Student responses to differing accounts of a controversial historical issue: 15-year-old Greek students consider the removal of children in the Greek Civil War

In recent decades, controversial issues have come to the forefront of history teaching. So far, they have been utilized in three ways: (1) to manage tensions in divided societies; (2) to instil humanitarian values into students; and (3) to enhance the teaching of second-order historical concepts. This study is based on the findings of other relevant research, and underpins the use of controversial accounts in order to foster procedural concepts of history. It was conducted in three middle schools of the Xanthi Prefecture, northern Greece, in 2017 and 2018. The subjects were 94 15-year-old students, and the design was experimental. After being taught two versions of the Greek Civil War, a traditional and an experimental one, students expressed their opinions about three pairs of different historical accounts of a controversial issue: the removal of children during the war. A pilot study consisted of role-playing activities involving historical competences. After qualitative and quantitative analysis, a variety of ideas emerged about the differences in the accounts, the reasons for their differentiation, and the epistemological status of history. The findings show that: (1) students’ comprehension depended on the level of difficulty of the accounts; and (2) the experimental groups modified their ideas about the different accounts and history to some degree. In conclusion, a structured, disciplinary approach to controversial historical issues, focused on role-playing activities, could contribute to a refinement of students’ epistemological notions

Constraining nuclear physics parameters with current and future COHERENT data

Motivated by the recent observation of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CE$\nu$NS) at the COHERENT experiment, our goal is to explore its potential in probing important nuclear structure parameters. We show that the recent COHERENT data offers unique opportunities to investigate the neutron nuclear form factor. Our present calculations are based on the deformed Shell Model (DSM) method which leads to a better fit of the recent CE$\nu$NS data, as compared to known phenomenological form factors such as the Helm-type, symmetrized Fermi and Klein-Nystrand. The attainable sensitivities and the prospects of improvement during the next phase of the COHERENT experiment are also considered and analyzed in the framework of two upgrade scenarios.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables; v2: minor corrections, version to appear in PL

Potential and limiting factors in the use of alternative fuels in the European maritime sector

The maritime sector is a key asset for the world economy, but its environmental impact represents a major concern. The sector is primarily supplied with Heavy Fuel Oil, which results in high pollutant emissions. The sector has set targets for deacrbonisation, and alternative fuels have been identified as a short-to medium-term option. The paper addresses the complexity related to the activities of the maritime industry, and discusses the possible contribution of alternative fuels. A sector segmentation is proposed to define the consumption of each sub-segment, so to compare it with the current alternative fuel availability at European level. The paper shows that costs and GHG savings are fundamental enablers for the uptake of alternative fuels, but other aspects are also crucial: technical maturity, safety regulation, expertise needed, etc. The demand for alternative fuels has to be supported by an existing, reliable infrastructure, and this is not yet the case for many solutions (i.e. electricity, hydrogen or methanol). Various options are already available for maritime sector, but the future mix of fuels used will depend on technology improvements, availability, costs and the real potential for GHG emissions reduction.(c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Modeling Simulated Emissions from Galactic Binary Stars

Relativistic plasma flows from the jets of black hole binary systems consist the environment of multiple particle production and radiation emission including neutrinos and gamma-rays. We implement a hadronic model based on $p-p$ interactions with the purpose of predicting the produced secondary particle distributions inside the jet. Our ultimate goal is the neutrino and gamma-ray intensities calculation while taking into account the most important gamma-ray absorption processes in order to present more realistic results.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Lepton Flavor Violation: Constraints from exotic muon to electron conversion

The exotic neutrinoless $\mu^- - e^-$ nuclear conversion is studied within the conventional extensions of the standard model as well as in the minimal supersymmetric (SUSY) models with and without R-parity conservation. The dependence of the $\mu^- - e^-$ conversion rates on the nucleon and nuclear structure is consistently taken into account. Using our calculated transition matrix elements and the available experimental data on the branching ratio $R_{\mu e^-}$ for $^{48}$Ti and $^{208}$Pb as well as the expected experimental sensitivity for $^{27}$Al employed as a target in the planned at Brookhaven $\mu^--e^-$ conversion (MECO) experiment, we extract very severe constraints for the flavor violation parameters. We especially emphasize on the constraints resulting for SUSY R-parity violating parameters.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures. Based on the Invited talk given by T.S. Kosmas at the International Conference on Non-Accelerator New Physics(NANP'99), Dubna, Russia, 199