Prof. Monika Kalinowska and Dr. Agata Goździk of the PAS Institute of Geophysics talk about ways to bolster public awareness of water issues.
The article investigates the level of language awareness manifested by the advanced learners of Polish as a FL (146 students of the Polish Language Course attending the School of Polish Language and Culture at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland). The exact focus is on learning outcomes (areas of language progress and regress), and perception of the Polish language material learnt (including grammar, vocabulary and phonology), an emphasis being put on most problematic issues. Having presented learners’ opinions and reflections on language, implications for teachers including teaching materials raising language awareness are offered.
The availability of cheap and widely applicable person identification techniques is essential due to a wide-spread usage of online services. The dynamics of typing is characteristic to particular users, and users are hardly able to mimic the dynamics of typing of others. State-of-the-art solutions for person identification from the dynamics of typing are based on machine learning. The presence of hubs, i.e., few instances that appear as nearest neighbours of surprisingly many other instances, have been observed in various domains recently and hubness-aware machine learning approaches have been shown to work well in those domains. However, hubness has not been studied in the context of person identification yet, and hubnessaware techniques have not been applied to this task. In this paper, we examine hubness in typing data and propose to use ECkNN, a recent hubness-aware regression technique together with dynamic time warping for person identification. We collected time-series data describing the dynamics of typing and used it to evaluate our approach. Experimental results show that hubness-aware techniques outperform state-of-the-art time-series classifiers.
The paper depicts a complex, distributed information system aimed at promoting cybersecurity awareness at the national level. The system, that is built in accordance with the Act on National Cybersecurity, passed by the Polish Parliament, enables collecting and processing in near-real time available information on the security status of essential services and digital services and, also, provides for assessment of negative impact of the identified threats concerned with the provision of those services. Advanced access control and dissemination mechanisms, for secure information sharing within the system, are provided in order to aggregate distributed knowledge and use this information for online security risk analysis and for generation and distribution of early warnings.
The paper addresses the issue of the Electromagnetic Environment Situational Awareness techniques. The main focus is put on sensing and the Radio Environment Map. These two dynamic techniques are described in detail. The Radio Environment Map is considered the essential part of the spectrum management system. It is described how the density and deployment of sensors affect the quality of maps and it is analyzed which methods are the most suitable for map construction. Additionally, the paper characterizes several sensing methods.
The article presents the ways of defining and understanding hope in Polish, English and American literature. The basic theses are: 1) hope is an ambivalent phenomenon, 2) hope is connected with the work of consciousness and imagination, 3) hope conjures up visions of the alternative existential and social solutions, 4) hope is a passion and a way of knowing, 5) hope constitutes the keystone of artistic and academic activity.
In the author’s opinion the traditional image of a human is incorrect: it is not the rational soul that directs people’s behaviour, but a set of programs (neural applications) recorded in the brain. The ego (sense, awareness, will) is able to block their action as long as the upbringing of the person in question has created the right habits and thus initiated proper programs in the brain. Human (as well as animals) turns out to be a combination of the matter (‘body’), spirit (‘ego’) and abstracts (neural applications). The difference between humans and animals is the complexity of human’s neural software and the ability to pursue the non-utilitarian purposes.
The concept of conscience is analyzed here in two different ways: the systematic and the historical-literary. As to the first, systematic perspective, I distinguish (in part 1) three levels of conscience and on every level I identify two opposite categories (conscience that is ‛individual’ versus ‛collective’; ‛emotional’ versus ‛intellectual’; ‛motivating ex ante’ versus ‛evaluating ex post’). In the second, historical-literary perspective, I analyze two literary cases of fictional characters usually thought of as being guided or affected by conscience. The first case is the ancient Greek tragedy and here I offer (in part 2) a comment on the Sophoclean Antigone and the Euripidean Orestes presenting them both as dramas that contain an exemplary formulation of the phenomenon of conscience. Although Antigone and Orestes express their main principles of action in apparently different words, I suggest (in part 3) the two poetical visions of conscience are equally based upon a highly emotional behavior called pathos by the Greek. Thereby I provide a reason, why ancient philosophers created a new concept of conscience intended as an alternative to the poetical vision of human behavior. The new philosophical concept of conscience was based upon an axiological behavior called ethos. I also coin (in part 4) a concept of the ‛community of conscience’ where I distinguish four ‛aspects of solidarity’ in conscience, namely, somebody’s own self, a group of significant persons, a group of the same moral principles, and a sameness of life. In the end I turn (in part 5) to a historical-literary case in Joseph Conrad’s last novel The Rover (1923), which provoked a lively discussion among Polish authors and seems useful as an illustration of several levels of ‛solidarity of conscience’.