Museums and Transitional Justice: Assessing the Impact of a Memorial Museum on Young People in Post-Communist Romania

Memorial museums are frequently established within transitional justice projects intended to reckon with recent political violence. They play an important role in enabling young people to understand and remember a period of human rights abuses of which they have no direct experience. This paper examines the impact of a memorial museum in Romania which interprets the human rights abuses of the communist period (1947–1989). It uses focus groups with 61 young adults and compares the responses of visitors and non-visitors to assess the impact of the museum on views about the communist past, as well as the role of the museum within post-communist transitional justice. The museum had a limited impact on changing overall perceptions of the communist era but visiting did stimulate reflection on the differences between past and present, and the importance of long-term remembrance; however, these young people were largely skeptical about the museum’s role within broader processes of transitional justice. The paper concludes that it is important to recognize the limits of what memorial museums can achieve, since young people form a range of intergenerational memories about the recent past which a museum is not always able to change

COMPARATIVE STUDYON MILK COLD PASTEURIZATION USING HYDROGEN PEROXIDE

The study evaluates two methods of non-thermal milk pasteurization, namely cold pasteurization using hydrogen peroxide and hydrogen peroxide followed by its decomposition under the action of added catalase extract. These two methods seem to be effective, far less expensive than conventional ones, much more simplistic and do not cause significant changes in the chemical composition of milk, thus preserving its nutritional value.

Mathematical results for some α\displaystyle{\alpha} models of turbulence with critical and subcritical regularizations

In this paper, we establish the existence of a unique "regular" weak solution to turbulent flows governed by a general family of $\alpha$ models with critical regularizations. In particular this family contains the simplified Bardina model and the modified Leray-$\alpha$ model. When the regularizations are subcritical, we prove the existence of weak solutions and we establish an upper bound on the Hausdorff dimension of the time singular set of those weak solutions. The result is an interpolation between the bound proved by Scheffer for the Navier-Stokes equations and the regularity result in the critical case

'Heat from Above' Heat Capacity Measurements in Liquid He-4

We have made heat capacity measurements of superfluid He-4 at temperatures very close to the lambda point, T(sub lambda) , in a constant heat flux, Q, when the helium sample is heated from above. In this configuration the helium enters a self-organized (SOC) heat transport state at a temperature T(sub SOC)(Q), which for Q greater than or = 100 nW/sq cm lies below T(sub lambda). At low Q we observe little or no deviation from the bulk Q = 0 heat capacity up to T(sub SOC)(Q); beyond this temperature the heat capacity appears to be sharply depressed, deviating dramatically from its bulk behaviour. This marks the formation and propagation of a SOC/superfluid two phase state, which we confirm with a simple model. The excellent agreement between data and model serves as an independent confirmation of the existence of the SOC state. As Q is increased (up to 6 micron W/sq cm) we observe a Q dependant depression in the heat capacity that occurs just below T(sub SOC)(Q), when the entire sample is still superfluid. This is due to the emergence of a large thermal resistance in the sample, which we have measured and used to model the observed heat capacity depression. Our measurements of the superfluid thermal resistivity are a factor of ten larger than previous measurements by Baddar et al

Education and post-communist transitional justice: negotiating the communist past in a memorial museum

This paper examines the role of education within post-communist transitional justice. It focuses on the ways in which young Romanians negotiate the communist past during an educational visit to a memorial museum. The museum enabled these visitors to better understand the repression of the communist era, had limited impact in changing their attitudes towards communism, but it did provoke reflection upon and comparison between the present and the communist past. Visitors recognized the role of the museum as a site of memory within post-communist transitional justice, but were also critically aware of the limitations to what the museum could achieve. The implications of these findings for postcommunist transitional justice are examined

Encountering the Victims of Romanian Communism: Young People and Empathy in a Memorial Museum

Many states in post-communist East-Central Europe have established memorial museums which aim to tell the story of suffering under the communist regime. They also seek to encourage visitors to develop empathy for the victims of communist repression.This paper explores the responses of a group of young people to a memorial museum in Romania (Sighet Memorial Museum), focusing on how these visitors experienced empathy for the victims of communist-era violence. Data were collected using focus groups. Most participants showed a degree of empa- thy for the victims of suffering but this was usually shallow in nature. However some visitors displayed more“active” empathy (characterized by deeper imaginative and cogni- tive engagement). The paper explores how both the design and environment of the museum and the back- ground experiences of visitors influenced the develop- ment of empathy. It argues that empathy is not an automatic response to suffering and instead can be con- sidered as an interaction between the design of the museum and the background knowledge of visitors. The paper argues that empathy is an important means for young people to participate in remembering the commu- nist period, and is a means to make“prosthetic”memories of an authoritarian past which they have not experienced first-hand

Improving Accuracy in α-Models of Turbulence through Approximate Deconvolution

In this report, we present several results in the theory of α -models of turbulence with improved accuracy that have been developed in recent years. The α -models considered herein are the Leray- α model, the zeroth Approximate Deconvolution Model (ADM) turbulence model, the modified Leray- α and the Navier–Stokes- α model. For all of the models from above, the accuracy is limited to α 2 in smooth flow regions. Better accuracy requires decreasing the filter radius α , which, in turn, requires a smaller mesh width that will lead in the end to a higher computational cost. Instead, one can use approximate deconvolution (without decreasing the mesh size) to attain better accuracy. Such deconvolution methods have been considered recently in many studies that show the efficiency of this approach. For smooth flows, periodic boundary conditions and van Cittert deconvolution operator of order N, the expected accuracy is α 2 N + 2 . In a bounded domain, such results are valid only in case special conditions are satisfied. In more general conditions, the author has recently proved that, in the case of the ADM, the expected accuracy of the finite element method with Taylor–Hood elements and Crank–Nicolson time stepping method is Δ t 2 + h 2 + K N α 2 , where the constant K < 1 depends on the ratio α / h , which is assumed constant. In this study, we present the extension of the result to the rest of the models