to specialised institutional activities. If we call guidance a practical activity related to providing help, counseling is called a scientific discipline, the theory of guidance. The article presents the history of the formation of counseling and the paradigms, currents and theoretical concepts and counseling as a scientific discipline. Attempts to describe this process can be made from various theoretical and methodological positions, using regularities taken from various scientific disciplines.

Abstract. Introduction. Cooperative activity of an educator and preschool children is a priority form of education in the modern preschool organization. The purpose of the article is to conceptualize the definition of “Collaborative Educational Activity” and a humanitarian diagnostics of the preschool teachers’ readiness for designing this activity and its realization. Study materials and methods. The components of preschool teachers’ readiness to design and to realize variable forms of collaborative activities with children were subjected to diagnostic study. Purpose of the research is to determine the problems of FSES practical realization in the point of the requirements to the organization of collaborative educational activities in the context of a holistic preschool educational process. As well as to define the role of methodological support in preschool educational institution from the senior educator’s position in the development of educator’s readiness for open cooperation in educational activities. Results. In the process of analyzing theoretical and methodological positions in the field of collaborative activity of educators and children, the authors conclude that the importance of humanitarian methodological support in understanding this phenomenon. The results of educators’ self-analysis of organizing collaborative activities with children are presented for discussion. It turned out that most of educators have difficulties in selecting the content of collaborative activities; difficulties in designing the technological component, difficulties in implementing reflection of collaborative activities. Conclusion. The significance of the presented research materials is determined by the importance of increasing the readiness of educators for productive collaborative activities with children. In the future, these studies can serve as a basis for further research on the problems of educator and child’s collaborative activities. Keywords: holistic educational process, a collaborative educational activity of an educator and preschool children, an open cooperative action, social constructive didactic model, the educational situation, preschool education.

This paper gives an overview of the work of Carl Menger, the founding father of the Austrian School of Economics. Menger’s theoretical and methodological positions are compared and contrasted with those of contemporary Austrian Economics. The idea of the unintended consequences of individual purposive actions is seen as a key to Menger’s economics. Although many elements of contemporary Austrian Economics can be found already in the work of Menger, we argue that there are some differences with respect to economic theorizing and economic policy recommendations. We propose to bring Austrian Economics closer to mainstream economics, especially with respect to the analytical tools to be used.

Efficiency of program handling as a function of verbal and iconic interfaces and individual differences in ability

With respect to the question of how mathematical concepts are formed by children, we can draw upon several theoretical positions, going from the most general point of view, relative to the universal subject, to the most specific point of view, relative to the didactic subject. In this chapter I will rely on the theory of conceptual fields, whose originator, G. Vergnaud, describes it thus: “The theory of conceptual fields is a cognitivist theory, which sets out to provide a coherent framework and some basic principles for the study of the development and learning of complex competencies, notably those which arise in the sciences and technologies” (Vergnaud, 1991, p. 135) I shall try first to show the necessity of that theory for the didactics of mathematics in relation to that of genetic epistemology; in the second section I shall elaborate on what the theory of conceptual fields contributes, with the notion of scheme-algorithm, to questions on the cognitive sources of observable errors in written calculations.KeywordsDistribute SchemeInvariant OrganizationGenetic PsychologyConceptual FieldEpistemic SubjectThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

A novel fast binary pyramid motion estimation (FBPME) algorithm is presented in this paper. The proposed FBPME scheme is based on binary multiresolution layers, exclusive-or (XOR) Boolean block matching, and a N-scale tiling search scheme. Each video frame is converted into a pyramid structure of K-1 binary layers with resolution decimation, plus one integer layer at the lowest resolution. At the lowest resolution layer, the N-scale tiling search is performed to select initial motion vector candidates. Motion vector fields are gradually refined with the XOR Boolean block-matching criterion and the N-scale tiling search schemes in higher binary layers. FBPME performs several thousands times faster than the conventional full-search block-matching scheme at the same PSNR performance and visual quality. It also dramatically reduces the bus bandwidth and on-chip memory requirement. Moreover, hardware complexity is low due to its binary nature. Fully functional software MPEG-2 MP@ML encoders and Advanced Television Standard Committee high definition television encoders based on the FBPME algorithm have been implemented. FBPME hardware architecture has been developed and is being incorporated into single-chip MPEG encoders. A wide range of video sequences at various resolutions has been tested. The proposed algorithm is also applicable to other digital video compression standards such as H.261, H.263, and MPEG4.

REVIEWS 226 Butterworth’s study is divided into chapters which address the role of the “juggler ” (or in modern terms, the magician), acrobatic elements of stagecraft, devices which involve the collusion or confederacy of pseudo-audience members, the creation of illusions of appearances and disappearances, the use of sound, puppetry, substitution (such as the use of dummies), other stage tricks, and finally, a chapter on terminology. The focus on primary historical documents allows for valuable explorations of these events, such as the section where Butterworth argues for a specific magician who invented and operated under the stage-name “Hocus Pocus,” but the absence of an engagement with cultural theory detracts from this research. For example, Butterworth discusses texts which refer to public and legal performances of “magic tricks,” texts which refer to incidents which were characterized as theft, and texts of published drama. While these texts clearly share a set of practices and conceptions of magic, Butterworth makes no effort to distinguish between their theoretical positions—they are simply quoted interchangeably to describe performance techniques. Such a slippery slope between entertainment and criminality could easily be connected to the large array of scholarship on the quasi-legitimate status of theatrical performances generally. Similarly, the question of whether the magic was perceived to be “real” or not could fruitfully be connected with the similarly active body of literature on the performativity of witchcraft, gender and identity in the period. In the absence of a literary or cultural goal, Butterworth’s main aim seems to be to ascertain the “truth” of how these tricks were staged, and at times such revelations seem relatively obvious. For example, he discusses that an early modern magician caused a trained horse to make a “seemingly reasoned choice” among available alternatives during a performance. Butterworth counters that “such reasoned responses are unlikely” to actually come from a horse, and that instead the magician probably used patter to create the illusion of a thinking horse (64). Butterworth explains that “The trainer should only use the prescribed words to instruct the horse in his actions and must not feed or reward him when he does not perform the correct action” (65). The study remains a meticulously organized expansion of our records and understanding of early modern magic. MICHAEL SAENGER, English, Southwestern University The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, ed. Marcia B. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005) xiii + 415 pp., ill. The art of Raphael, master painter and architect of the Italian High Renaissance, has been universally admired by art historians for its clarity of form and ingenuity of composition. His work, along with that of Bramante and Michelangelo, was fundamental to the development of the High Renaissance style in Rome and his creations have been lauded as the ultimate visual manifestation of Christian Neoplatonic ideology. The essays collected within this volume variously consider this celebrated artist and his artistic legacy. Each contribution is highly singular in both topic and approach, providing readers with a spectrum of Raphael scholarship. Indeed, the diversity of viable approaches is in itself a testament to the complexity of the artist and the historical significance of his work. The volume is dedicated to the late John Shearman; the breadth and high quality of the scholarship therein makes a fitting tribute to REVIEWS 227 this great Renaissance scholar. Jeryldene M. Wood’s essay provides an overview of Raphael’s earliest beginnings as an artist through 1508. Looking to such influences as patronage and his interactions with other artists, Wood traces Raphael’s early career both geographically and temporally. The essay considers the artist’s “extraordinary powers of assimilation” as fundamental to Raphael’s success (16). Wood describes the young Raphael as an artist who carefully assimilated and developed upon the example of established masters in order to establish himself within the parameters of a preexisting artistic system (22). Raphael’s early work is considered vis-à-vis that of the artists most influential in his development, i.e. Perugino , Signorelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo. Raphael emerges as a vibrant and savvy character, able to maximize his own artistic potential in light of contemporary needs and taste. In her chapter, Sheryl E. Reiss presents a helpful summary of Raphael...