Recent advances in bio-based polymers and composites: Preface to the BiPoCo 2012 Special Section

The increasing environmental awareness of the society has become an important factor in recent decades affecting legislation, commerce and industry as well as research and development to a great extent [1-7]. This tendency has also been recognized by the European Community, which supports numerous projects in order to promote innovative solutions leading to a sustainable economy. Three such projects of the Seventh Framework Programme with overlapping scopes, Biostruct [8], Forbioplast [9] and Woody [10], focused on the valorization of forest-derived resources for the production of various bio-based products, including polymers, additives, and composites with natural reinforcements. The leaders of these projects decided to join forces to organize a conference in order to create a possibility to disseminate their results as well as to increase the efficiency of their research and development by exchanging ideas with leading experts in the field. The International Conference on Bio-based Polymers and Composites (BiPoCo 2012) was organized for the first time in Siófok, Hungary, between May 27th and 31th, 2012, with 234 registered participants delivering more than 90 oral and 110 poster presentations. Scientific and technological lectures focused on the theory and practice of biopolymers, renewable-based monomers, fillers and additives as well as sustainable polymer blends and composites with possible application in packaging, agriculture, automotive or biomedicine. In the following sections we provide a short overview of the main research areas and presentations related to the event, and by doing so, continue the line set by Filip Du Prez, Jean-Marie Raquez and Philippe Dubois as Editors of the recent Biobased Polymers and Related Materials special issue of the European Polymer Journal [11]. Below we introduce to the reader the BiPoCo 2012 Special Section containing four feature articles and several research papers

A tanárképzés történeti hagyományai Magyarországon

The “teacher training centre” named in the 2011 Higher Education Act is not a novelty in the history of the Hungarian secondary school teacher training. Regarding its function, “the teacher training institute” established at the end of the 19th century can be considered as an antecedent at Hungarian universities. This type of institution was created in university cities, such as Budapest, and later Kolozsvár, Szeged, Pécs and Debrecen. Its function was to carry out a continual interest-promoting discourse on issues of the practical needs of secondary education with university faculties referring to the Humboldtian idea as regards the freedom of teaching. Thanks to the 1924 Teacher Training Act, the training institutes in the capital and provincial cities gained strong legitimacy, in the wake of which with their definied licenses remarkable achievements were made in harmonizing the components of teacher training