Twenty Years After the Velvet Revolution: Shifts in Czech Adolescents’ Perceptions of Family, School, and Society

Families and schools are traditionally seen as substantial socialization agents forming adolescents’ social values and their views of society. Special attention is paid to the question whether the relative importance of these influences remains stable in times of major social changes. In this study, two different generations of Czech middle adolescents are compared: (a) the “post-totalitarian” generation that grew up in the last decade of the communist regime and entered adolescence during the time of rapid political and socioeconomic changes (data collected in 1995) and (b) the current generation without personal experience with the communist regime, raised in a stable democratic society (data collected in 2010). Both groups of participants (total N = 2,127, aged from 14 to 17 years) were administered an identical questionnaire. First, we examined the changes in adolescents’ perception and evaluation of the society over the last 15 years. Today’s adolescents perceive society more as a community and their future orientations are more focused on materialistic and less on environmental values. While the emotional relationship between the children and parentsremains the same, adolescents learn a somewhat different message in the family, emphasizing self-reliance. School environment is perceived more as positive and engaging than 15 years ago. Second, we predicted adolescents’ social views and values from their assessment of family and school environment. Our results show that the effect of parental values on adolescents’ value orientations is higher in the current generation. Positive school environment contributes to the development of socially responsible orientations despite the changes in society

Testing for Markovian Character and Modeling of Intermittency in Solar Wind Turbulence

We present results of statistical analysis of solar wind turbulence using an approach based on the theory of Markov processes. It is shown that the Chapman-Kolmogorov equation is approximately satisfied for the turbulent cascade. We evaluate the first two Kramers-Moyal coefficients from experimental data and show that the solution of the resulting Fokker-Planck equation agrees well with experimental probability distributions. Our results suggest the presence of a local transfer mechanism for magnetic field fluctuations in solar wind turbulence

Generalized two-scale weighted Cantor set model for solar wind turbulence, Geophys

[1] In order to quantify the multifractality of solar wind turbulence, we consider a generalized weighted Cantor set with two different scales describing nonuniform compression of cascading eddies. We investigate the resulting multifractal spectrum of generalized dimensions depending on two scaling parameters and one probability measure parameter, especially for asymmetric scaling. In particular, we show that intermittent pulses are stronger for the model with two different scaling parameters and a much better agreement with the solar wind data is obtained, especially for the negative index of the generalized dimensions. Therefore we argue that there is a need to use a two-scale cascade model. Hence we propose this new more general model as a useful tool for analysis of intermittent turbulence in various environments. Citation: Macek, W. M., and A. Szczepania

Evolution of order and chaos across a first-order quantum phase transition

We study the evolution of the dynamics across a generic first order quantum phase transition in an interacting boson model of nuclei. The dynamics inside the phase coexistence region exhibits a very simple pattern. A classical analysis reveals a robustly regular dynamics confined to the deformed region and well separated from a chaotic dynamics ascribed to the spherical region. A quantum analysis discloses regular bands of states in the deformed region, which persist to energies well above the phase-separating barrier, in the face of a complicated environment. The impact of kinetic collective rotational terms on this intricate interplay of order and chaos is investigated.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, Physics Letters B, in press. Higher quality (larger size) figures can be obtained from http://www-ucjf.troja.mff.cuni.cz/~geometric/PLB-Figs2-3.zi