The Ethnic 'Other' in Ukrainian History Textbooks: The Case of Russia and the Russians

This paper examines portrayals of Russia and the Russians in two generations of Ukrainian history textbooks. It observes that the textbooks are highly condemning of Ukraine's main ethnic other in the guise of foreign ruler: the tsarist authorities and the Soviet regime are always attributed dubious and malicious intentions even if there is appreciation for some of their policies. By contrast, the books, certainly those of the second generation, refrain from presenting highly biased accounts of the ethnic other as a national group (i.e. Russians). Instances where negative judgements do fall onto Russians are counterbalanced by excerpts criticizing ethnic Ukrainians or highlighting conflicting interests within the Ukrainian ethnic group. The negative appraisal of the ethnic other as foreign ruler is clearly instrumental for the nation-building project as it sustains a discourse legitimating the existence of Ukraine as independent state. However, recent trends in history education, the paper concludes, suggest that the importance of nurturing patriotism as a national policy objective is diminishing

Accuracy Improvement of a Photoacoustic Helmholtz Cell Model

This paper presents a method for improving accuracy of the frequency response of a photoacoustic Helmholtz cell model. The method generates simple non-linear corrections to well-established (reference) delay line model of the cell. The form of the correction functions is obtained from a study of a numerical fitting of the reference model to the measurement data. A novel integral accuracy measure is formulated to compare fit of cell models to actual measurements in the neighborhood of the resonance frequency, which is important for measurement applications of the cell. The two proposed correction functions modify effective values of duct parameters. Despite simplicity the proposed corrections make significant improvement of modeling accuracy, as shown with the integral measure but also with prediction accuracy of the resonance frequency and the cell quality factor. It is significant that substantial accuracy gain due to the corrections was confirmed with measurements of a second (testing) set of photoacoustic Helmholtz cells with geometrical parameter values which are different from these of the first set