Keywords: Bishop Friedrich Müller; the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Romania; evangelization; lay preachers; sects; Evangelical Society (Landeskirchliche Gemeinschaftsbewegung);
During the extremely difficult years immediately after World War II, the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Romania (ECACR) was confronted on the one hand with a severe shortage of priests and on the other hand with the growing agitation of neo-protestant churches (looked upon as sects). The simple church members – who had suffered because of the war, the nationalization of most of their property and the deportation of the middle generation for forced labor to the USSR – were in need of pastoral care. In order to serve the church members and to protect them against the proselytism of the sects, Bishop Friedrich Müller (1884–1969) had the courage to officially send lay preachers of the Evangelical Society (a pietistic movement within the ECACR) to evangelize in the villages on behalf of the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession. The article documents this episode of church history with its difficulties and successes. Once the Protestant Theological Institute with University Degree in Cluj was founded, new generations of priests were trained and filled in the gaps. The help given by lay preachers lost its relevance. The Evangelical Society, having the statute of an association, was forbidden by the communist regime. Reverberations of the activity of the Evangelical Society were the Bible study meetings (Bibelstunde) in some of the ECACR congregations.
More...Keywords: Virtual Programming Lab (VPL); Moodle; usability evaluation; design and evaluation methods; Human-Computer Interaction (HCI);
Teaching introductory computer programming and choosing the proper tools and programming languages are challenging tasks. Most of the existing tools are not fully integrated into systems to support the teaching-learning processes. The present paper describes the usability evaluation of the Virtual Programming Lab module for Moodle (VPL-Moodle) based on a satisfaction questionnaire answered by 37 undergraduate students enrolled in CS1 and CS2 courses and 7 lecturers. Moreover, a heuristic evaluation performed by two specialists is also presented. Results of the descriptive and inferential analysis revealed mainly two things: a) the VPL-Moodle has a low level of usability in all five aspects analyzed by the students: satisfaction, efficiency, learnability, helpfulness, and environment control; and b) lecturers found some difficulties using the VPL-Moodle. A number of suggestions for the improvement of the VPL-Moodle interface are provided based on the findings of the paper.
More...Keywords: logos; aletheia; hen panta; work of art; balet; Degas; “Giselle”;
The aim of this essay is to offer a comparative analysis of different works of art through an approach inspired by Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”, making use of his concepts of logos, hen panta, and aletheia presented in his book “Early Greek Thinking”. In order to do this, I will start with a discussion of the art of dance in ballet and painting, applying the already mentioned Heideggerian concepts. The analysis proceeds with a painting described in Ernesto Sabato’s book “The Tunnel” then moves to dance as immortalised in “L’Étoile” painting by Edgar Degas and ends with a discussion of dance on scene, “Giselle”.
More...Keywords: International relations theory; schools; theories; elites;
More...Keywords: Pablo Picasso; Blue Dove; graphic; museum collection; Cluj;
The National Museum of Transylvanian History owns a graphic work signed by Pablo Picasso. The image represents a blue pigeon holding an olive branch in its beak. Iconographically, the Blue Dove is part of the series of graphic works made by the artist to promote the Peace Movement, born immediately after the Second World War. The purpose of this study is to reconstruct the history of this artifact. By contextualizing it, I aim to decipher the symbolism behind this image. Following its circulation, and establishing its provenance in the museum’s collection, I aim to confirm its authenticity.
More...Keywords: metropolitan areas; administrative-territorial organization; local public administration; smart city;
The expansion of urban communities to the outskirts of the city or to the surrounding localities, has given rise to large urban centers. Whether we consider the development of Madrid, Paris or Bucharest, the phenomenon is similar and irreversible. Moreover, the migration of the population within those areas has put a huge pressure on the old administrative-territorial delimitations, the local public administrations being obliged to work together and to provide integrated public services. This new reality has given rise to different legal solutions. However, the vast majority have in common the creation of new administrative structures called metropolitan areas, which have in their center a smart community that benefits from smart, interconnected localities. This growing phenomenon is known through concepts such as Smart Village, Smart City and Smart Region.
More...Keywords: Matei Visniec; philosophical fable; journalistic fiction; consumerist society; rats; evil; metaphysics; living and existing;
Matei Visniec, an internationally recognized author, mainly known as a dramatist, is particularly concerned with integrating existential questions in his creation. The play Omul din care a fost extras răul (The Evil-Free Man) makes no exception. Its author sees it as a philosophical fable and a journalistic fiction. The philosophical fable and the journalistic fiction are indeed in such a broad connection that their splitting apart would totally change the message. Thus, the fable exploits the rat metaphor: with the degrading impact the consumerist society has on humanity, the only salvation would consist in the intervention of rats empowered with the authority to eliminate both ecological and metaphysical damages. Through its main character and through the evolution of social and political events, the journalistic fiction underlines the impact every invented story of the mass media may have on a brainwashed population whose choice cannot go from living to existing. My intention is to underline these main aspects and the possible message.
More...Keywords: discrimination; National Council for Combating Discrimination; law; education;
Timidly begun in the first part of the 20th century, the removing of the discriminations had continued to some extent under the communist regime, which maintained a general hostile attitude towards the human rights paradigm. After December 1989 the phenomenon of discrimination was tackled through the connection to the standards of the international law and the adoption of new legal instruments. In the context of the start of the accession negotiations to the European Union, the general act in the field was adopted, the Government Ordinance no. 137/2000. The non-discrimination law was amended several times, without much care for coherence between the provisions from different Acts. The National Council for Combating Discrimination has an important role in the application of the non-discrimination law, but it is under the pressure of the lack of the human and material resources. The persistence of some discriminatory attitudes and behaviours with serious consequences shows that for long term solutions the legal edifices are not enough, and the education is essential.
More...Keywords: Lviv; Suceava; Principality of Moldavia; trade relations; merchants;
The article deals with economic and social relations between Lviv, as the largest Ukrainian cities in the Medieval Ages, and the towns of Moldavian principality. They were established primarily on economic grounds, as trade routes to the East passed through the principality. Lviv officials supported the political and diplomatic steps of the Kingdom of Poland towards rapprochement with the Principality of Moldavia. Economic relations developed especially intensively under Stephen the Great, prince of Moldavia in the second half of the 15th century, when the Turks captured the northern Black Sea coast with the main trading ports of Kaffa, Kilia, and Cetatea-Alba.In addition to the important function of ensuring the transit of oriental goods to the West, Moldavian merchants supplied the Lviv market with local goods. Lviv city books note large consignments of oxen and beluga fish among the main products of Moldavian exports. In exchange, Lviv merchants supplied the Moldavian market with large quantities of Western cloth, iron products, and dyes. The organization of trade processes was facilitated by the protectionist policy of the Moldavian prince, who granted a number of privileges to the city of Lviv. Strong trade and economic contacts arose due to the large diasporas of Armenian and German merchants that existed in Lviv and Suceava, Seret, and other Moldavian towns. Merchants’ groups and companies arose among Armenians, Germans, Wallachians, and Ruthenians on both mononational and multinational grounds. Immigrants from the Moldavian principality settled in Lviv and the region; on the one hand, they provided stronger economic contacts, and on the other hand, they avoided the threatening Turkish expansion into Moldavian lands.
More...Keywords: hotel sector; direct-costing; cost; calculation methods;
The direct-costing method is a method often used for determining and analyzing costs, in order to make the best decisions at the management level, both for companies whose object of activity is production and for those providing services, such as accommodation units that are the subject of this paper. Romania enjoys a wide category of tourist reception structures, having a huge tourist potential, given the extremely varied relief and the multitude of tourist attractions in the country, representing an important source of the labour market (at the beginning of 2020, about 400,000 employment contracts were registered in the industry), but nevertheless they hold only about 3% of the gross domestic product of Romania (unlike Greece, where they hold 25%). All this leads to the importance of the fact that in the hotel industry, the management is informed with regard to the cost situation, in order to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the activity, which is the main step towards the development of the hotel sector in Romania.
More...Keywords: environment; ecology; small and medium business; lending; microcredit; entity; entrepreneurship; financing; innovation;
The article is devoted to the development and financing of innovations of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Republic of Kazakhstan, which is recognized in the world as an effective lever for ensuring the country's economic growth, since the main part of Kazakhstan's budget revenues is tax revenues from businesses and citizens: it is through them that expenses are financed state (along with borrowed funds). Particular attention is paid to the creation of SMEs around new innovative enterprises using various types of business cooperation and areas of activity in the field of ecology.
More...Keywords: femicide; violence against women; COVID-19 pandemic; media; social media;
The COVID-19 pandemic has represented a high impact situation for the nations around the world. The measures imposed by the Governments, the unavoidable changes and particularly the lockdowns had and still have many repercussions for all the people. In this context, the most affected groups have been children, elderly people and women. Even if before the pandemic has started, the violence against women was considered a significant matter that needs more attention from the part of the national and international entities, during the health crisis, each country underlined that the number of domestic violence cases increased and also the number of femicides. This paper will provide a large perspective regarding the manner in which Romanian journalists depicted the domestic femicides during March 2020-May 2021, using the discourse analysis and the thematic content analysis. The main objective of this study is to identify specific patterns, recurrent themes and actors that appear when a journalist presents a domestic femicide. The conclusions will focus on the differences and similarities between the articles selected for this research in order to create a clearer image of a phenomenon that constantly increases: the femicide.
More...Keywords: cyberspace; natural environment; technology; ecology; markets; states; economic calculation; public policies;
Planet Earth, with its plethora of natural (im)balances, has a venerable age of 4.54 billion years; the (industrial) imprint placed by the human species on it, considered to be not negligible, counts of just little over two centuries; while the digital/IT&C/virtual existence of man, in what we call cyberspace, is reduced to just a few decades. An amorphous world, hastily assimilated to the Internet, the cyberspace is the sum or, better said, the synergy created by links between computers (and other compatible devices), servers, routers and various items of global IT and telecommunications infrastructures. A sort of fiefdom for tech computing power, but also a field of geo-political-economic power calculus, the cyberspace raises another dilemma: is it the salutary alternative to the bodice of a physical environment subject to depletion/plunder and degradation/pollution of its scarce resources? This article aims to capture, in an original way, how the translation of a great part of the world and social life into cyberspace, especially in the wake of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, relieves the natural environment/climate of Anthropocene pressures (e.g., via optimizations of production processes, favoured by artificial intelligence etc.), or, on the contrary, a less noticeable aspect, how it worsens certain components of it (e.g., via the amplified need for energy or for rare minerals, critical to new technologies etc.). Moreover, the above-mentioned ecological alleviations (labelled as of software nature) and (hardware) aggravations brought by digitalization are duly emphasized and evaluated in the light of the (un)intended consequences occurring at the highly sensitive intersection between markets (private practices) and states (public policies), pointing to the case of the European Union.
More...Keywords: Green Deal (GD); tourism; digitalization; smart city;
Global tourism activity reached high levels before the outbreak of the pandemic, but it was also one of the most affected economic sectors in 2020 when there was a real collapse of tourism activity. Tourism is an activity with a high degree of pollution, with many studies highlighting the fact that the hotel industry is a high-energy consumption and polluting sector. The Green Deal (GD), a bold project of the European Union, aims to make Europe carbon-neutral by 2050. Tourism is not an objective explicitly presented in the GD but because tourism is an activity with a high degree of pollution it must align to the new requirements. Targeting the hotel market of Cluj-Napoca, the article aims to analyse the activity of the hotels in terms of their adaptation to the new recommendations of the European Commission, implementing the GD, and moving to digitalization, as a new stage, for a cleaner environment. The research combines descriptive and inferential statistical methods to test the hypotheses formulated and to investigate the links between the variables studied, through unifactorial one-way ANOVA analysis. At the same time, the internal consistency of the 62 items of the questionnaire, filled in by the 38 hotels participating in the study, was analysed, obtaining a high Cronbach-Alpha score (0.88). The main conclusions drawn indicate a low degree of familiarity of hotel employees with the provisions of GD. In addition, especially in the case of internationally affiliated and of 4- and 5-star (*) hotels, the existence of a sustainable development policy is associated with a focus on local producers for both the supply of agri-food products and cosmetics and personal care products. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the digitization process of Cluj-Napoca hotels.
More...Keywords: "fish teeth"; alicorn; unicorn horn; walrus tooth; narwhal tusk;
Depuis le XVIe siècle, les sources historiques moldaves enregistrent une marchandise au nom bizarre, généralement importée de Moscou et qui était régulièrement envoyée à la Sublime Porte en tant que présents (peşkeş): les«dents de poisson». En essayant d’identifier cette marchandise inhabituelle, les chercheurs ont proposé, jusqu’à présent, plusieurs hypothèses: ivoire, carapaces de tortues, crocs de morse ou dent d’espadon. D’autre part, les termes utilisés pour définir le produit dans les sources russes, mais aussi orientales et chinoises,pourraient désigner à la fois l’ivoire de morse et de narval. À l’époque, la dentde narval était confondue avec la «corne de licorne» – une sorte de panacée universelle, qui avait la capacité de détecter et de neutraliser tout poison, depurifier l’eau, de guérir de nombreuses maladies et d’avoir des propriétés aphrodisiaques. La «corne de licorne» était aussi une marque de pouvoir et un objet de prestige, que tous les souverains devaient posséder. L’auteur de cetarticle rassemble et analyse toutes les pistes pour voir laquelle des hypothèses est la plus plausible. Enfin, à l’aide des informations offertes par plusieurs catégories de sources, mais aussi par les analogies, on peut conclure que les« dents de poisson » doivent être identifiées seulement aux crocs de morse.
More...Keywords: migration; Romania;Italy;brain drain;dossier;
The migration phenomenon is gaining momentum in Romania’s recent history.Even though the official statistics are incomplete, the increasing trend cannot beoverlooked. One of the European countries where the Romanians could easily integratewas Italy, a country that became a favourite destination. Here, in 2019, the numbersshowed that more than 1.2 million137 Romanians officially migrated, from a total ofapprox. 10 millions 138 that are currently abroad, which means approx. 12.06%139 ofthe Romanian diaspora can be found in Italy. The data used in the present paper wasgathered from both official sources (statistical data published by the national statisticalinstitute, statistics of various associations, official statements, etc.) and unofficial ones,most of them highlighted by the media (secondary analysis). By analyzing the datacollected, we will try to reveal the magnitude of the phenomenon, and the social,economic, psychological, cultural, political and legal-administrative implications in acomparative manner: for both Romania and Italy. Thus, we will name the accumulationof these particular implications the Italian dossier of the Romanian emigration.
More...Keywords: constitution; citizens’ constitution initiative; Constitution Tribunal; citizens’ legislative initiative; Romania; the right to initiative;
The citizens’ constitutional initiative and the citizens’ legislative initiative exist in Romania since 1991. They were established by the Constitution of 21 November 1991. The right to initiate a constitutional amendment is vested in a group of at least 500,000 citizens who have the right to vote; they must be residents of at least half of the voivodships, and at least 20,000 citizens must sign the initiative in each voivodship and in Bucharest. The right of legislative initiative is vested in a group of at least 100,000 citizens with the right to vote; they must be residents of at least one-quarter of the voivodships and in each of them such an initiative must be supported by the signatures of at least 5,000 citizens. The Constitution provides exemptions to these initiatives. The collection of signatures and the further handling of such drafts are regulated by Act No. 189 of 9 December 1999 on the exercise of a legislative initiative by citizens (amended in 2004). Their compliance with the Constitution is examined by the Constitutional Tribunal. The project initiator has 6 months to collect signatures from the moment of its publication in the official publication journal „Monitorul Oficial României”. In practice, a small number of citizens’ constitutional and legislative initiatives have so far been submitted. It is therefore an ineffective institution. This is believed to be due to overly complex bureaucratic rules governing the collection of signatures. Therefore, it is postulated to simplify the process and introduce the possibility of collecting signatures electronically.
More...Keywords: legal fiction; classical logic principles; fictional mechanism; physical reality – GIVEN; legal reality – constructed; physical reality continuous relation function;
The succession of logical forms being a facet of the otherness of time, the subsumption of materiality, and especially of conceptuality to different logical patterns become a truism that wears the garment of a logical evolutionary process. By this, it is imperative to undertake a logical-philosophical analysis on some conceptual entities that show traces of ancestry, in the sense of researching their logical permanence. The concordance with the temporality of this research demands, as essence, the research of the logical permanency related to that logicae prima facias. The latter prima facias as a logical pattern must imperatively be represented by the logical entity that has the value of ab initio point on the scale of temporality, namely the classical logic. Considering an ab initio conjugated homologous point, but which designates the source of fictionality in the field of law, we conclude that the legitimacies, functionalities, respectively subtleties of the principal pattern of classical logic that is incident in the conceptuality of legal fiction must be investigated in order to conclude over the actuality of this abstract construct of law-part of legal reality, as well as on the actuality of the precepts of classical logic as prima facias logicae.
More...Keywords: Scientifical Department; Mureş County; Library; 30th Anniversary; Romania;
The paper is structured on several chapters: Short History; Completing and Organizing the Collections; The Catalogues; The Evidence of the Readers and the Statistic of Borrowed Documents; The cultural - Scientific Activities Organized Between 1974 - 2004; The Librarians of the Department. The foundations of the new department of technical publications was at that moment a necessity, because of the industrial development and also because of the request of qualified specialists on different technical domains. It was the idea of a well-known librarian - Meszáros Jozsef - that was presented to a group of engineers, organized in an association, that finally was put into practice. Thus, on November the 20th 1974 the new department was officially opened to public and its evolution since then was quite ascendent. The department of technical publications permanently increased its collections; thus, in no more than three decades its fonds were enriched with different technical materials, today their number being over 32 thousand publications. Unfortunatelly, the acquisition policy had to change during the last years, because of the lack of financial resources and because of the prices of books. As it expected, for a better circulation of information, there were organized many catalogues, such as the alphabetical one, sistematical, thematical etc. The paper also contains a readers evidence, on criteria such as age, profession etc. and some statistics concerning daily frequency, monthly frequency etc. It is also worth mentioning the fact that between 1974 - 2004 this department was involved in 119 cultural activities, such as picture and photographic exhibitions, scientific meetings etc. In the last part of the paper there is a presentation of each of the librarians that have worked during time at this department.
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