Recently, the search for new effective energy production solutions has been focused on the production of electricity using renewable and environmentally friendly carriers. This resulted in an increased interest in PV cells and cogeneration systems. The article looks at the main factors affecting their operational parameters against the background of the development history of subsequent generations of PV cells. Average daily solar radiation and wind velocity in Lodz were characterized. The research was done on a static and tracking system with a total peak power of 15 kWp and a 30 kW microturbine. PV panels are installed on the building of the Institute of Electrical Power Engineering of the Lodz University of Technology and they work as part of DERLab. A microturbine is inside the building. Energy measurements were carried out in 2016 giving grounds for the analysis of energy efficiency and financial analysis of the energy supply in buildings. Energy yields in the static and tracking system as well as percentage coverage of electricity from PV cells and microturbines were assessed. The distribution of monthly savings, annual savings of energy costs and the payback time of the investment costs of the systems subject to the test were determined. The research we have done allows us to say that the energy produced by follow-up modules is about 3 times greater than that generated in stationary modules. On the other hand, the annual savings of energy costs using gas micro-turbines are about 10 times higher than those of lagging panels. The analysis shows that it is possible to determine the profitability of the microturbine and photovoltaic panels use despite large financial outlays. The payback period of investment outlays is about 12 years when using the installation throughout the year.

The article presents the challenges faced by the hard coal mining sector in Poland. The biggest

challenge results from a decrease in the demand for coal, which was triggered mainly by the climate

policy, including the tightening of environmental standards and an increase in the efficiency of generating

units. The fundamental model of the MRÓWKA domestic coal market has been described.

The model allows for determining the marginal price of a given fuel for a given generating unit in

the system and the optimal mix of fuels to meet the energy demand. The results of the model calculations

for the baseline and alternative scenarios were presented. It has been shown that the optimal

distribution of coal mining capacities promotes the import of the discussed fuel in the north-eastern

part of the country and that the individual customer valuation leads to a decrease in the competitiveness

of the units located in the central-western part of the country. The paper also discusses the

potential impact of the domestic oversupply on the balance sheet and the price of coal. According

to the obtained results and the basic laws of economics, an oversupply of coal leads to a decrease

in prices. For the analyzed variants, the dependence of prices was estimated at PLN 0.0308 / GJ for

every million tons of the oversupply. The fall in prices is largely due to the fuel supply to units located

close to ports or railway border crossings. Based on the presented arguments it can be concluded

that the maximization of financial result from the extraction of coal should be based on an analysis

taking incremental changes in fuel prices into account.

Consumer experiences as a driver of contemporary brand and marketing management are taken up nowadays by many researchers and academics. It’s merely compelled by bored with generic products and services consumers who much more than ever look for intensive, personalized experiences. However, there is a significant gap in knowledge how to transfer these global changes to the needs of effective tourist product management. The article presents a brand-new approach called ‘the experience key’ for discovering, grouping and converting common, dedicated to a certain destination customers experiences into clear and desirable tourist offer with meaningful competitive impact. One of most important advantages of the methodology is its simplicity and ease-of-use for any professionals involved in destination product management by using well-know research methods and apparent applicability into the process of building and selling tourist offer of a place. The Experience Key can be regarded as a missing link between theoretical considerations led by academics and expectations of tourism industry representatives in the context of applying customer experience to place brand and product management.

The article discusses the issue of proper names defined as symptoms of culture. The first part is of a theoretical character and develops the theory of symptomatology of culture in the context of semiotics (Ch. Peirce), psychology and psychoanalysis (S. Freud and J. Lacan), and onomastics. Symptomatology of culture is a practice of interpreting a certain group of texts of culture and extracting common qualitative traits within them. This is especially in the case of those traits specific to them and often encountered, which could testify to particular serious and deeply-rooted social phenomena leading to their appearance. In the empirical part the author presents a way of using (onymic) symptomatology in practice to research modern culture. She uses the examples of popular psychological and auto-therapeutic guidebooks and treats them as linguistic symptomatic forms of the most significant linguistic and cultural phenomena along with their social causes and functions which are often dysfunctional or abnormal in character. The analysis comprises the most typical conceptual and syntactic constructions encountered in the group.

The article features a systemic approach to digitalization in mining, covering the production process, supervision and management. Business continuity management of a critical infrastructure was characterized with respect to an industrial facility, i.e. a mine. The “SILESIA” Integrated Security System was described. This solution, offered by CNP EMAG, is an example of a systemic approach successfully implemented in industry. The article includes information about the development of technological hardware solutions as well as software which is able to assess the solutions developed in the SecLab Information Security Technology Development Laboratory in the EMAG Institute.

The paper is devoted to discussing consequences of the so-called Frisch-Waugh Theorem to posterior inference and Bayesian model comparison. We adopt a generalised normal linear regression framework and weakenits assumptions in order to cover non-normal, jointly elliptical samplingdistributions, autoregressive specifications, additional nuisance parameters andmulti-equation SURE or VAR models. The main result is that inference basedon the original full Bayesian model can be obtained using transformed dataand reduced parameter spaces, provided the prior density for scale or precisionparameters is appropriately modified.

The aim of the study is to formally compare the explanatory power of Copula-GARCH and MGARCH models. The models are estimated for logarithmic daily rates of return of two exchange rates: EUR/PLN, USD/PLN and stock market indices: SP500, BUX. The analysis is performed within the Bayesian framework. The posterior model probabilities point to AR(1)-tSBEKK(1,1) for the exchange rates and VAR(1)-tCopula-GARCH(1,1) for the stock market indices, as the superior specifications. If the marginal sampling distributions are different in terms of tail thickness, the Copula-GARCH models have higher explanatory power than the MGARCH models.

Present study examines nonfinancial support granted for older people in Poland and other European countries in order to understand the relationships between family structures and that support and to diagnose the challenges that the Polish population may face in this respect in the nearest future. The analysis is based on the data from the Survey on Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The study attempts also to answer the question about the need for informal support in future generations of older Poles. The study is focused on the population of individuals aged at least 50+, because they will decide about the situation of older people in the near future. The author considers, in addition to personal care, help in running a household and help with paper work. The most frequently received type of support is the help in running a household, received primarily from neighbors and family members, which reduces the need for institutional care. Personal care is provided to the minority of the examined population, even in the highest age group, and, apart from household members, it concerns usually biological children.

The Author is an expert on United States’ maritime (admiralty) law and on American legislative process.

The Rotterdam Rules, or the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Carriage of Goods Wholly or Partially by the Sea, drafted by the UN General Assembly on 11 December 2008 (Resolution 63/122), create a new legal order on affreightment and thus aim at replacing the Hague Rules, the Hague-Visby Rules and the Hamburg Rules.

The Author argues that the dominant legislative contribution to the draft is American. The United States have amended their own maritime law and, at the same time, internationalized some of its content. If the US ratification process is completed within the next 2 years with the signature of the President, the USA, representing 25% of the world’s overall tonnage, shall be the game-changer in international law on carriage of goods by the sea.

The United Nations began working on the codification of the Law of the Sea in 1958, when four conventions were adopted in Geneva, namely the Convention on the Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone, the Convention on the High Seas, the Convention on Fishing and Conservation of the Living Resources of the High Seas, and the Convention on the Continental Shelf The conventions came into force in 1960. This was the first UN Law of the Sea conference and was organized under the auspices of the International Law Commission. In 1960 the second UN conference on maritime law was also held in Geneva and was dedicated to describing territorial seas. However, it did not succeed in reaching agreement regarding the six-mile territorial sea and six-mile fisheries zone. The third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea took place between 1973 and 1982. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea from 1982 confirmed the right of each country to declare its territorial seas at limits of up to 12 nautical miles. The number of participating countries represented at the Law of the Sea conferences had increased with 157 national representatives in attendance at the third UN conference. In addition to issues of territorial sea width, other topics discussed included investigations and exploitation of marine resources outside of state jurisdiction, the legal status of sea areas and their countries, the rights and obligations of the largest exploiters of seas and oceans and principles of their cooperation. The author gives a high evaluation of the Law of the Sea codifications, which were prepared with the participation of the United Nations.

This paper address the rarely discussed issue of underwater areas. The author draws attention to the political and economic importance of areas on the sea bed’ both those areas that are under jurisdiction and those that are beyond any jurisdiction. In particular the article discusses international treaties relating to the sea bed. First, it analyzes the 2001 Paris Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage. Next, it discusses the new Nairobi International Convention on the Removal of Wrecks (2007). A further part of the article presents the decision to protect the wreck of the “Estonia” ferry (the Tallinn Agreement o f 1995) and the old Paris Convention (1884) on the protection of submarine cables. Finally, the author draws attention to the relatively low amount of interest of national legislation in issues connected with underwater areas and proposes concrete changes and additions to Polish maritime law.

The international community is presently facing a new hazard in the form of oil spills from drilling platforms rather than ships. The issue was first brought to public attention in conjunction with the 2009 West Atlas rig fire that resulted in oil pollution of Indonesia and northern shores of Australia. The wrangle continues in the wake of the recent Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

As of today there are no international measures that regulate the issues of civil liability for offshore drilling related pollution. Indonesia has put forward the matter to the International Maritime Organisation; the IMO intends to draft a convention.

Civil liability for offshore drilling related pollution within domestic law is aseparate issue. In Polish law, Article 435 et seq of the Civil Code would apply. The pollution threat extends to the Baltic Sea, Northern Sea and other parts of the world.

The issue is also being examined by the European Union. The European Agency for the Maritime Safety has mandate to act in case of damage related to offshore drilling. Following the example of the American Oil Pollution Act (1990), the EU aims to draft comprehensive laws that would cover pollution associated with the entire mining industry.

The article discusses new developments in law controlling carriage of goods by sea, namely — the effect of phenomena such as slot charter or volume contract on drafting carriage contract terms. The analysis of carriage contract definitions as set out in Hague-Visby Rules, Hamburg Rules and Rotterdam Rules is offered in context of carriage contracts by modes other than the sea. The author concludes that present-day maritime trade calls for revision of common views on traditional dichotomies such as charter/booking contract or liner/tramp services in favour of a new, broader concept of a maritime carriage contract.

The Polish basis of dolomites is remarkable. Their total reserves reported in the 62 deposits listed in current data bases of mineral resources amount to 1,500,000 t. However, there is a shortage of the so-called converter dolomites of high quality applicable in manufacturing of refractory materials. Such dolomites of the Triassic age have been quarried for many years in the Brudzowice and Ząbkowice Śląskie I deposits in the Silesian-Cracow region. The Libiąż deposit is perspective of this area, considering the character and properties of its dolomites. The dolomites of the Nowa Wioska and Stare Gliny deposits belong into the same group although their applying as refractories seems to be disputable at the moment and would require more detailed analyses of the chemical composition and firing properties of the rocks mentioned. The reason is that the dolomites of these deposits have been reported andmassively quarried up to now mainly for civil engineering (roads, buildings, etc.). Unfortunately, worsening properties of the dolomites occurring in Żelatowa, still another large and developed deposit of the region, have been excluded using these rocks in producing of refractories. Among the group of reserve converter dolomite deposits, the best rock properties have been found in four of them, i.e., Chruszczobród, Chruszczobród I, Chruszczobród II and Libiąż Wielki. The survey presented indicates that there are some possibilities of including dolomites of the Winna and, to a lesser degree, Radkowice-Podwole deposits as the raw materials in manufacturing of refractories. Again, more detailed analyses of the chemical composition and petrographical development, mainly of the grain size distribution, would be required. Dolomitic marbles of the Lower Silesia region represent a separate problem. Traditionally, they have been considered to be non-applicable in manufacturing of refractories because of too coarse grain size of these rocks. It should be stressed, however, that the Lower Silesian marbles occur in several varieties and among them also fineand coarse-grained dolomites occur. Their finest and chemically purest varieties can be an interesting option in extending the basis of refractory dolomitic raw materials in Poland, although selective quarrying would be required in such a case.

Since fluoroquinolone (FQ) antibiotics are extensively used both in human and veterinary medicine their accumulation in the environment is causing increasing concern. The aim of the study was to isolate a microbial consortium resistant to ofl oxacin and norfl oxacin and able to biodegrade both antibiotics. Green compost was used as a source of microorganisms. The biodegradation effi ciency was monitored by changes of antibiotics concentrations and toxicity. The microbial consortium was composed of two bacterial isolates: Klebsiella pneumoniae (K2) and Achromobacter sp. (K3) and two fungi Candida manassasensis (K1) and Trichosporon asahii (K4). All the isolates were characterized as highly resistant to both antibiotics – ofl oxacin and norfl oxacin. FQs were supplied individually into the culture medium in the presence of an easily degradable carbon source – glucose. Biodegradation of norfl oxacin was much faster than ofl oxacin biodegradation. During 20 days of the experiment, the norfl oxacin level decreased by more than 80%. Ofl oxacin was generally biodegraded thereafter at relatively slow biodegradation rate. After 28 days the ofl oxacin level decreased by 60%. Similarly, the toxicity of biodegraded antibiotics decreased 4-fold and 3.5-fold for norfl oxacin and ofl oxacin, respectively. The ability of the bacterial-fungal consortium to degrade antibiotics and reduce toxicity could help to reduce environmental pollution with these pharmaceutical.

A phoneme segmentation method based on the analysis of discrete wavelet transform spectra is described. The localization of phoneme boundaries is particularly useful in speech recognition. It enables one to use more accurate acoustic models since the length of phonemes provide more information for parametrization. Our method relies on the values of power envelopes and their first derivatives for six frequency subbands. Specific scenarios that are typical for phoneme boundaries are searched for. Discrete times with such events are noted and graded using a distribution-like event function, which represent the change of the energy distribution in the frequency domain. The exact definition of this method is described in the paper. The final decision on localization of boundaries is taken by analysis of the event function. Boundaries are, therefore, extracted using information from all subbands. The method was developed on a small set of Polish hand segmented words and tested on another large corpus containing 16 425 utterances. A recall and precision measure specifically designed to measure the quality of speech segmentation was adapted by using fuzzy sets. From this, results with F-score equal to 72.49% were obtained.

Reverberant responses are widely used to characterize acoustic properties of rooms, such as the early decay time (EDT) and the reverberation times T20 and T30. However, in real conditions a sound decay is often deformed by background noise, thus a precise evaluation of decay times from noisy room responses is the main problem. In this paper this issue is examined by means of numerical method where the decay times are estimated from the decay function that has been determined by nonlinear polynomial regression from a pressure envelope obtained via the discrete Hilbert transform. In numerical experiment the room responses were obtained from simulations of a sound decay for two-room coupled system. Calculation results have shown that background noise slightly affects the evaluation of reverberation times T20 and T30 as long as the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is not smaller than about 25 and 35 dB, respectively. However, when the SNR is close to about 20 and 30 dB, high overestimation of these times may occur as a result of bending up of the decay curve during the late decay.