The Maiden's Song

Edited by Andor Pintér. Separate violin part missing

Key pedagogic thinkers: Anton Makarenko

This article gives an introduction to the life and work of the Ukrainian social pedagogue and educational theorist Anton Makarenko. In the early part of the 1920s, he formulated a theory that he further developed while helping orphans under the most difficult and dramatic conditions. When he died, aged only 51 years old, Makarenko left behind a multifaceted theory, or a system of theories, that deals with many aspects of social pedagogy. Unfortunately, this source is ignored by most professionals in the Western countries. Those embarking on this substantial body of work will experience exciting reading. Most likely they will also acquire new insights and perspectives, which may be useful when trying to help young people. Makarenko's theory is directly inspired by his background and life experiences. In order to fully understand and thereby be able to assess his texts one needs thorough insight into the difficult political and social conditions under which he lived. The initial part of this article describes some of the key events in his life and also provides an overview of his most important texts. The subsequent part describes the essence of the theory and links its different elements to contemporary professional discourse. In the concluding part the holism and dialectics in Makarenko's reasoning and his intellectual kinship with John Dewey are highlighted

Diagonalizing the Frobenius

Over a Noetherian, local ring R of prime characteristic p, the Frobenius functor F induces a diagonalizable map on certain quotients of rational Grothendieck groups. This leads to an explicit formula for the Dutta multiplicity, and it is shown that a weaker version of Serre's vanishing conjecture holds if only chi(F(X)) = p^{dim R}chi(X) for all bounded complexes X of finitely generated, projective modules with finite length homology.Comment: Revised (simplified) version. 12 page

The effect of integration time on fluctuation measurements: calibrating an optical trap in the presence of motion blur

Dynamical instrument limitations, such as finite detection bandwidth, do not simply add statistical errors to fluctuation measurements, but can create significant systematic biases that affect the measurement of steady-state properties. Such effects must be considered when calibrating ultra-sensitive force probes by analyzing the observed Brownian fluctuations. In this article, we present a novel method for extracting the true spring constant and diffusion coefficient of a harmonically confined Brownian particle that extends the standard equipartition and power spectrum techniques to account for video-image motion blur. These results are confirmed both numerically with a Brownian dynamics simulation, and experimentally with laser optical tweezers.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, revtex4; published in Optics Express. http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?URI=oe-14-25-1251

Parents' Desire to Make Equal Inter Vivos Transfers

This study argues that parents have a desire for dividing equally between their children, and that this motive applies to transfers of gifts inter vivos. We suggest that the equal division motive competes with traditional altruism: support to the child or the children with greatest needs. When parents are drawn between these two ambitions, the degree of income compensation should be stronger in one-child families and we expect the altruism motive to dominate the equal division desire at low levels of recipients’ income. We find support for both these hypotheses, when analysing Norwegian data for inter vivos transfers behaviour. The data include information about stated attitudes towards transfers among the parents, which also support the equal division motive.inter vivos gifts, equal divisions, altruism, sibling comparisons