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Компьютерная техника

Harris J. Using a Computer to Assist in the Teaching and Learning of Science. Aspects of Education // J. of the Institute of Education. 1980. Nr 12.

In this paper the author discusses examples of computer - based work in science. In his opinion they can be used to enrich science courses and can lead to effective learning. The author believes that the computer based work in the classroom should involve students in an ac­ tive way, and this active involvement is one of the essentials for learn­ ing.

Most o f the examples referred to are taken from projects developed for use at secondary school level in this country. They do not require any programming skill on the part of students or teachers. Most are intended to be used interac­ tively by a small group at a printing or visual display temrinal, though some should be adapted for demonstration to a larger group, and a few might be used, though less effec­ tively, in batch mode.

ПРИЛОЖЕНИЕ

T e x t 1

Archeology as Long-Term Ethnography

Michael A. American Anthropologist // New Series. 1991. Vol. 93, № 2. P. 308-321.

As a sample of past settlements and activities, the ar­ cheological record produces an incomplete picture of prehis­ toric behavior. Recognizing this, most approachesto prehis­ toric hunter-gatherers first assume a patterned seasonal round, as presented in many ethnographies, which is then transformed into a static archeological record by various cultural and natural processes (Schiffer 1976). The resulting record is then presumed to be biased by differential visibility: larger camps of longer occupation will be most visible, and camps in locations such as floodplains will be deeply buried and rarely discovered.

One other biasing factor that has received less attention is the tendency for many hunter-gatherers to show behavioral changes from one year to the next. Because the resolution of our chronologies is not adequate, we cannot normally isolate sites from different years. In most cases the archeological re­ cord is an aggregate of many years, and often, an aggregate of different yearly patterns. In order to understand the nature of this aggregate, we need to understand the structure of be­ havioral variability that led to its creation.

A major trend in current anthropological thought is an emphasis on variability. Cordell and Plog (1979) stress the need to go beyond normative descriptions and emphasize the articulation of variability in writing culture histories. Plog (1984) points out that changing patterns of variability can

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greatly affect the resolution of culture chronologies, that con­ structing neat, cultural boxes isolating discrete and homoge­ neous entities in time and space may be more difficult in some periods than others. As Winterhalder (1980), Slobodkin and Rapoport (1974), and Leonard and Jones (1987) all em­ phasize, an appreciation of behavioral variability is essential to the understanding of human adaptation and cultural evolu­ tion: variation provides the raw material of evolution by natu­ ral selection.

Consequently, there is solid methodological and theoreti­ cal justification for focusing attention on behavioral variabil­ ity. My concern here is with year-to-year variability, which may derive from several causes, including environmental fluctuations and the dynamics of human-resource interactions (Winterhalder et al. 1988). Temporal variability in the envi­ ronment has emerged in recent years as a major factor in much theoretical work. Buffering responses to such variabil­ ity have been suggested to contribute to resource choices (Lovis 1986), the origins of agriculture (Ford 1977), patterns of exchange (Wiessner 1977) and sharing (Cashdan 1985; Winterhalder 1990), and the development of political com­ plexity (Price and Brown 1985). Patterns of sedentism and mobility (Kelly 1985) and territorial and social boundaries (Dyson-Hudson and Smith 1978) have also been claimed to reflect, in part, the nature of environmental fluctuations and their predictability.

Given the importance of this factor, it is regrettable that environmental variability is so difficult to monitor prehistorically. The resolution of our environmental reconstructions is in most cases too poor, unless we have access to detailed tree-ring sequences or other exceptional direct data. We must

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ask whether there is indirect information that we can utilize to evaluate the types and degree of past environmental fluc­ tuations, perhaps in the archeological record of settlement patterns and activities, without becoming involved in circular reasoning about cause and effect.

So we face two related problems. We want to look at be­ havioral variability, but lack the chronological precision to do so. We also want to monitor environmental variability, but rarely have the necessary tools. In order to begin to solve these problems, we need to examine the effects of yearly environ­ mental variation on the structure of settlement patterns and, subsistence and on the archeological record, bi doing this, we need to go beyond our emphasis on (or perception of) short­ term stability in the ethnographic record as a model for our en­ deavors, to see the archeological record as a long-term ethnog­ raphy of sorts, with its own characteristics and potential.

A number of archeologists are doing just this. Brown (1986) has discussed biases in the archeological record that result from differential visibility of variable behavior. In the Great Basin, both Thomas (1973) and Bettinger (1977) have examined the relationship between variability of behavior and the archeological record, including using simulations of re­ source fluctuations to predict site use and artifact discard. Yesner (1976) has examined the implications of population fluctuations for patterns of site use and diet breadth. A differ­ ent approach has been taken by Binford (1982), who empha­ sizes the potential variation in the use of single sites through time caused by changes in organizational positioning. I hope to contribute to this endeavor by exploring patterns of yearly variation in environment and behavior in the ethnographic literature and by suggesting implications of these patterns for

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our interpretation of the archeological record. In so doing, I am adopting an explicitly ecological approach, assuming that many aspects of hunter-gatherer behavior are directly re­ sponding to environmental factors.

T e x t 2

Campaign Craft

The Strategies, Tactics, andArt ofPolitical

Campaign Management

Daniel M. Sh. Praeger series in Political Communication. Westport, Connecticut; London, s. a.

The rate of technological change in the latter part of the twentieth century has been . nothing short of stunning. Only thirty years ago black-and-white television was the rage; today every home in America has at least one color set, usually boasting hundreds of channels. Want to watch a live cricket game in Scotland? - no problem! Sitting on this author's desk is a machine thousands of times more powerful than the first computer developed only a few decades ago, weighing thirty tons. Cordless telephones, once faddish, have been replaced by cellular phones - now standard ware for the upwardly mobile. By utilizing satellite triangulation, hikers can find their way out of the woods with a hand held global positioning system (GPS). Of course, the use of fiber optics is changing every­ thing: four billion bits of information can be sent over the in­ formation superhighway at once - that means three copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica per second. And these changes represent just the tip of the iceberg.

As we might expect, the technology revolution is chang­ ing American social fabric as well: how we teach our chil­ dren, converse with one another, and entertain ourselves; and

45

what we do for a living and what are our expectations about the future. Less obvious, but no less profound, are adjust­ ments to our system of government. This notion may seem odd to some, since the basic structure of our system has re­ mained about the same over the last two centuries. Yet the Framers would not recognize a core element of the process: the way we now elect public officials.

Regardless of one's precise view of democracy, few dispute that elections are not at the center of the process. How candidates are offered to voters and the way in which citizens structure and process this information speaks volumes about the democratic character of a popular system. "Elections can .produce high drama or infinite tedium, but they are the key institutions of rep­ resentative democracy" (Butler and Ranney 1992,1).

In this light, it can be argued that the contemporary elec­ tion process represents one of the most significant transfor­ mations in our nation's history. In the recent past, campaigns were conducted by volunteers, usually local party activists and the candidate's, network of friends and family. Timehonored methods were used, mostly face-to-face canvasing and a modest range of printed material (e. g. pamphlets, posters, and newspaper advertisements). By the mid-1960s, many of the skills and tactics used by product marketing specialists began to appear in presidential and congressional elections. Carefully conducted random sample surveys, for example, proved to be a better and more cost-effective means of identifying and responding to the wishes of voters than simply keeping a finger to the wind.

Today, pure grassroots campaigning seems archaic for all but the most local races. Even town and city council races are utilizing expensive, high-tech methods and the tricks of

46

the last decade are quickly becoming passe. Instead of con­ ducting large-scale polls, focus groups are frequently util­ ized; rather than sending out printed direct mail, video tapes are distributed; satellite teleconferences have replaced smoke-filled rooms; and radio beepers and television satel­ lite feeds may be more important than written press releases. Simply put, no other area of American politics has so drasti­ cally changed over the last few decades than the way in which candidates pursue votes.

Changes in campaign technologies have had, and will continue to have, a serious impact on governance. For one, the importance of money in the election process has been well documented. Candidates with enough resources can by­ pass traditional screening mechanisms, such as party support and other ways of "paying dues." Those without sufficient funds rarely stand a chance, particularly if they are chal­ lenging an incumbent. Political parties, the center of cam­ paign activity for over 150 years, have taken a back seat to campaign consultants and political action committees (PACs), and they are struggling to regain relevance. Without viable parties, many suggest, there is serious doubt as to whether the structure of our system can endure.

The type of campaign information provided to voters has also changed. We are now inundated with thirty-second spots and ten-second bytes. Perhaps this is behind the in­ creased level of cynicism and distrust among voters, and a corresponding decrease in turnout at elections, but at the very least the type of campaign information citizens receive these days is much different than it was in the past. Image has replaced substance. Moreover, the volume and tone of negative campaign advertising appear to be at a fever pitch.

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The media seem more interested in who is ahead in the polls and in how each campaign is being run, than in the policy stands of the candidates. There is even some evidence to suggest that the type of person willing to undergo the rigors of Modem campaigning has changed - leading to a much different crop of public officials and a new approach to gov­ ernance (Ehrenhalt 1991).

Modern campaign technologies have also begun to spread to Central and South America, as well as to the emerging democracies throughout Eastern Europe. For citi­ zens in many of these countries, high-tech campaigning will be the only electoral process they have known. How this will impact the development of these systems is only speculation at this point. Surely the process and the result will be differ­ ent from the American experience.

T e x t 3

BOFIT Discussion Papers 9. 2005

Anatolyev S.

A Ten-Year Retrospection of the Behavior

ofRussian Stock Returns

In the handful papers that consider the Russian financial market at the aggregate level (e. g., Gelos and Sahay, 2001; Jithendranathan and Kravchenko, 2002; Lucey and Voronk­ ova, 2004; Hayo and Kutan, 2005), it is generally presumed that, apart from the period of the Russian financial crisis of 1998 and possibly a few other crises, relationships in the market have been temporally stable. At the same time, it is documented that relationships in developing financial mar­ kets, particularly those in post-communist countries, have evolved differently (e. g. Zalewska-Mitura and Hall, 1999; Rockinger and Urga, 2000).

48

In this paper, we conduct a systematic investigation of three aspects of the Russian stock market at the aggregate level over the past ten years. First, we study how various macroeco­ nomic and financial variables, both global and domestic, have impacted Russian stock returns and how this impact has changed over time. We specially construct a variable to reflect the political riskiness or attractiveness of the Russian stock market. Second, we track indicators of integration of the Rus­ sian stock market with world financial markets. Third, we take a look at its efficiency and the profitability of trading by a vir­ tual investor. To accomplish these goals, we compute various statistics of interest within a window of one year of data, with this window moving in time from early 1995 to late 2004-early 2005. The' figures showing how the statistics of interest vary across time provide an interesting picture of the development of the stock market in Russia. We find tracking the statistics of interest over time in this manner is better suited to the constantly changing environment of a developing financial market than the popular methodology of identifying struc­ tural breaks at unknown dates developed by Bai and Perron (1998), which is often applied to developed markets (e. g. Rapach and Wohar, 2004).

In our analysis, we strive to use the simplest parametric models (and even nonparametric methods), because, in our view, the strong assumptions underlying, say, the ARCH mod­ els used in Rockinger and Urga (2000) and Hayo and Kutan (2005), do not necessarily hold in a constantly changing envi­ ronment. Moreover, our modest sample sizes preclude reliable inference of complicated parametric models. For the particular study of how stock returns have been determined, we use a lin­ ear regression analysis.

To see how the degree of market integration evolved over the period, we construct nonparametric "realized cor­

49

relation" measures of co-movements from high-frequency (daily) returns data.

Finally, to study the question of efficiency of the Russian stock market, we employ a nonparametric test of mean predict­ ability, and look at the profitability of trading by a virtual investor.

The results yield substantial evidence that the Russian stock market has been afflicted by considerable structural in­ stability, and that this instability has not been confined to one­ time events such as the documented financial crises. Moreover, the influence of certain factors on Russian stock returns such as oil prices and foreign exchange rates has diminished, while the influence of other factors such as US stock prices and interna­ tional and domestic interest rates has increased recently. The explanatory power of domestic and global factors has fluctu­ ated appreciably, with the regression R2 taking values from mere few percent to as much as 60%. There is no clear positive trend in the degree of integration of the Russian stock market with other stock markets, but in recent years the spillovers coming from other stock markets to the Russian market have increased, while spillovers in the opposite direction having di­ minished. The co-movements of Russian and world sectoral stock markets also exhibit a varying pattern. They are quite high most of the time, although not necessarily greater for en­ ergy markets. The weak-form market efficiency of the Russian stock market is confirmed, and the trading of a virtual investor using publicly observable information is not particularly profit­ able, even under the assumption of no market limitations and during the periods of strong profitability in 1998 and 1999.

The paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we describe the data. In section 3, we conduct the analysis of factors influ­ encing Russian stock returns, and the evolution of their impact through the years. In section 4, we analyze the evolution of correlations between stock returns in the Russian and other in-

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