The research task of the essay is to answer the question of what is the face of the nation in the ethnic enclaves situated at the peripheries of national states. The subject of the analyses is the local population of the village Jaworzynka. In 1922, the settlement Herczawa was founded as a local unit independent from Jaworzynka. Since then Herczawa began to belong to Czechoslovakia. The state-owned status of Jaworzynka, which started to be a part of the Republic of Poland, was recognized after the World War I. The author takes into account the longue durre of folk and national culture generated in the Silesian Beskidy in the second half of the 18th century. The national culture is the main term applied to the investigations of the borderland regions. According to the ethno-symbolic approaches (Anthony D. Smith) and culturalism methods in sociology (Antonina Kłoskowska), the author analyses in his research: 1) language, 2) religion, 3) folkways and mores 4) arts, 5) local knowledge and literature. These elements delineate the sphere of symbolic culture. Based on the common folk culture, two national cultures have been formed nowadays – the Polish and Czech ones. Both Polish and Czech Census Bureau data and objective elements of national culture discussed in the essay indicate the process of national revival. The local people of Jaworzynka identify themselves as Poles and the population of Herczawa define themselves as Czechs. The content and the form of the local culture are visible in Jaworzyna, but they seem to be latent or diminishing in Herczawa.
This article, focused principally on the exploration of contingency, the body and disgust in Michał Witkowski’s novel Margot, is also a polemic and a vindication of the book against the barrage of criticism it received from its reviewers. Most of them decided that Margot was a novel about nothing, a haphazard mix of sundry discourses devoid of any linear structure. In fact, several critics blamed the author of giving away both the narrative structure and the plot to capricious contingency. The article takes a fi rm stance against such charges and argues that contingency does not need to be seen as a fault at all. It lies at the heart of the novel and determines the actions of characters, but it plays as important a role in people’s lives outside fi ction. Analysing the ups and down of the main characters (Margot and Wadek Mandarynka), the article explains the function of emotions, the body, the characters’ language and their ideas of sacrum in the legitimization of contingency. A special role in this mechanism is played by disgust. Reactions of disgust are always contingent, or, as Julia Kristeva puts it the abject has the power to terrorize the subject to such extent that he can do nothing but to succumb to contingency. In working out the idea of the contingency of selfhood, the article also draws on Richard Rorty’s approach, and in particular his concept of ironism. The latter is used to classify the main character of Witkowski’s book as a consummate ironist, i.e. a person who tests different languages in which the world can be described in order to pursue his carnal desires. Finally, the article argues that in his novel Witkowski not only brings to light the fortuitous character of the postmodern identity but also creates a heterogeneous language to express it.
This article examines the relationship of disgust and perversion in Lovetown (Lubiewo bez cenzury) by Michał Witkowski. An overview of the reception of the book reveals that reviewers and critics have focused mainly on Witkowski’s portrayal of the LGBT community, the structure of the novel (dubbed the ‘queer Decameron’), and the textual (meta) creation of the writer’s voice, but it ignored his handling of disgust and perversion. Central to this reading of Lovetown, which draws on Sigmund Freud’s analyses of disgust and perversion, is the observation that the narrator interlards his lingo with neutral, ‘objective’ explanations of the main characters’ deviant behaviours. This glossary, written for the general reader, tends, in effect, to legitimize deviance. An in-depth analysis of the writer’s handling of the categories of the disgusting, the perverse and the sacred leads to the conclusion that Lovetown exemplifies a cathartic-therapeutic narrative in which disgust becomes a tool of self-fulfi llment.
W artykule opisano spory wokół sposobów zbierania danych na temat smogu w Polsce. Ramą teoretyczną analizy są studia nad nauką i technologią, a w szczególności badania nad rolą infrastruktur, standardów i danych. W części opisowej przedstawiono rolę infrastruktury pomiarowej w kształtowaniu relacji pomiędzy różnymi podmiotami zajmujący się pomiarem jakości powietrza, a następnie zanalizowano dwa wymiary konfliktu. Pierwszy z nich dotyczy kwestii metodologicznych i związany jest z rzetelnością pomiaru. Drugi natomiast – ontologii smogu, to znaczy odmiennego ujmowania problemu zanieczyszczenia przez ekspertów i obywateli, co ma przełożenie na praktyki społeczne.
A review is presented of the history of ‘impact factor’ since its introduction in 1955 by Eugene Garfield for assessing scientific periodicals to its present degeneration in the hands of science administrators who enforce its use to classify scientists. Arguments are presented against that procedure. Recently there has been an increase of resistance among scientists and the editors of periodicals who call for replacing bibliometric parameters by peer review assessment of publications.
Hundred years ago education aimed mainly at memorizing as much information as possible. Such an approach lost its sense in the digital age of today since we are overwhelmed by an easily accessible ocean of true information mixed with “fake news”. Hence, the role of the teachers nowadays must be to guide and organize the learning process rather than provide knowledge. The students must no longer be passive recipients but active participants in the process of acquiring knowledge. A new approach of “phenomenon-based learning” introduced in schools in Finland, Norway and other countries agrees also with the holistic process of human cognition rather than absorbing information in a way sliced into traditional disciplines. In the future, say, fifty years from now, the role of teachers may be partly modified by the use of robots, which however could not replace creative thinking of human beings.
In 1993 Engle and Kozicki proposed the notion of common features of which one example is a serial correlation common feature. We say that stationary, non-innovation processes exhibit common serial correlation when there exists at least one linear combination of them which is an innovation. Later on in 1993 Vahid and Engle combined the notions of cointegration among I(1) processes with common serial correlation within their first differences. It is commonly known that cointegrated time series have vector error correction (VEC) representation. The existence of common serial correlation leads to an additional reduced rank restriction imposed on the VEC model’s parameters. This type of restriction was later termed a strong form (SF) reduced rank structure, as opposed to a weak one introduced in 2006 by Hecq, Palm and Urbain.
The main aim of the present paper is to construct the Bayesian vector error correction model with these additional strong form restrictions.
The empirical validity of investigating both the short- and long-run co-movements between macroeconomic time series will be illustrated by the analysis of the price-wage nexus in the Polish economy.
In this paper we present the Bayesian model selection procedure within the class of cointegrated processes. In order to make inference about the cointegration space we use the class of Matrix Angular Central Gaussian distributions. To carry out posterior simulations we use an alorithm based on the collapsed Gibbs sampler. The presented methods are applied to the analysis of the price – wage mechanism in the Polish economy.
The concept of cointegration that enables the proper statistical analysis of long-run comovements between unit root processes has been of great interest to numerous economic investigators since it was introduced. However, investigation of short-run comovement between economic time series seems equally important, especially for economic decision-makers. The concept of common features and based on it the idea of two additional reduced rank structure forms in a VEC model (the strong and the weak one) may be of some help. The strong form reduced rank structure (SF) takes place when at least one linear combination of the first differences of the variables exists, which is white noise. However, when this assumption seems too strong, the weaker case can be considered. The weak form appears when the linear combination of first differences adjusted for long-run efects exists, which is white noise.
The main focus of this paper is a Bayesian analysis of the VEC models involving the weak form of reduced rank restrictions.
After the introduction and discussion of the said Bayesian model, the presented methods will be illustrated by an empirical investigation of the price – wage spiral in the Polish economy.
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