The article presents two dimensions of the relationship between cinema and Polish independence. The first part was devoted to the situation of Polish cinema after 1918. I describe the film market, the political situation, relationship between the state and cinematography, films that were then created and their impact on national identity. Then I focus on films in which independence has become a movie theme. I divide them into three periods: until 1939, the People's Republic of Poland and after 1989. I draw attention to their political and historical contexts, functions and film form, and I discuss the meaning and interpretation of each films.

The main focus of this tutorial/review is on presenting Prospect Theory in the context of the still ongoing debate between the behavioral (mainly descriptive) and the classical (mainly normative) approach in decision theory under risk and uncertainty. The goal is to discuss Prospect Theory vs. Expected Utility in a comparative way. We discuss: a) which assumptions (implicit and explicit) of the classical theory are being questioned in Prospect Theory; b) how does the theory incorporate robust experimental evidence, striving, at the same time, to find the right balance between the basic rationality postulates of Expected Utility (e.g. monotonicity wrt. First-Order Stochastic Dominance), psychological plausibility and mathematical elegance; c) how are risk attitudes modeled in the theory. In particular we discuss prospect stochastic dominance and the three-pillar structure of modeling risk attitudes in Prospect Theory involving: the non-additive decision weights with lower and upper subadditivity and their relationship to the notions of pessimism and optimism, as well as preferences towards consequences separated into preferences within and across the domains of gains and losses (corresponding to basic utility and loss aversion), d) example applications of Prospect Theory.

The paper presents the comments of English, French, German, and Russian-language press, published in countries ranging from the USA to Soviet Russia, on the events in future Polish Second Republic between November 1918 till February 1919. The press certainly is not the ideal source to reconstruct the origins of reborn Poland. However, the press coverage reveals the stereotypes, misconceptions, impressions, and convictions of the authors, the expression of editors’ political line, sometimes even the governments of relevant countries. Alternatively, the press coverage reveals the lack of knowledge on the part of the above. “Old” Europe was wary of a new country, that was to emerge on the map of the continent. Simultaneously, some were seeing Poland as an important chain in the anti-Bolshevik cordon sanitaire. Most importantly, however, the contemporary press coverage reveals the lack of awareness of the basic political mechanisms and identity problems present in the lands of the emerging Polish Republic.

Based on 25 interviews with high-skilled migrants, this article examines the migration of IT profession-als from Ukraine in Australia. Their migration experience – identified as ‘migration for achievement’ – is examined in three ways. First, the article sets out the structural context for migration and the formation of the achievement life strategy: (1) the emergence and growth of the IT industry in Ukraine, in combination with (2) shifts in Australian migration policy triggered by the growth of the innovation economy and demand for highly skilled migrants. Second, it examines migration decision-making and the individual motivations, values, aims and agency of migrants. Third, the article explores how achievement life strategies are recreated or transformed after migration by looking into the migrants’ adaptation, occupational outcomes, language and national identity, future plans and aspirations. The narratives of the ‘achievement migrants’ in Australia form a story of well-integrated members of Australian society and active agents of social and economic life. Given their capacity to successfully main-tain their social and economic status after migration, along with their positive contributions to Australian society in terms of social cohesion, innovation and economic production, this group can be considered a ‘brain-gain’ for Australia.

Biometrics provide an alternative to passwords and pins for authentication. The emergence of machine learning algorithms provides an easy and economical solution to authentication problems. The phases of speaker verification protocol are training, enrollment of speakers and evaluation of unknown voice. In this paper, we addressed text independent speaker verification using Siamese convolutional network. Siamese networks are twin networks with shared weights. Feature space can be learnt easily by training these networks even if similar observations are placed in proximity. Extracted features from Siamese then can be classified using difference or correlation measures. We have implemented a customized scoring scheme that utilizes Siamese’ capability of applying distance measures with the convolutional learning. Experiments made on cross language audios of multi-lingual speakers confirm the capability of our architecture to handle gender, age and language independent speaker verification. Moreover, our designed Siamese network, SpeakerNet, provided better results than the existing speaker verification approaches by decreasing the equal error rate to 0.02.

To overcome the detrimental influence of α impulse noise in power line communication and the trap of scarce prior information in traditional noise suppression schemes , a power iteration based fast independent component analysis (PowerICA) based noise suppression scheme is designed in this paper. Firstly, the pseudo-observation signal is constructed by weighted processing so that single-channel blind separation model is transformed into the multi-channel observed model. Then the proposed blind separation algorithm is used to separate noise and source signals. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified by experiment simulation. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm has better separation effect, more stable separation and less implementation time than that of FastICA algorithm, which also improves the real-time performance of communication signal processing.

Bogusław Wolniewicz, inspired by his formal ontology of situations, has put forward a question on semilattices with a unit (A question about joinsemilattices, Bulletin of the Section of Logic 19/3, 1990). The present paper is entirely devoted to this problem in the formulation given by Wolniewicz. First, the meaning of the question is analyzed and its lattice-theoretical and Boolean algebraic contents are exhibited. Second, set-theoretical and topological counterparts of the question are formulated and commented upon.

In education, information and Communications Technologies mostly play the role of a medium of communication, as well as a means of imparting knowledge. ICT, however, is used less as a subject for student activity, i.e. a subject for students to learn, where they can operate the technology, as in robotics or mechantronics. Information technologies are also very rarely implemented in education as a way for students to build their identity and shape their attitudes towards their outside and inside worlds. In spite of this, in the history of educational technology there have been a number of researchers and educators who have promoted interesting ideas for implementing technologies as tools for human cognitive, affective, psychomotor and moral empowerment. Today such people are also present in education, however, they play unimportant roles on the periphery of formal education. This paper is a reminder of a number of ideas by theorists and researchers concerning the implementation of ICT, but mainly highlights the empowerment it gives students and its humanizing/humanitarian role.