Book
Антропоцентрические науки: инновационный взгляд на образование и развитие личности: материалы 1-й Международной научно-практической конференции

In this book Lee Rudolph brings together international contributors who combine psychological and mathematical perspectives to analyse how qualitative mathematics can be used to create models of social and psychological processes. Bridging the gap between the fields with an imaginative and stimulating collection of contributed chapters, the volume updates the current research on the subject, which until now has been rather limited, focussing largely on the use of statistics.
Qualitative Mathematics for the Social Sciences contains a variety of useful illustrative figures, introducing readers from the social sciences to the rich contribution that modern mathematics has made to our knowledge of logic, structures, and dynamic systems. A beguiling array of conceptual systems, topological models and fractals are discussed which transcend the application of statistics, and bring a fresh perspective to the study of social representations.
The wide selection of qualitative mathematical methodologies discussed in this volume will be hugely valuable to higher-level undergraduate and postgraduate students of psychology, sociology and mathematics. It will also be useful for researchers, academics and professionals from the social sciences who want a firmer grasp on the use of qualitative mathematics.
Such crucial aspects of philosophical and psychological conception of scientific work of prominent domestic philosopher and psychologist Sergey Leonidovich Rubinstein as problems of Man and Personality, ontological basis of their essence and means of existence and self-realization are analyzed. Created by the scientists school consecutively developed his sophisticated and profound ideas, integrating separately elaborated aspects (abilities, needs, motivation, consciousness, self-consciousness, thinking as personality problems), widening the context of their researches. Rubinstein's approach due to his disciples and followers, due to the constructivism of his ideas itself holds a leading position in Russian psychology.
Opinions of professors and chairmen of chambers of appeals on the quality of teaching in universities' law schools in imperial Russia in the late 19th - early 20th century are discussed.
This paper presents a novel testing approach for model-based design tools, termed GraphOTK, and applies it to the optimizing component of a code generator for Simulink and Stateflow models.
The book contains the official proceedings of The Asian Conference on Psychology & the Behavioral Sciences 2013.
The paper proposes a cultural-historical periodisation of V. P. Zinchenko's life and activity, presenting an integral outline of his interests and his diverse contributions to contemporary science and culture. The principal aspects of V.P. Zinchenko's creative approach to science are described in comparison with encyclopaedic approach of the Renaissance era. The paper also presents a view of his original philosophic and psychological system set against the backdrop of the 20-21st century human sciences, and its more specific aspects, including his developments of the activity theory in general psychology, and his systemic psychological theories describing the interactions between image and action, intelligence and emotion, consciousness and reflexive activity, creativity and intuition. V.P. Zinchenko's scientific works can be characterised as a union of fundamental research and its practical implementation in the fields of systems engineering and management, ergonomics and design, pedagogy and education, literature and culture.
Combinatorial abilities are fundamental to experimental thinking. The aim of this work was to design didactic objects that will stimulate preschoolers’ experimental thinking and to study young children’s thinking in relation to these objects. Six heuristic rules for the design of didactic objects are specified, and the responses of 623 children aged between 3 and 7 to the didactic objects are described in this paper. The first two calculating devices required rods to be pressed simultaneously for successive windows to be lit up or made visible. A total of 30 five year olds played with these for 20 minutes, and were seen to perform a logical series of actions in order to understand the device’s function. Half of the children counted the presses and thereby understood the way the device functioned. The second device was designed to allow all possible combinations of four variables. Sixty children between the ages of 4 and 6 played with the device for 20 minutes. A total of 88% of the children found all possible combinations of the device, with no differences between age groups in the strategies used. The third device had a matrix of shutters opened by buttons arrayed along two edges. In the first mode, single buttons presses opened the nearest windows and button presses along both edges opened windows on coordinates determined by the two buttons. In the second mode, single button presses opened nothing and simultaneous button presses along two edges opened windows on coordinates determined by the two buttons. Ninety children between the ages of 5 and 10 played with the device in the second mode for 20 minutes. The children used scientific strategies to discover the device’s function in the following proportions: 20% at five years, 50% at six years and 93% at 10 years. Eighteen children between the ages of 4 and 6 played with the device in the second mode. They played in pairs, and each child was assigned a row of buttons, thus requiring co-operation to open the windows requiring two coordinated button presses. All the children were eventually successful in the joint experimentation. The fourth device had 16 windows and eight buttons, which lit up the windows when pressed in logical combinations. A total of 20 five-year-old children were trained on this device to use combinations of button presses to light up selected windows. These children were then allowed to explore the third device in second mode by themselves. The trained five year olds all used scientific strategies in their search for the third device’s combinations. The study showed that preschoolers can combine actions and discover hidden relationships, and that the didactic objects can be used to develop children’s thinking.
Institutions affect investment decisions, including investments in human capital. Hence institutions are relevant for the allocation of talent. Good market-supporting institutions attract talent to productive value-creating activities, whereas poor ones raise the appeal of rent-seeking. We propose a theoretical model that predicts that more talented individuals are particularly sensitive in their career choices to the quality of institutions, and test these predictions on a sample of around 95 countries of the world. We find a strong positive association between the quality of institutions and graduation of college and university students in science, and an even stronger negative correlation with graduation in law. Our findings are robust to various specifications of empirical models, including smaller samples of former colonies and transition countries. The quality of human capital makes the distinction between educational choices under strong and weak institutions particularly sharp. We show that the allocation of talent is an important link between institutions and growth.