Nauka

In the Accession Treaty of 16 April 2003, Poland agreed to adopt euro as its national currency, but the date of this adoption was not specified. The financial crisis in several countries of the Eurozone, in response to the world financial crisis in 2008, reduced drastically the public support in Poland for the replacement of the zloty by the euro. This article has two objectives. One is to assess the net costs, economic and political, for Poland remaining long outside the Eurozone. In this assessment the analysis includes also two official reports by National Bank of Poland, the country’s central bank, published in 2009 and 2014. The other objective is to note and assess the reforms which have been undertaken by member states of the Eurozone in response to this crisis, in order to maintain and enhance financial stability and economic effectiveness of the rules adopted at the start of the Eurozone on 1 January 1999. The author suggests to consider and adopt additional reforms. Discussed is also the USA experience with its own monetary union, and the potential influence on policy developments in the EU of increasing global competitive pressures from China and India.

The text is written on the occasion of the centenary of the Faculty of Law of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. The author describes the history of the Jubilarian, discusses the achievements of the Faculty’s community and reveals some of its imperfections. The review presents the changes which the Faculty has undergone. The authors commentary is pervaded with the pride of he Faculty‘ s successes from the articular periods of the history. The author also expresses concern about the effects of the Polish higher education reform which is now in its initial stage.

The consciousness of a crisis of university inclines towards its reformation. In the thinking about its revival it is necessary to take into account the archetypical idea behind university, traditions to date, contemporary conditions and visions of the future. It is also getting indispensable to take into consideration such values that ought to steer the development of university in the framework of global civilization. The tasks of university are as follows: 1) to conduct research in striving for truth in the conditions of autonomy and freedom, as well as responsibility for the present day and the future of man; 2) to educate students, which introduces them in the world of science and life, as well as teaches them to be responsible; 3) to practice public science which is present in debates undertaking to solve vital social problems. The academic community and its elites should defend the conception of university against the dictate of their political and economic counterparts who attempt to impose the idea of an entrepreneurial university which produces a utilitarian knowledge and “human principles”.

One of the main human goals is to achieve the state of happiness. Almost all people ask themselves the question of how to attain this goal. For thousands of years, philosophers and spiritual leaders and, nowadays, researchers representing various disciplines of social sciences, have been searching for the right answer to this question. One of the dilemmas intertwined in the debate about the essence of happiness relates to the tension expressed by the question “to be or to have”; the tension between the spiritual and the material world; between sacrum and profanum. Can accumulation of money and material possessions make us happy? Starting with the message passed on by a German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in his essay “To Have or to Be” and the wisdom derived from the classic philosophical and religious works, I will attempt to define the relation between the state of happiness and the attachment to money and possessions or the attachment to social and transcendent values. This difficult, yet crucial, problem will be analyzed in the context of the current psychological knowledge related to the emotional and cognitive consequences of taking a materialistic approach to life. Erich Fromm and other thinkers who had lived hundreds of years before him, suggested that greed and pursuit of material possessions did not appease the human longing for happiness. The latest experimental research, conducted by psychologists, economists and scholars representing other disciplines of science, seem to strongly confirm these assumptions.

Basing on Polish experience of about 5 years (since the presence of the African swine fever (ASF) in this country, starting from February 17th, 2014) and in accordance with literature the importance of the disease in wild boar is charaterised. ASF belongs to the most dangerous, very contagious diseases occurring in domestic swine and wild boar in Eurasia. In Europe, including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Belgium ASF is existing at present and was diagnosed for short time in the frame of the Eurasian pandemy. There is a serious concern of spreading of the virus of ASF (ASFV) to other countries of Europe, not only by wild boar. However the reservoir of ASFV in this animal is playing a very important role in the maintenance of the virus and infection of pigs. Long lasting existence of ASFV in the environmnent is connected with the very high resistance to antiviral environmental factors. Following the lack of an effective immunogenic vaccine against ASF the disease can only be controlled by administrative measures. Additionally the important and recommended procedure is the significant reduction of the wild boar population. Probability of eradication of ASFV from wild boar is increased after adding quick carcass removal simultaneously by respecting biosecurity rules. If effectively implemented, fencing is more useful to delineating zones rather than adding substantially to increased efficiency of ASF control. However, segments of fencing will be particularly usefull in theses areas, where carcasses removal or intensive hunting is difficult to implement.

In 1949 the first book of the Atlas of Polish Traditional Costumes series appeared. Józef Gajek was the one who initiated the series, published by Polish Folk Association to this day. He was associated with Polish Ethnographic Atlas, which had a great impact on the character of the series. Its main objective was to describe Polish traditional costumes according to particular regions. Janusz Kamocki and Barbara Bazielich were subsequent editors of the series. Since 2011 the authors of this article have been part of the editorial staff. At their initiative ten more books of the series were published in the years 2013–2018, field research on traditional handicraft was conducted and the Traditional Costume Section was established. The article describes the circumstances accompanying this editorial series appearance and discusses both main directions in research on traditional costumes and activities for popularising knowledge of this unique cultural phenomenon.

The article is an invitation to discuss the way of understanding human development as an actualization of individual’s potential. I present two opposite approaches to this particular problem: human development as choosing preferable potentials and also as striving to actualization of, in some way, every potential, especially these which concern the uniqueness of an individual. In the following parts of the article I locate the problem of human potential in three main discourses regarding: 1) human nature and its origin, 2) the possibility of full experience of individual lifespan 3) the possibility of influence through people on the content and the form of their actualizing potential. To the latter and strictly practical issue I pay most attention. I formulate five thesis regarding this issue. They may, in my opinion, be a starting point to discuss the general problem mentioned above. Therefore, they encourage to think about the mechanism of human development and the future environment of his life.

This year we are celebrating 150 anniversary of the discovery of DNA by Friedrich Miescher. His finding initiated a series of discoveries that allowed to depicts life's most famous molecule with novel features with considerable biological interest. In this article we recall the biggest mile stones of 150-year history of DNA and present the context and meaning of several key observations that have brought us closer to understanding DNA. 150 years ago, people had no idea that DNA existed, and they certainly hadn’t heard of DNA structure and sequencing. We now know that DNA is a dynamic, tortuous coil, constantly shuffling and unwinding. Today DNA is all around us, in a physical sense and in a cultural sense. It is really part of our culture. We will discuss also the little known facts, often overlooked in similar discussions. We will focus particularly on Professor Richard Altmann's from Iława, whose contribution to knowledge about nucleic acids is significant, although not well recognized so far.

Józefa Joteyko was the outstanding scientist in the end of the 19th and in the beginning of the 20th century. Together with Maria Skłodowska-Curie she was the most famous woman and scientist of Polish origin in Europe. She was given the right to present her lectures in the Collége de France and she was, after Adam Mickiewicz, the second Polish lecturer at this great academy. She had committed her life to scientific disciplines which included child neurology, neurophysiology, psychology and pedagogy. She had managed to develop each of them evenly with the same progress and in relation to children. Such approach was aimed at understanding the child and gathering the knowledge about its character and predisposition. These was also meant to help in determining what kind of educational and professional way the child should take. The present-day psychological and pedagogic clinics are the practical fulfilment of Józefa Joteyko’s idea and we cannot imagine the contemporary education without the support of such institutions.

We discus legal status of plants obtained using NBT: whether they are to be treated as GMOs or not. The conclusion may have a negative impact on the development of research on them and their practical use. The problem of the application of provisions on GMOs in relation to the products of some of the NBT has been the subject of the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Case C-528/16 – this topic is analyzed in details.

The aim of the article is to discuss Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona in a philosophical context and analyze the problem of the identity of the main characters. During the analysis, elements of existential thought and Sartre's philosophy were used. The psychological and philosophical layer of the film combines the common theme of broadly understood existence. The focus was on the identity problems of the main characters of the film and the linguistic layer in the context of the interpersonal conflict.