The Culture of the Deaf Community in the Czech Republic

Romana Mazerova. The Culture of the Deaf Community in the Czech Republic Mazerova set out to discover if the deaf community in the Czech Republic can be said to have its own culture and if so what this is. She began with a comprehensive survey of the history of the deaf from 1786 to the present day, identifying a major turning point in the exclusion of sign language from the education of the deaf around 1930, a move then reinforced in the communist period to the extent that teachers of the deaf had to sign a commitment not to use sign language in their lessons. She also noted the difference between so-called signed Czech, which is an exact translation of the spoken language, and Czech sign language, which has its own structure and even dialects. Following the historical research, Mazerova studied a range of Czech and foreign materials relating to the culture of the deaf, interviewed deaf people about their experiences in school, their participation in the activities of associations for the deaf, and their experiences as a deaf person in a hearing society (these interviews are recorded on video), and visited various associations, clubs and schools for the deaf throughout the country. She concluded that while deaf people share certain behaviours which are quite distinct from those of hearing Czechs, there is little sense of a community as such. The vast majority of deaf people were not born into the deaf community and while feel that they belong together, they do not identify themselves as part of a deaf community and do not work together as a community to achieve their goals.

Central Europe in the Process of European Integration. A Comparative Study of the Strategies of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia towards the Deepening and Widening of the European Union

Membership of the European Union U is usually seen as a strategic goal of the associated states of central and eastern Europe. At the beginning of the 1990s central European countries, where the economic and political transformation was relatively advanced, received preferential treatment from the European Community, which was starting to evolve a policy of differentiation. Podraza studied the strategies of four central European countries towards changes under way in the European Union, analysing several aspects for each case: (1) the process of political transformation (2) decision-making structures in the field of foreign policy and European integration (3) integration strategies: (a) main foreign policy priorities (b) application for membership of the European Union (c) the Commission option on each country (d) accession partnership, including a National Programme for the Adoption of the Acquis (NPAA) (e) regular Commission reports (f) accession negotiations

Economic and Social Changes in Czech Society after 1989: an Alternative View

The group presents an analysis of the development of the Czech society and economy during the 1990s. They believe that the Czech neo-liberal strategy of transformation led to a partial and uneven modernisation and that this strategy is unable to provide a firm basis for a complex process of modernisation. The increasing developmental problems encountered during 1996-1999 can be seen as empirical evidence of the inadequacy of the neo-liberal transformation strategy. These problems are connected to institutional shortcomings due to the excessive speed of privatisation, its form with certain important Czech innovations (particularly the voucher method and an attempt to resuscitate the Czech national capital) and with the overlooking of the importance of the legal framework and its enforcement. The overly hasty privatisation has created a type of 'recombinant property' which lacks the economic order necessary to stimulate efficiency in an atmosphere of prevailing social justice. A second reason for the present difficulties is the long-term lag behind the civilisation and cultural standards typical of the advanced European countries. The first steps of the Czech transformation concentrated mainly on changes in the institutions important for the distribution of power and wealth and largely neglected the necessity of deep-reaching modernisation of Czech society and the economy. The neo-liberal strategy created conditions conducive to predatory and speculative behaviour at the expense of creative behaviour. Inherited principles of egalitarianism combined with undeserved economic privileges survived and were reinforced by important new developments in the same direction. This situation hinders the assertion of meritocratic motivations. The group advocates the development and implementation of a complex strategy of modernisation based on deliberate reforms, institutional changes and restructuring on the basis of strategic planning, and structural and regional policies which stress the role of cultivation of the institutional order and of the most important factors of economic growth and development.

Paleoenvironmental reconstructions from cave sediments of the Moravian Karst, Czech Republic / by Pavel Sroubek.

This thesis presents a paleoclimatic/paleoenvironmental study conducted on clastic cave sediments of the Moravian Karst, Czech Republic. The study is based on environmental magnetic techniques, yet a wide range of other scientific methods was used to obtain a clearer picture of the Quaternary climate. My thesis also presents an overview of the significance of cave deposits for paleoclimatic reconstructions, explains basic environmental magnetic techniques and offers background information on the study area – a famous karst region in Central Europe with a rich history. In Kulna Cave magnetic susceptibility variations and in particular variations in pedogenic susceptibility yield a detailed record of the palaeoenvironmental conditions during the Last Glacial Stage. The Kulna long-term climatic trends agree with the deep-sea SPECMAP record, while the short-term oscillations correlate with rapid changes in the North Atlantic sea surface temperatures. Kulna Cave sediments reflect the intensity of pedogenesis controlled by short-term warmer events and precipitation over the mid-continent and provide a link between continental European climate and sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic during the Last Glacial Stage. Given the number of independent climate proxies determined from the entrance facies of the cave and their high resolution, Kulna is an extremely important site for studying Late Pleistocene climate. In the interior of Spiralka Cave, a five meter high section of fine grained sediments deposited during floods yields information on the climatic and environmental conditions of the last millenium. In the upper 1.5 meters of this profile, mineral magnetic and other non-magnetic data indicate that susceptibility variations are controlled by the concentration of magnetite and its magnetic grain size. Comparison of our susceptibility record to the instrumental record of winter temperature anomalies shows a remarkable correlation. This correlation is explained by coupling of the flooding events, cultivation of land and pedogenetic processes in the cave catchment area. A combination of mineral magnetic and geochemical proxies yields a detail picture of the rapidly evolving climate of the near past and tracks both natural and human induced environmental changes taking place in the broader region.

The Legal Classification of ISPs - The Czech Perspective

This Article is a comprehension of the lecture held at at the International Conference on “Commons, Users, Service Providers – Internet (Self-) Regulation and Copyright” which took place in Hannover, Germany, on 17/18 March 2010 on the occasion of the launch of JIPITEC. It summarizes the current issues concerning ISP liability in the Chzech Republic.

Domain Name Transfer before Slovak and Czech Courts

In Europe, a disagreement persists in the courts about the possibility of plaintiffs to request a domain name transfer in domain name disputes. In the last ten years, Slovak and Czech courts also produced some jurisprudence on this issue. Interestingly, the BGH’s influential opinion in the shell.de decision, which denied domain name transfer as an available remedy under German law back in 2002, wasn’t initially followed. To the contrary, several Slovak and Czech decisions of lower courts allowed a domain name transfer using two different legal bases. This seemingly settled case law was rejected a few months ago by the globtour.cz decision of the Czech Supreme Court, which refused domain name transfers for the time being

Norms on the gender perception of role nouns in Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Slovak

We collected norms on the gender stereotypicality of an extensive list of role nouns in Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Slovak, to be used as a basis for the selection of stimulus materials in future studies. We present a Web-based tool (available at https://www.unifr.ch/lcg/) that we developed to collect these norms and that we expect to be useful for other researchers, as well. In essence, we provide (a) gender stereotypicality norms across a number of languages and (b) a tool to facilitate cross-language as well as cross-cultural comparisons when researchers are interested in the investigation of the impact of stereotypicality on the processing of role nouns.

The Response of a Small Stream in the Lesni Potok Forested Catchment, Central Czech Republic, to a Short-Term In-Stream Acidification

Lesni Potok stream drains a forested headwater catchment in the central Czech Republic. It was artificially acidified with hydrochloric acid (HCl) for four hours to assess the role of stream substrate in acid-neutralisation and recovery. The pH was lowered from 4.7 to 3.2. Desorption of Ca and MP and desorption or solution of Al dominated acid-neutralisation; Al mobilisation was more important later. The stream substrate released 4.542 meq Ca, 1, 184 meq Mg, and 2,329 meq Al over a 45 in long and I in wide stream segment, smaller amounts of Be. Cd, Fe, and Mn were released. Adsorption of SO42- and desorption of F- occurred during the acidification phase of the experiment. The exchange reactions were rapidly reversible for Ca, Mg and SO42- but not symmetric as the substrate resorbed 1083, 790 and 0 meq Ca, Mg, and Al. respectively, in a 4-hour recovery period. Desorption of SO42- occurred during the resorption of Ca and Mg. These exchange and dissolution reactions delay acidification, diminish the pH depression and retard recovery from episodic acidification. The behaviour of the stream substrate-water interaction resembles that for soil-soil water interactions. A mathematical dynamic mass-balance based model, MASS (Modelling Acidification of Stream Sediments), was developed which simulates the adsorption and desorption of base cations during the experiment and was successfully calibrated to the experimental data.