This study examines five children’s books produced in Soviet Central Asia and the Crimea between 1926 and 1932. While stemming from pre-Soviet intellectual movements among Muslims in the Russian Empire, these books represent a new kind of product that was created for children who were educated in new Soviet schools. The earlier books demonstrate an active effort to increase literacy among the Uzbeks and Turkmen and show little overt Soviet content. However, the Crimean Tatar book from 1932, while continuing the format of the children’s books of the 1920s, is overtly Soviet and didactic in content. The physical make-up of these books also reveals that they were essentially considered specialty products. By the 1920s, children thus were seen as a set-apart category of readers in Soviet Central Asia. Moreover, by 1932 and at least among the Crimean Tatars, children’s books began to function as a mechanism to disseminate Soviet ideology.

This paper.offers suggestions.for improving the reading skilIs aspect of the Text SkilIs¢omponent oflntematbnal University ofJapan’s Int¢nsive English Program. In order to prepare studentS for graduate stUdies, proper scaffolding of authentic texts is ne。巳ssary for short・‡¢mmand long-term goals. Text Skills coロrse designers should eonsider incIuding key strategies fbr reading comprehension that students use, perhaps凹nconsciously in their l『rst language(L1), but don・t immediately know how to transfer into th eir second language(L2).

Murphy, Koehler, and Fogler [1997] gave in the last issue of the Journal of Portfolio Management an account of how to raise a neural net’s IQ. The purpose of this reply is to point out some of the general difficulties with neural nets. Also, I would like to mention an alternative method, namely Pade approximants, which does not suffer from these difficulties.