Secular Improvements in Cognitive Aging: Contribution of Education, Health, and Routine Activities

Objectives Limited evidence exists regarding the reasons for secular changes in cognitive functioning over historical time. Thus, we examined potential explanatory factors for changes in cognitive speed, a central dimension of cognitive functioning. Methods Population-based data of middle-aged and older adults from Germany ( N = 5443) was used with baseline participants from 2002 to 2014, comparing the time periods 2002–2014. Results Cognitive speed improved in middle-aged adults (40–65) and older adults (66+). In both age groups, increases were partly explained by education, employment status, volunteering status, routine activities, and physical functioning. Changes in education were more important in explaining increases in older than in middle-aged adults, whereas changes in health were more important for explaining increases in middle-aged adults. Conclusions Cognitive speed increased in both age groups over historical time. Education, employment, volunteering, routine activities, and health were all important in explaining these changes, but their importance differed between age groups.

Strengths and weaknesses of S-curves

For the last 22 years I have been fitting logistic S-curves to data points of historical time series at an average rate of about 2–3 per day. This amounts to something between 15,000 and 20,000 fits. Combined with the 40,000 fits of the Monte Carlo study we did with Alain Debecker to quantify the uncertainties in logistic fits [1], probably qualifies me for an entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the man who carried out the greatest number of logistic fits.It hasn't all been fun and games. There have also been blood and tears and not only from human errors. There have been what I came to recognize as “misbehaviors” of reality. I have seen cases where an excellent fit and ensuing forecast were invalidated by later data. But well-established logistic growth reflects the action of a natural law. A disproved forecast is tantamount to violating this law. A law that becomes violated is not much of a law. What is going on? There is something here that needs to be sorted out.

National Identity and the Associative-Verbal Network: on a Hypothesis of Yu.N. Karaulov

The article presents the results of the study dedicated to native speakers sites of memory associated with key images of the Russian national culture. The investigation was inspired by the work of French historians Les lieus de mmoire (1984), whose ideas Yuri Nikolayevich Karaulov applied to the Russian Associative Dictionary (RAD). The study was initiated with the hypothesis elaborated by Yu. N. Karaulov that the Russian national memory could be studied through associative dictionaries. This provision is based on the linguistic personality concept formulated by Yu. N. Karaulov that is regarded as a personality expressed in a language / text and can be reconstructed on the basis of linguistic means. The texts that a language personality produces reflect the peculiarities of a persons vision of the environment (worldview). The hypothesis is tested on associative fields of the toponym Moscow and the lexemes war and Sunday using the data of several associative dictionaries compiled from 1988 to the current moment, i.e., the Russian Associative Dictionary, and Yu. N. Karaulov among the authors, as well as a number of later dictionaries developed on the basis of massive associative experiments carried out in the regions of Russia. The content and structural analyses of the associative fields of stimuli Moscow , war , and Sunday show that the associative material largely reflects the discursive space of the language personality and its functioning in texts that reproduce these sites of memory in a precedent form. The latter, however, can be found as various types of reactions (predications) of a non-stereotyped nature. Therefore, the sought-for data exist in different guises, obviously depending on the historical time and the discursive experience of native speakers of a language/culture, as well as on the region of their residence. This study confirms the psycholinguistic concept of meaning (including the associative one) as a sociocultural phenomenon.

Implementasi Aplikasi Sistem Peramalan Persedian Barang Menggunakan Metode Single Moving Average Berbasis Web

Forecasting is an estimate of future demand based on several forecasting variables based on historical time series or a process of using historical data (past data) that has been owned to use this model and use this model to estimate future conditions.The Ivori mini market SME group is known to be a mini market that sells daily necessities. The goods provided by the ivori mini market are not focused on only one type of goods, but include all types of goods. Ivori mini market often runs out of stock because there is no inventory planning. The main purpose of making this application is to assist employees in determining inventory planning that must be provided next month. While the method used to make this forecast is a single moving average, one of the time series methods in forecasting. Single Moving Average is a forecasting method that is done by collecting a group of observed values, looking for the average value as a forecast for the future period. The result of this forecasting is to predict the number of sales that will occur in the coming month.

The Return of the Suppressed and (Palaeo)Balkanology: Vojin Matić, Vladimir Dvorniković i Dragoslav Srejović

Numerous researchers into the history and prehistory of the Balkans – Niko Županić, Vladimir Dvorniković, Veselin Čajkanović, Miloje Vasić, Milan Budimir, Miloš Đurić, Vojin Matić, Milutin Garašanin, Dragoslav Srejović – have considered this region as the area in which cultural, linguistic, or material forms never really die out, although they constantly change. In the writings of these authors, an invisible (sometimes historical) thread is established between the past and the present of the Balkans, along which the previously forgotten forms can always come back, and the long suppressed cultural forms can resurface. A distinctive trope is thus constructed, according to which the past of the Balkans is seen as a dark repository of cultural, religious, or psychological contents, emerging again at the times of social crisis – the trope of the return of the supressed. The author here argues that this trope is in its essence psychoanalytical: it belongs to a thought system, a hermeneutics originating in the 1930s, parallel to the (palaeo)balcanological research, among the abovementioned authors. Some authors speak in explicitly psychoanalytical terms, and the text focuses on the three of them: Vojin Matić, Vladimir Dvorniković and Dragoslav Srejović. Vojin Matić was active over a long period from the 1930s to 1990s, and his work establishes a chronological structure of the psychoanalytical influences in the Serbian humanities. His palaeopsychology gave an explicitly psychoanalytical turn to the (palaeo)balkanological thought, in the search for the continuity of the psychological mechanisms towards which a subject can always regress. Karakterologija Jugoslovena by Vladimir Dvorniković marked the (palaeo)balkanological research before the WWII. Conceiving it as an explicitly psychoanalytical study, Dvorniković developed a classical “psychoanalytical vertical” – bottom/down/dark/subconscious, opposed to surface/up/light/conscious, along which the supressed “autochthonous” cultural layers surface. The interest of Dragoslav Srejović for human “behind” the archaeological material naturally led him towards psychoanalysis (or was induced by it). The explicitly psychoanalytical phase of his work is notable (late 1950s and early 1960s), to become a constant tendency of his later theoretical approach. Srejović added to the vertical constructed by Dvorniković the opposition of archaeological/historical time. It is argued here that with all the authors mentioned the psychoanalytical trope of the return of the suppressed is indubitable: the past of the Balkans is described as its dark subconscious, not recognizing time, and therefore able to emerge again into the conscious, the light, the surface.

How language learning and language use create linguistic structure

Languages persist through a cycle of learning and use: you learn a language through immersion in the language used in your linguistic community, and in using language to communicate you produce further linguistic data which others might learn from in turn. We know that languages change over historical time as a result of errors and innovations in these processes of learning and use; this paper reviews experimental and computational methods which have been developed to test the hypotheses that those same processes of learning and use are responsible for creating the fundamental structural properties shared by all human languages, including some of the design features that make language such a powerful tool for communication.

The formatting of space and time in totalitarian historical discourse

The subject of this article is the influence of socio-political engagement in non-democratic societies on the formation of scientific and historical discourse and on its further functioning and use for non-historical – political and educational purposes. It is analyzed not only from the point of view of the unique features inherent exclusively to totalitarianism, but rather as a derivative of socio-political requests for history that arise and are realized in any society, constantly becoming more complex over time. For Soviet totalitarianism, a characteristic feature of such requests was the absolutization of revolutions, which were interpreted as pivotal, milestone events that signified the main content of the progress of social development at literally all its stages. Because of this, Soviet historiography and the historiography of countries dependent on the USSR was characterized by attempts to “conceptually update the status” of a number of historical events, even those that preceded revolutions in their generally accepted meaning. In addition, an in-depth study of revolutions was characterized by the introduction of new terminology into scientific circulation and the identification of new elements of the division of historical time and space within revolutions.

Kittsteiner’s History Out of Joint

In this article, I portray both the “thinking historian” Heinz-Dieter Kittsteiner and his philosophical analysis of the unavailability of the historical process. In his book Out of Control (2004), Kittsteiner builds on Immanuel Kant’s concept of the historical sign to demonstrate how history is out of joint due to the contingent character of the historical process. This understanding demands a new theory of historical time and of historiographical practice, which I reconstruct through a close reading of a chapter of Kittsteiner’s book.