When the Soviet Union collapsed a transition process started in Eastern Europe. This included a number of reforms to adapt the educational system to the new requirements of the job market. To assess the educational systems in Eastern Europe, this paper takes a look at the gap in PISA test scores between F inland, the best performing country, and seven Eastern European countries, as well as, bet...

The flora of Russian Far East contains approximately 500 medicinal plants that have been used in traditional and conventional medicines. This paper is focused on plants used in traditional and conventional medicines as adaptogenic, stimulating, geriatric and antidepressant plants.

I had the good fortune to be appointed in 1973 to the first Wolfson Foundation Visiting Professorship in General Practice. The appointment entitles the holder, who must be a Fellow or Member of the Royal College of General Practitioners in active practice in the United Kingdom or Eire, to spend four to six weeks in any part of the world. The terms of reference are wide and include consideration...

LETTERS Cost effective strategy to risk stratify acute chest pain cases at a district general hospital I read with interest the paper by Miller et al. 1 The " high risk " patients with acute coronary syndrome are kept in hospital these days for a possible early intervention. This is in line with the FRICS-II recommendations. One of the fundamental principles of the National Service Framework (N...

New records of water mites of the family Torrenticolidae Piersig, 1902 (Acari: Hydrachnidia) from streams in South Korea and the Russian Far East are presented. Detailed descriptions or redescrptions are provided for eight species of the genera Torrenticola Piersig, 1896 and Monatractides K. Viets 1926. Two species are described as new to science: Torrenticola kimichungi sp. n. and Monatractide...

This paper describes our third participation in an evaluation campaign involving the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages (NTCIR-6). Our participation is motivated by three objectives: 1) study the retrieval performances of various probabilistic and language models for these languages; 2) compare the relative retrieval effectiveness of a combined “unigram & bigram” indexing scheme combined wi...

1 What is so interesting about the Russian Far East?...............................................................1 2 How it can happen...............................................................................................................3 2.1 Public justification of Chinese immigration .................................................................4 2.2 Economic interests..............