This paper analyzes the concept of context with a special focus on the context of communication. We suggest two ways of classifying approaches to the context of communication: (i) classifying approaches based on a number of relevant dimensions for analyzing context in social activities, (ii) classifying approaches, based on the dimensions of Peirce’s semiotics. We also discuss the use of collected corpora of language, especially multimodal corpora of spoken interaction, as an aid in studying context. Finally, building on the two ways of classifying approaches to the context of communication, we present our own proposal for how to analyze the main relevant contextual dimensions influencing human interaction and communication.

Philosophical concepts have always been closely related to the development of basic sciences. For example, great mathematical theories put forth at the turn of the century, and general theory of relativity were crucial for the advancement of physical sciences and at the same time had a great impact on the formation of a new science philosophy. They also initiated a new era of exploring the Universe, thus opening many issues in the fields of astrophysics and astronomy. In biology, the theory of evolution has greatly impacted the understanding of such fundamental issues as the origin of living species and the occurrence of the phenomenon of life on Earth. Another breakthrough in life sciences was a result of the progress in molecular biology which concerned sequencing genomes and modification of genetic resources of living organisms. These great achievements have led to formation of several new fields of life sciences such as: synthetic biology, systemic biology as well as personalized medicine.

In the paper author discusses problems related to the leading role of architectural structures, as a part of the creating process within contemporary urban space. Architectural objects establish a continuous dialogue not only with their surrounding space, but also between each other. In this relation, the first plan comes with two factors, determining all spatial and functional solutions: the place in which a given project is localized and the time in which the urban designer came to the architect to create his plan. Based on the analysis of own projects and urban and architectural realizations, the author proves that the architectural dialogue in urban space must be respected in the context of the place and the time, but also in the creators moral responsibility. This responsibility is defined by consequences of design decisions not only for the urban space itself, but above all, for people and their coexistence with the space. For designers it reveals a necessity to comply principles of ethics and professing the value system in order to taking care of the urban space not only three-dimensional, but also “existential”.

Identity in a housing environment is one of its resources as valuable as its water, air, flora and fauna. The readability of identity should be the basic factor of the quality of architecture and landscape architecture recognizable as a significant resource. It is an important factor which influences the living standard of people who inhabit a given space from a psychological, social and cultural point of view. In order to care for identity, we must be aware of it, of its role and significance in our lives and residence in a given environment. Man must understand the phenomenon of the meaning of life with respect to its space as his place in the world. When we understand the all-embracing rhythm and taste of the life of a place of residence, we will comprehend life itself.

At present, most of the existing target detection algorithms use the method of region proposal to search for the target in the image. The most effective regional proposal method usually requires thousands of target prediction areas to achieve high recall rate.This lowers the detection efficiency. Even though recent region proposal network approach have yielded good results by using hundreds of proposals, it still faces the challenge when applied to small objects and precise locations. This is mainly because these approaches use coarse feature. Therefore, we propose a new method for extracting more efficient global features and multi-scale features to provide target detection performance. Given that feature maps under continuous convolution lose the resolution required to detect small objects when obtaining deeper semantic information; hence, we use rolling convolution (RC) to maintain the high resolution of low-level feature maps to explore objects in greater detail, even if there is no structure dedicated to combining the features of multiple convolutional layers. Furthermore, we use a recurrent neural network of multiple gated recurrent units (GRUs) at the top of the convolutional layer to highlight useful global context locations for assisting in the detection of objects. Through experiments in the benchmark data set, our proposed method achieved 78.2% mAP in PASCAL VOC 2007 and 72.3% mAP in PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset. It has been verified through many experiments that this method has reached a more advanced level of detection.

The paper gives an evidence that construction of contemporary objects at the interface with the historic urban space, may be a way to renew and revitalize areas which require it. Such action may be a strong and valuable catalyst for the functional and visual transformation of a given fragment of urban space. It can also contribute to the increase of social activity within it. Research shows that public facilities from the turn of the 20th and 21st century, which were built using innovative architectural technologies and constructional solutions, are the buildings which provide great opportunities to contrast with historical architecture. This can be achieved due to their significant scale and rank in the urban space. The analyzes show that design based on the principle of contrast is the right solution for the degraded historic urban space. The replenishment of the old tissue should be carried out with the emphasis on the identity of the times in which we live, without creating architecture which could literally imitate historical objects or compete with them. Because of this contrast and diversity, new fragments of the city can become a counterweight or a valuable background to the existing historical tissue. Contemporary buildings located in a historical context are not only enhancing the values of cultural heritage but can also become a grateful element of the urban space and a strong accent of modernity and innovation in the city.

The essence of advertising lies very often in unusual and surprising juxtapositions of apparently incongruous elements, which nevertheless successfully combine in producing a coherent and understandable message. A vital role is performed by a skillfully engineered context, which allows for simultaneous activation of certain otherwise inconspicuous senses and the construction of novel and attractive connections. Such theoretical proposals as Lemke’s traversals (2001; 2005), Fauconnier and Turner’s Conceptual Blending Theory (1998; 2002) and Kecskes’s Dynamic Model of Meaning (2008) seem to describe many vital aspects of the phenomenon in question. It is in advertising that we often come across the linking of elements by transgressing naturally existing borders between domains which are unrelated, and we are invited to map onto one another different mental spaces on the basis of their salient analogy or identity, and indulge in creative riddle-like exploration of contextual elements in order to reconstruct the intended message. These techniques’ true power lies in their ability to blur the distinction between ‘the real’ and ‘the imagined’ to such an extent that certain irrational but attractive connections, implanted in the minds of the audience, contribute to subsequent decisions in the real world. The present study attempts to uncover the ways in which certain unrelated elements are skillfully brought together in a context which allows for such a juxtaposition in selected Polish TV advertisements for various medicine and health-related products. The method employed is an in-depth content analysis of the material, followed by an attempt to integrate the identified mechanisms with the models of meaning-making mentioned above. The results will hopefully help in better understanding of the ways in which particular components of the context may interact with the message expressed verbally or pictorially in the construction of multilevel meanings in advertising communication.

The term “metalearning”, which was introduced into scientific literature by J. Biggs (1985) is, broadly speaking, an awareness of one’s own learning process and exercising control over it. Metalearning, whose roots lie in the personal, early experiences of the child related to learning, and which is expressed in her or his current concepts – is considered in this article as a basic condition for the acquisition of one of the key competences of 21st century man, namely, the learning competence. Recognizing the importance of colloquial concepts of learning, as well as their uniqueness and contextuality – in the article I will present the main problems associated with learning about the vision and understanding of the personal worlds of the learning of pupils, coming at the end of early education. On the basis of analysis of the scientific literature and previous studies conducted abroad, as well as a number of my own research projects (resulting from the application of quantitative or qualitative approach), I will present questions, doubts and selected emerging difficulties in the application of both the presented research approaches.

We aimed to investigate whether educational activities in the form of guided tours through an exhibition change the appreciation of art when young experts (i.e. first-years students of artistic faculties) view contemporary art in a gallery. Participants viewed and assessed the artworks presented at the gallery twice – before and after taking part in a guided tour led by a gallery educator. The guide-led tour increased both understanding and ratings (the hedonic value) of the artworks, which is consistent with the “effort after meaning” hypothesis and also with the model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments. Our results suggest that the reception of works of art by young experts is changed when they are under the influence of extensive contextual information.

This article discusses and expands on two related issues. The first is the unexplored reasons for the departure of Polish migrant women: the forced migration phenomenon. The author describes the system behind forced migration as created at the intersections not only of care, gender and migration regimes but also of legal regimes. Second, the author points out that the close relation between forced migration and the process of ‘unbecoming a wife in the transnational context’ creates a distinctive type of trans-national motherhood experience. In order to explain the specificity of these types of experiences better the author introduces a new typology of transnational motherhood biographies. The case study of Al-dona is representative of the experiences of some Polish women in the period under study, 1989–2010.