OLIVES, POMEGRANATES AND CLOUDS THE SPLENDOR OF THE DESERT THE SPLENDOR OF THE DESERT (2 of 3) THE SPLENDOR OF THE DESERT (3 of 3) CORAL RETURNED TO THE SEA BEFORE THE SEA, AS BEFORE DEATH, I HAVE NO SECRETS NEVER THE GREEN WINDOW FRAME OF DEATH SONNET WINDOW IN A LOST TOWN
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Keywords: Balkans; floods; Bulgaria; Varna; rain; Roma; weather;
Shoddy, illegal settlements and more frequent weather catastrophes make the Balkans’ Roma communities increasingly perilous places.
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Keywords: European Union; Polish products; EU member states; Polish economy; EU membership; integration; Polish food; Polish farmers; Polish businesses
A good first year in the EU is having too little impact on Polish politics.
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Keywords: Serbia; migration; Roma settlement; Belgrade; Kosovo; deportation; poverty; Serbian refugees; EU; Brussels; Balkans; UN High Commissioner for Refugees; asylum seekers; Montenegro; Danilo Rakic of Group 484; Foreign Ministry; government; Vojvodina province
In a deal with the EU, Belgrade has to confront the task of bringing home its thousands of citizens living elsewhere in Europe illegally.
More...Keywords: entrepreneurship. in Romania;
L’entreprenariat. Vecteur postmoderne de l’urbanisation. Enquêtes dans les montagnes Apuseni (le département Alba, Roumanie). Cette étude aborde dans une nouvelle perspective une série de recherches faites entre 2004 et 2005 sur l’entreprenariat dans la région des montagnes Apuseni. La nouvelle perspective se traduit par l’identification de l’entreprenariat à un vecteur de l’urbanisation postmoderne. De nos jours l’entreprenariat est une dimension significative pour la mentalité des habitants des communes d’Apuseni. En plus, l’orientation de l’entreprenariat en fonction de domaines d’activité nous indique une propension au secteur tertiaire, une tendance spécifique pour cette époque post-industrielle ou postmoderne. Des problèmes concernant l’entreprenariat peuvent modifier l’essence, le rythme et le support relationnel humaine des communautés qui vivent aujourd’hui aux alentours des montagnes Apuseni. Par conséquent, nos recherches ont été centrées sur l’identification de ces problèmes, le point de départ de nos analyses étant déjà le développement des affaires menées dans les zones respectives. On est arrivé à la conclusion que les problèmes du développement de l’entreprenariat dans la région d’Apuseni sont les mêmes que les problèmes généraux de la région. Une dernière constatation indique qu’il s’agit d’un entreprenoriat de subsistence, ce qui pourrait être un nouvel défi pour les recherches socio-économiques, au niveau régional.
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Keywords: Romani; education; budget; government; shools; GDP; EUMAP; politicians; Romani children; vulnerable; teachers; pensioners; kindergarten; Education Minister Ecaterina Andronescu;
Romania’s rural schools are suffering from underfunding, neglect, and the government’s budget priorities.
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Keywords: Kyrgyzstan; education; schools; private school; kindergarten; preschool;
This is the first in an occasional series of articles on the implications of private education in TOL’s region. A serious shortage of kindergartens has driven the few who can afford it into private schools of debatable quality. First in an occasional series.
More...Keywords: Collaborative learning; methods; small group skills; cooperation; communication
Because democratization and access to knowledge, the teacher is an organizer, a guide to learning, offering preschool to the traditional „transmission of knowledge" real „learning experience". This can be achieved but only in an inclusive kindergarten, who can respond to a large diversity of children, a garden where everyone participates and is treated as equally important. Collaborative learning methods provide a solution this new challenge inclusive research demonstrating that collaborative methods and techniques can enhance positive attitudes towards learning, school performance and self-esteem of preschoolers, promoting positive interaction and mutual support between children. Collaborative Learning: Education - is a way that is based on the capitalization of collaboration within a group; -is a teaching tool for group work, communication and collaboration; -is used when there is a real interdependence among group members in a task, a sense of responsibility to the group and its goals; -is based on discussions between the participants and the active work through teaching material
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Keywords: development; exploitation; Appalachia; towns; railroads
This paper looks at eight towns in the southern Blue Ridge section of Virginia, USA, during their formative stage, circa 1880-1920. It asks why they were built and why some persisted while others faded. Three major factors seem to predict their creation and longevity: 1] the availability of an appropriate transportation system, 2] their level of economic complexity, and 3] the proximity (or distance) to their source of investment capital. Towns based on single resource extraction, financed by distant capital fared the worst, while locally developed, economically diverse communities did well. The results tend to re-enforce Helen Lewis’s Internal Colonial Model. This story of creation and collapse in southern Appalachian America offers a cautionary tale for post-Soviet Eastern Europe.
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Keywords: wood design; sustainable design; application of timber; contemporary design;
There are many examples for the application of timber in contemporary design, however, some of the most attractive ones are those related to the development of sustainable design. In these cases the interventions in the natural structure of the wood are reduced to the minimum. Often the production technology corresponds to the ancient and traditional practices for wood-processing, while as raw material are used materials with interrupted structure or of low technological quality.
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Keywords: professor; conductor; choir; Orthodox; document; parish; archive.
The present study approaches the history of Romanian education in the town of Sebeş – Alba during the first half of the 20th century. The paper considers Nicolae Lupu, a teacher of several schools in town, who contributed to the promotion of cultural and artistic values among the Romanian community in the area. The information referring to the teacher Nicolae Lupu comes mostly from documents found in the funds of the Sebeş Orthodox Parish and Astra from the Alba County Service of the Romanian National Archives. The material was organized chronologically, a process permeated with inherent difficulties due to the lack of information which would allow for the drawing of a complete professional trajectory.
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Keywords: native beech wood;beech red heartwood; thermal modification; transverse anisotropy; dimensional stability
This research is mainly focused on the impact of thermal modification on the transverse anisotropy and dimensional stability of native beech wood (Fagus sylvatica L.) and beech red heartwood. Applied to two time-temperature regimes, the first period of maximum temperature to 180° C and the second to 230° C. The factor of anisotropy in native beech wood is 1.29 and beech red heartwood is 1:24. Dimensional stability of the native beech wood is improved for 33.3% and beech red heartwood for 29.1%. The changing of the volume mass per thermal modification of 6% is too small and does not affect other properties.
More...Keywords: arabesque; irony; parody; fictional technique; irony source; theme; variation; integrative techniques;
This article treats John Steinbeck‘s cycle of stories The Pastures of Heaven as a novel, due to its close-fitting temporal, spatial and thematic structure, attempting to read into it a number of narrative techniques that best fall under the heading of stylistic concepts. One of the narrative modes that obsessively permeates the rest of Steinbeck‘s fiction as well and which may be called an acute sense of showing or—as one critic prefers—arabesque, possibly comes to him from cinematography and is counterbalanced by the overall ironic tone of the epic to achieve fictional symmetry. The narrative material is investigated for instances ranging from benevolent irony or parodic depiction to mythical or even grim irony, all infused with the humor of hearsay dissemination techniques. Some sources of irony are identified and a discussion of the rare passages when irony is dropped harmonizes the commentary.
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Keywords: Leadership; Contemporary Trends; Propensity to Lead; Disruptive Change;
Leadership is a catch all concept and the subject attracts intensive attention. Yet the concept, as it stands today, is obsolete. The prime parameters of people and tasks have lost content with people performance parameters going through palpable change and the fundamentals of the task seriously disrupted. Those developments are rendering concepts of leadership in their current professional and conceptual framework, blurred. Gamely and fashion prone colourful presentation of “leadership” are taking over. A serious search into the heart and soul of leadership and a formulation of building blocks is, therefore, needed. It should be serious and it should be conceptual and operationally cogent.
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Keywords: Slovakia; refugee crisis; migration; Central Europe
Nitra is a small city of around 78,000 in western Slovakia, nestled at the foot of a castle crowned hill. A walk down the main drag, Štefánikova Street, paints a picture seen across provincial former Habsburgia: there’s brand new infrastructure, shiny new buses but no jobs. Since December 2015 a small group of Christian refugees from Iraq have called this small town their home away from home.
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doc. Mgr.art Jana Hojstričová, ArtD. (*1972, SK)was born in 1972 in Myjava /Slovakia/. She grad- uated in the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. She works as a photographer and as a teacher. Since 1998 she has been teaching at the Department of Photography and New Media at AFAD.In the art scene she entered in the 90s of the 20th century. The main theme of her photographic work is a body, which she puts into context with the growing influence of consumer society on it. Currently she focuses her photographic creation on visual sociological interpretation of the state of today‘s family.
More...Keywords: hospitality; international hotel systems;
The paper focuses on the development of the global hotel industry, which in the course of historical and economic changes tended towards the formation of the international hotel systems. This problem is presented against the background of the history of the development of hospitality, pointing to significant circumstances that contributed to the development of international hotel systems. The article also includes examples of international hotel systems operating around the world.The aim of the paper is to show the essence of the functioning of the global hotel industry in the context of hotel systems.
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Keywords: Mikhail Berman-Tsikinovsky; playwriting; exile
This paper analyses two “migration plays” written by the doctor-writer and dramatist Mikhail Berman-Tsikinovsky: Mediterranean Paradoxes (1998) and The Time Machine (1999), now available for the first time in English translation, in the volume From Russia for Good (2011). The Author reflects himself in the main characters, respectively the doctors Vesuvius Mediterranean and Musya Belochkin, presenting the steps of his conquest of freedom in the United States. On the stage, the audience discover the difficulty of his travel from Kharkov to Chicago, and the problems of his new life: the re-construction of another existence abroad, the use of a different language, the lack of the native land, the failure of the first marriage. Moreover, there is a balance of his personal experience as a migrant: “time” is the keyword to understand the past and the present, is the virtue necessary for the development of a better life.
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Keywords: History of Pharmacy; Pharmacy Museum; University of Basel; Josef Anton Häfliger
Founded in 1925, the Pharmacy Museum of the University of Basel is the only museum in Switzerland dedicated to the History of Pharmacy. It houses a unique and extensive collection, with a focus on historical pharmaceuticals, pharmacy furniture, laboratory utensils, ceramics, instruments, books, art- and craftwork. It is located in the old-town of the city of Basel in a building which dates back to the late medieval times. It used to even be visited by the famous Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus in the 1520’s. Today, the city of Basel and its region are an international hub for the pharmaceutical industry. The history of the museum is connected to the developments of the pharmaceutical practices, sciences and industry in the 20th century, when they experienced fundamental changes. The Pharmacy Museum itself underwent major changes in the past two decades but has kept its historical exhibition mode, dating back to the first half of the 20th century, making it a historical object on its own. By placing the Museum into a framework of cultural, social and technological development, and treating the museum itself as a museological object of study, this article reflects the historical and contemporary position, function and structure of the Pharmacy Museum at the University of Basel.
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