Children’s exceptional minds as socio-economic resource

This special issue entitled «Managing giftedness in contemporary society» analyzes how the category of giftedness has been mobilized in different areas —education, mental testing, and childrearing— to manage, classify, nurture, and even exploit commercially children in Europe and America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the first decades of the twentieth century, educators, pedagogical experts, pedologists, and psychologists, together with some physicians, drew attention to the existence of children whose intelligence and talents exceeded the average.

CONVEYOR MODEL AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE REAL NUMBERS ADDER ON FPGA

The purpose of these studies is to develop an effective structure and internal functional blocks of a digital computing device – an adder, that performs addition and subtraction operations on floating- point numbers presented in IEEE Std 754TM-2008 format. To improve the characteristics of the adder, the circuit uses conveying, that is, division into levels, each of which performs a specific action on numbers. This allows you to perform addition / subtraction operations on several numbers at the same time, which increas- es the performance of calculations, and also makes the adder suitable for use in modern synchronous cir- cuits. Each block of the conveyor structure of the adder on FPGA is synthesized as a separate project of a digital functional unit, and thus, the overall task is divided into separate subtasks, which facilitates experi- mental testing and phased debugging of the entire device. Experimental studies were performed using EDA Quartus II. The developed circuit was modeled on FPGAs of the Stratix III and Cyclone III family. An ana- logue of the developed circuit was a functionally similar device from Altera. A comparative analysis is made and reasoned conclusions are drawn that the performance improvement is achieved due to the conveyor structure of the adder. Implementation of arithmetic over the floating-point numbers on programmable logic integrated cir- cuits, in particular on FPGA, has such advantages as flexibility of use and low production costs, and also provides the opportunity to solve problems for which there are no ready-made solutions in the form of stand- ard devices presented on the market. The developed adder has a wide scope, since most modern computing devices need to process floating-point numbers. The proposed conveyor model of the adder is quite simple to implement on the FPGA and can be an alternative to using built-in multipliers and processor cores in cases where the complex functionality of these devices is redundant for a specific task.

The Imperfect Child

This chapter examines the crucial role that the diagnostics and treatment of ‘imperfections’ in the child population played in the formation and growth of Russian child science. It emphasizes the plurality, indeterminacy, and intermixing of diagnostic regimes, which led to ambiguity and vagueness in the definition of infringements of the norm in child development. Analysis opens by considering the emergence of mental testing in Russia as a new means of measuring development and diagnosing deviations from the ‘normal’. It first looks at the fostering of mental testing as a purported ‘scientific’ substitute for school assessments and thus, potentially, a new way of framing educational norms. It then scrutinizes the use of mental testing on the boundaries between neuropsychiatric and psycho-educational diagnostics. The chapter then shifts from problems of diagnostics to those of therapeutics, by looking at the creation of special establishments for ‘defective’ children in the late tsarist period. While medical discourse dominated this domain, it ultimately generated hybrid forms of therapeutics, institutionalized as ‘curative pedagogy’, which stretched across medical, pedagogical, and correctional domains. The chapter concludes with an examination of pathologizations of children in the context of large-scale social upheavals, such as revolution and war. It examines two exemplary case studies in this context—the ‘epidemic’ of ‘child suicides’ in the wake of Russia’s 1905 revolution and the moral panic surrounding the effects of total war on the psychology of the Russian child during the First World War.

Afterword

In 1905 French physiological psychologist Alfred Binet pioneered a “metrical scale of intelligence,” a practical and easily administered system for establishing a child’s capacity to perform complex mental processes. Binet did not intend his intelligence test—or the score that the test yielded—to be anything more than a method to identify, and thus to assist, children who experienced difficulties with learning. When the concept of IQ arrived on American shores, it rapidly became racialized. That the racialization of mental testing came so powerfully to thrive in the United States was due in no small part, as Stephen Jay Gould has shown, to the growing prestige and influence of the discipline of psychology in the early decades of the twentieth century, the consequences of which live on – however inadvertently – into the twenty-first century

Sociobiology

Following Darwin, biologists and social scientists have periodically been drawn to the theory of natural selection as the source of explanatory insights about human behaviour and social institutions. The combination of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian theory, which did so much to substantiate the theory of evolution in the life sciences, however, has made recurrent adoption of a biological approach to the social sciences controversial. Excesses and errors in social Darwinism, eugenics and mental testing have repeatedly exposed evolutionary approaches in the human sciences to criticism. Sociobiology is the version of Darwinism in social and behavioural science that became prominent in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Philosophical problems of sociobiology include challenges to the explanatory relevance of Darwinian theory for human behaviour and social institutions, controversies about whether natural selection operates at levels of organization above or below the individual, questions about the meaning of the nature–nurture distinction, and disputes about Darwinism’s implications for moral philosophy.

Rereading ‘Biogenetics of Race and Class’ 50 Years Later

In 1968, long before the publication of Stephen J. Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve, or Arthur Jensen's Bias in Mental Testing, Irving Gottesman published a book chapter that addressed head-on the issues that would define the relationship between the genetics of social behavior and large-scale social theory for the next 50 years. That he could do so with his characteristic scholarly thoroughness and scientific tough-mindedness without once lapsing into regressive hereditarianism is a testimony to the scope of his scientific knowledge and the generosity of his intellectual spirit.

Race, Work, and Disability in Progressive Era United States

Throughout U.S. history, the production of difference, whether along racial or disability lines, has been inextricably tied to the imperatives of labor economy. From the plantations of the antebellum era through the assembly lines and trenches of early-twentieth-century America, ideologies of race and disability have delineated which peoples could do which kinds of work. The ideologies and identities of race, work, and the “fit” ’ or “unfit” body informed Progressive Era labor economies. Here the processes of racializing or disabling certain bodies are charted from turn-of-the-century actuarial science, which monetized blacks as a degenerate, dying race, through the standardized physical and mental testing and rehabilitation methods developed by the U.S. army during World War I. Efforts to quantify, poke, prod, or mend black bodies reshaped contemporary understandings of labor, race, the state, and the working body.

Numbering the mind

During the interwar years psychologists Louis Leon Thurstone and Rensis Likert produced newly standardized forms of questionnaires. Both built on developments in mental testing, including the use of restricted sets of answers and the emergence of statistical techniques, to create questionnaires that employed numerical scaling. This transformation in shape of questionnaires was intimately tied up with both psychologists’ nominal subject of investigation: attitudes. Efforts to render psychology a socially valuable and influential science spurred psychologists to create sophisticated and increasingly precise means of measuring social attitudes. Reducing mental dispositions to mere numbers on a scale, these developments also initiated new relationships between psychology and the public. Rather than engage a wide spectrum of the public directly in the research process, questionnaire research was limited to those within academic circles. Even so, research with questionnaires aimed to comment on attitudes in the public more broadly. The kind of ‘thin description’ afforded by numerical scales, though used to measure individual psychological subjects, afforded psychologists the opportunity to craft their vision of an increasingly attitudinal public, one positioned as best governed with the aid of psychological expertise.