The thrust of this article is to examine a contemporary international arbitration process in commercial and investment cases, specifically the interplay of common law and civil law elements in the taking of evidence. It begins with a survey of the provisions of the most popular international arbitration instruments, including international arbitration rules and IBA Rules on the Taking of Evidence in International Arbitration. Following the discussion of some relevant examples of international arbitration instruments, the author tries to answer the question whether these instruments, in their current form, support the popular thesis that the international arbitration process has become largely harmonized. In trying to verify this thesis, the article also goes beyond the text of international arbitration instruments and considers the influence of the cultural biases of international arbitration actors.

In the calculations presented in the article, an artificial immune system (AIS) was used to plan the routes of the fleet of delivery vehicles supplying food products to customers waiting for the delivery within a specified, short time, in such a manner so as to avoid delays and minimize the number of delivery vehicles. This type of task is classified as an open vehicle routing problem with time windows (OVRPWT). It comes down to the task of a traveling salesman, which belongs to NP-hard problems. The use of the AIS to solve this problem proved effective. The paper compares the results of AIS with two other varieties of artificial intelligence: genetic algorithms (GA) and simulated annealing (SA). The presented methods are controlled by sets of parameters, which were adjusted using the Taguchi method. Finally, the results were compared, which allowed for the evaluation of all these methods. The results obtained using AIS proved to be the best.

One more time we would like to pay attention of especially of the hydraulic engineer audience to bankfull stage and discharge. Along the paper we show commonly accepted definitions of it and ways of calculations. It is difficult to determine the size of the bankfull flow level, that is why the authors are presenting many selected methods. Some of the methods allow the determination of biotic bankfull flow through the occurrence of zones of vegetation characteristic and based on the observation of the occurrence of ground beetles (e.g. the Woodyer and the Radecki-Pawlik and Skalski methods). Some of the methods – most popular- are using morphometric parameters (e.g. the Williams, the Hey and Thorne, the Gauckler-Manning and finally the Lambor methods).

We believe that the value of bankfull discharge would be accepted as a supporting tool for designers, hydraulics engineers and managers, especially those who care about river channel environment and cooperate with fluvial geomorphologists- and biologists as well as environmental agencies.

The work concerns the influence of the method of numerical modelling of the connections of the roof truss and vaults with the walls of historic masonry objects structures on the local stress distribution in the walls. At the outset, the need to search for rational modelling was justified due to the large size of the calculation models and the erroneous results obtained with oversimplification of the model. Four methods of modelling the connections between the walls and roof truss and vaults were analysed. The first method was to describe the elements of walls and foundations as solid elements, the ribs of the vaults and the roof truss as beam elements, and the vaulting webs as shell elements. The remaining methods 2–4 describe the walls as shell elements. In places where the walls join with the roof truss and vaults, fictitious/fictional elements in the form of rigid horizontally-oriented shells were used in model No. 2. In model No. 3, fictitious rigid horizontally-oriented shell elements in addition to local rigid vertically-oriented shells were used, while in model No. 4, only fictitious rigid vertically-oriented shell elements with stepwise decreasing protrusions were introduced. The best solution in terms of local stress distribution turned out to be the description of connections with fictitious shell elements in the case of model No. 4. This approach slightly increases the number of unknowns, and makes the results of stresses in the connection areas realistic in relation to full modelling with solid finite elements.

Background and objective: Urological diseases represent a signifi cant health issue worldwide. Presented study aimed at assessing current urological knowledge and confi dence in performing urological diagnostic and therapeutic procedures among medical students at Jagiellonian University Medical College in Poland and compare it on diff erent stages of the undergraduate medical education. Material and methods: We designed an anonymous survey distributed among Polish students from 1st to 6th year of medical studies, before and aft er clinical urology course. Questions concerned general urological knowledge, prostate diseases, erectile dysfunction, and self-reported practical urological skills. Results: Overall, 437 respondents participated in the survey. Mean total test score in our study groupwas 50.08%, mean general urological knowledge score was 53.44%, mean prostate diseases knowledge score was 55.43%, mean erectile dysfunction score was 36% and mean practical skills score was 45.83%. Mean total test score increased with consecutive years of studies (R = 0.58; p <0.001). Th e risk of an above average total test score was signifi cantly infl uenced by the urology course (OR = 7.95, 95%CI = 1.81–34.84, p = 0.006) and the year of medical studies (4th–6th vs. 1st–3rd) (OR = 5.16, 95%CI = 3.41–7.81, p <0.001). Practical skills score above average was signifi cantly more frequent in the group aft er the urology course (OR = 6.75, 95%CI = 1.54–29.58, p = 0.011). Conclusions: Results of this study reveal low mean scores obtained by students, even aft er completing the urology course, which implies that curriculum requires further development. Urological knowledge and self-assessed practical skills increased with years of medical education. The urology course improved the score obtained in our survey, both in terms of total test score and practical skills.