The purpose of this study was to evaluate the psychoacoustic annoyance (PA) that the tractor drivers are exposed to, and investigate its effects on their brain signals during their work activities. To this aim, the sound of a garden tractor was recorded. Each driver’s electroencephalogram (EEG) was then recorded at five different engine speeds. The Higuchi method was used to calculate the fractal dimension of the brain signals. To evaluate the amount of acoustic annoyance that the tractor drivers were exposed to, a psychoacoustic annoyance (PA) model was used. The results showed that as the engine speed increased, the values of PA increased as well. The results also indicated that an increase in the Higuchi’s fractal dimension (HFD) of alpha and beta bands was due to the increase of the engine speed. The regression results also revealed that there was a high correlation between the HFD of fast wave activities and PA, in that, the coefficients of determination were 0.92 and 0.91 for alpha and beta bands, respectively. Hence, a good correlation between the EEG signals and PA can be used to develop a mathematical model which quantifies the human brain response to the external stimuli.

The Northern Copper Belt is located in south-western Poland, a region well known for its copper and silver occurrences of varying significance. This area also includes the abandoned mines of the North-Sudetic Trough (Old Copper District), as well as the currently active New Copper District in the southern part of the Fore- Sudetic Monocline. The vast exploration programme of Miedzi Copper Corp. initiated in 2011 in the northern, deeper part of the Fore Sudetic Monocline provided new data about the deeper parts of this geological unit, located north of the known deposits. A number of prospective areas with Cu-Ag mineralization were investigated, which ultimately resulted in the discovery of three new Cu-Ag deposits. Both the prospective areas and the documented deposits form the so-called Northern Copper Belt, which as a whole has high potential for the identification of new ore deposits and an increase in resources. A description of these three new deposits is provided along with characteristics of the areas of their possible extension, and the additional prospective areas with hypothetical and speculative resources. The new deposits are compared to other Polish Cu-Ag ore deposits, with an emphasis on differences in their geological structure and mineralogy. The paper also presents a brief summary of the applied new exploration tools which have led to this discovery.

In this paper the capacity of non-uniform sampling rate conversion techniques, involving different interpolation methods, aimed at wow defect reduction, is examined. Involved are: linear interpolation, four polynomial-based interpolation methods and the windowed sincbased method. The examined polynomial methods are: Lagrange interpolation, polynomial fitting with additional noise reduction, Hermitan and Spline. The performance of an artificially distorted audio signal, restored using non-uniform resampling, is evaluated on the basis of standard audio defect measurement criteria and compared for all of the aforementioned interpolation methods. The chosen defect descriptors are: total harmonic distortion, total harmonic distortion plus noise and signal to noise ratio.