A wider Europe? The view from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine

On the evidence of national surveys conducted between 2000 and 2006, there is a declining sense of European self-identity in the three Slavic post-Soviet republics of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Attitudes towards the European Union and the possibility of membership are broadly supportive, but with a substantial proportion who find it difficult to express a view, and substantial proportions are poorly informed in comparison with the general public in EU member or prospective member countries. Those who are better informed are more likely to favour EU membership and vice versa. Generally, socioeconomic characteristics (except for age and region) are relatively poor predictors of support for EU membership as compared with attitudinal variables. But ‘Europeanness’ should not be seen as a given, and much will depend on whether EU member countries emphasize what is common to east and west or establish ‘new dividing lines’ in place of those of the cold war

Data visualization in yield component analysis: an expert study

Even though data visualization is a common analytical tool in numerous disciplines, it has rarely been used in agricultural sciences, particularly in agronomy. In this paper, we discuss a study on employing data visualization to analyze a multiplicative model. This model is often used by agronomists, for example in the so-called yield component analysis. The multiplicative model in agronomy is normally analyzed by statistical or related methods. In practice, unfortunately, usefulness of these methods is limited since they help to answer only a few questions, not allowing for a complex view of the phenomena studied. We believe that data visualization could be used for such complex analysis and presentation of the multiplicative model. To that end, we conducted an expert survey. It showed that visualization methods could indeed be useful for analysis and presentation of the multiplicative model

Integration, Elaboration and Recollective Experience

The relationship between integration and elaboration and consciousness in memory was investigated using the digit recall/distractor method of maintenance rehearsal. Subjects learned words either intentionally or incidentally while retaining three two-digit numbers. List items were rehearsed one, three, or six times. Subjects were given an immediate recognition test in which they were required to indicate, when recognising a word, whether or not their recognition was accompanied by conscious recollection of the item’s previous occurrence. Effects of intention to learn and number of rehearsals were found only for recognition accompanied by conscious recollection. The effect of rehearsals was found only for one to three, and not for three to six rehearsals. Further analysis indicated that the level of conscious recollection was a function of the amount of resources devoted to the rehearsal process, but no such relationship existed for recognition in the absence of conscious recollection. The results are taken as suggesting that consciousness in recollection is due to the retrieval of elaborated traces, while recognition in the absence of such consciousness is based on integrated traces