Academicus International Scientific Journal

9-28

Authors: Franco Ferrarotti

We live in a technical age. That is to say, modern societies have adopted technological innovation as a guide-principle. But technique is a perfection without an aim. It can only control its internal operations. It is the eternal return of the identical. Hence, a general feeling of social disorientation and anxiety. Moreover, in a nuclear age such as ours, there is no guarantee of survival for mankind. From a diachronic historical process, we are in a synchronic one. All cultures are to be considered at the same level. The only way out is dialogue, intercultural relations, based on a concept of «cultural co-tradition».

59-74

Authors: Atalia Onitiu, Diana Stere

The present research aims to investigate the perception of the parent - personal assistant on his/her profession, but also on his/her personal life, with the aim of identifying the challenges, but also the opportunities that this status brings in the lives of the parents. Starting from the purpose of our research, two objectives were pursued, namely to identify the challenges and opportunities of the personal assistant position and to analyze the parents’ perception regarding the decision to become a personal assistant. The study was designed as a qualitative research approach, the interview method was considered the most appropriate to serve the research objectives. The research took place in a day center that offers recovery services to children with disabilities in Timișoara (Romania), the subjects of our research being exclusively mothers. The research revealed that the decision to become a personal assistant for the child with disabilities is dictated by the affection for the child and the sense of duty towards him as a parent, despite the financial well-being previously ensured by a well-paid job. What impacts the respondents’ lives is not the new job, but the confrontation with the child’s disability. If in some cases the disability was accepted relatively easily, the parents offering each other support, the level of cohesion increasing and benefiting of help from the extended family, we also identified a situation where the family fell apart. The only need claimed by the parents is that of counselling, the respondents complainings were on the difficulties they have to manage with regard to stress, fatigue and lack of free time.

89-109

Authors: James J Chriss, Miyuki F Tedor

Since the early 1980s, specialized problem-solving courts known as drug courts emerged in the United States as a response to the backlog of drug and alcohol-related cases plaguing the U.S. criminal justice system. In a few decades, with the seeming success of the drug court in helping AOD defendants achieve sobriety while reducing recidivism, the drug court model has achieved international prominence as well. This paper discusses a pilot study which seeks to analyze the feasibility of connecting a website, drughelp.care, developed at the host institution of the co-authors, to the everyday operations of local drug courts. Talcott Parsons’ AGIL schema is utilized as a conceptual template for organizing our thinking about how the website could improve services to administrators and clients according to the unique functional elements of the drug court.

121-129

Authors: Laura Gómez García

Road violence is a major problem that does not yet have a universally accepted definition. It is important to consider violence in the context of the road in order to prevent it. Road criminology focuses on the study and prevention of traffic- related deviations and problems generated after and accident. There is a lack of general knowledge about the reality of crime in the road environment; the society is not aware that certain behaviours of harassment and aggression cause risky situations and fatal results. It is essential to address the problem, defining and delimiting it to combat it. Education is once again essential to prevent crime and to put an end to social permissiveness around unacceptable behaviour related to road safety.

142-168

Authors: Ksenia Dishkant

Conflict is a costly endeavor. However, conflict itself is of unobservable magnitude which makes statistical inference problematic. The long-run economic cost of conflict is calculated as the sum of the contemporaneous costs and the discounted value of future costs. Typically, researchers use War or Militarized Interstate Conflicts as independent, discrete events to calculate its contemporaneous effect and then introduce a time binary variable to estimate the lagged effects since the end of the event. The conflict datasets accurately recognize the dates of the core conflict. However, they ignore the possibility that a lack of militarized conflict does not necessarily mean that issues have been settled, thus we are underestimating overall costs. The present study estimates the economic costs of rivalry. The international rivalry cycle is a process in which a pair of states create and sustain a relationship of atypical hostility for some period. This paper is part of the renaissance of research activity in the applied economics of international trade. The gravity model is used to determine the economic cost of Rivalry on bilateral trade using panel data. At the aggregate level, strategic and enduring rivalries have a negative and significant effect on trade flow. The results show that the total effect of rivalry accounts for48%-57% of the fall in bilateral trade volume, which is equivalent in cost to 19% of the ad-valorem tax. If the rivalry is disaggregated by claim type: spatial, positional, and mixed, then we observe that the cost varies substantially with the type. Spatial rivalry explains 16%-26% of the fall in trade volume, while positional and mixed rivalry explain 49%-57% and 77%-82%, respectively.

191-199

Authors: Dalila Karakaҫi

The Grand Tour played an important role in the education of the aristocratic British youth. Several requirements served for its classical qualification. The Tour lasted from some months to some years. Travelers’ individual choices, spread of diseases, priority to special places, as well as historical events shaped the travel plan. The Tour changed its classical denotation in the 19th century, reflecting a radical social transformation in the British society. The middle class would be engaged in travelling beyond the borders of the British territory. The Romantic traveler of the 19th century differers from the classic traveler of the Grand Tour, stressing heroism and bravery, avoiding scenic descriptions. These travelers resembled the explorer. A term introduced by the Romantics. The dense narrative produced in this period would permit the British public to become familiar with unalike people, experiences, and lands. There are five travellers that visited the Albanian land in the first half of 19th century, during British Romanticims. Dodwell, Hughes, Martin Leake, Urquhart and Best published works mentioning the Albania theme, people, culture, nature, geography. Dodwell’s work is significant because of classical archeology. T.S. Hughes gives information about Ali Pasha and his mystical figure. Topographical data on the Albanian population, customs, and traditions are introduced in Leake’s book. Urquhart looks at the Orient from a philosophical viewpoint. A work about hunting, natural beauty, customs, traditions is written by Best. Therefore, their books give essential information about the country in the first half of this century.

219-223

Authors: Michele Marsonet

There are many pragmatisms, and it is a little misleading to present this variegated trend of thought as if it were a monolithic doctrine. The founding fathers, too, were all but unanimous. Peirce was not in agreement with James on many issues. Dewey, in turn, did not like various aspects of both Peirce’s and James’ philosophy, while C.I. Lewis’ views on logic were quite different from those held by Dewey. It should not be surprising, then, to find the same amount of disagreement in contemporary neo-pragmatism, where Rescher and Rorty, who both define themselves pragmatists, display different opinions on most subjects. I shall draw some comparisons between the ideas of these two thinkers.