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The architectural expression of buildings realising the ideas of urban agriculture
Get PDFEconomic and environmental conditions, changing with unprecedented speed, entail looking for new agricultural technologies. The increasing human population makes it necessary to think of new methods of food production. Until now, several-dozen-storey vertical farms, open and closed, and intended mainly for urban areas and urban agriculture, belong mostly in the sphere of futuristic ideas. The projected structures are complexes of unprecedented architectural forms, self-sufficient in energy, making use of sustainable energy sources, recycling water and/or other materials. The question must be raised as to whether our civilisation on Earth can survive and develop in the coming decades without implementing visionary (for the time being) conceptions of food production? Agriculture in high-rise buildings is the dream of some scientists and architects around the globe and is becoming a reality
The Adam Mickiewicz controversy, 1948: Eisenhower and Columbia
Get PDFColumbia University announced the Adam Mickiewicz Chair in Philology, Language and Literature in May, 1948, during the Cold War. The Chair’s incumbent would be Manfred Kridl, an émigré who had left Poland 1940, and the communist Warsaw government would contribute $10,000 annually. Polish Ambassador Josep Winiewicz, with the assistance of Czeslaw Milosz, had suggested Kridl. Arthur Coleman, an Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages, and the Polish-American Congress loudly protested the appointment, “This infiltration of the Communist voice.” The Polish-American press agreed. The controversy received nationwide attention when Coleman resigned and asserted that Poland, controlled by Moscow and the Comintern, would wage a campaign of “academic infiltration” with the Mickiewicz Chair. Sigmund Sluszka, a former Coleman student, called Kridl “a noted Marxist.” The New York Timesgave the resignation front-page coverage, and the media emphasized that Columbia was “a Hot-Bed of Communism.” The fact that World War II hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had just become the university’s president increased public interest in the controversy, even though the decision on the Chair had been made before his arrival. Columbia’s Provost launched an extensive investigation into the accusations against Kridl and two professors, and Eisenhower presented the confidential report to the University’s Trustees. Columbia stood by hersupport of the Chair and Kridl.The protest lasted throughout the summer, and several university officials had questioned accepting the funding from Warsaw. While the controversy had undermined the Polish Studies program for the Polish-American and émigré communities, the Provost believed that the Adam Mickiewicz Chair and Professor Kridl contributed to the furthering of Polish-American Studies in America
Écrire, c'est lutter contre l'oubli pour se bâtir une identité
Get PDFTo resist is to fight against the Forgetting ; it's to build its own Identity The principal aim of this paper is to examine two novels of the caribbean writter Maryse Condé, Moi, Tituba sorcière noire de Salem and Les derniers rois mages. I will analyse in these how notions of both personal and collective cultural identity are explored so as to overcome the old perception of Négritude and Panafricanism. Many of her novels embrace the idea of searching, her protagonists are often on some type of quest and searching for an authentic homeland. Much of her work revolves around the notion of asking questions, but not necessarily providing answers, and reflecting on the history of her people. On different levels, Condé does not allow her work to be limited by boundaries of any type. That´s her own way to resist
"Simowie" na wspak. Gra "This War of Mine" w perspektywie retoryki proceduralnej
Get PDFThe Sims à Rebours. A Game This War of Mine in Perspective of Procedural Rhetoric The article analyzes a computer game This War of Mine in terms of Ian Bogost’s procedural rhetoric. It reconstructs ideological presumptions of the game, mainly its communitarianism and pacifism
Przetworzenie to jeszcze nie powrót. O jednym wierszu Witolda Wirpszy (i wszystkich innych polskich wierszach postsekularnych)
Get PDFTransformation is Not a Return. A Reading of a Poem by Witold Wirpsza (and of All Other Polish Postsecular Poems)While challenging the common view which sees postsecularism as a return to religion, this paper is an attempt to apply the main tenets of the postsecular thought to the literary criticism accompanying the Polish literature. After a brief presentation of several Polish poets whose works meet the proposed criteria of postsecularism (T. Karpowicz, K. Miłobędzka, S. Barańczak and W. Wirpsza), the author sets forth the argument that it is the linguistic aspect of the poems that lets us read them as postsecular. The main part of the paper is a critical reading of Witold Wirpsza’s 1971 poem “Powrót w zamęcie” (“A Return in Confusion”) which is interpreted as, on the one hand, an illustration of the idea of the society being forced into secularisation and, on the other hand, an effect of an intertextual play with Jan Kochanowski’s “Hymn.” Both aspects are crucial in identifying the postsecular rhetoric of the poem as they involve an unorthodox rendering of theological motifs and structures (making it possible to approach them from the perspectives of animal studies and animal theology), the idea of the artistic potential of blasphemy, and the proposition of the vital role of the “linguistic moment” (J. Hillis Miller) in the extra-linguistic interpretation of poetic texts
Cross Entropy Clustering Approach to Iris Segmentation for Biometrics Purpose
Get PDFThis work presents the step by step tutorial for how to use cross entropy clustering for the iris segmentation. We present the detailed construction of a suitable Gaussian model which best fits for in the case of iris images, and this is the novelty of the proposal approach. The obtained results are promising, both pupil and iris are extracted properly and all the information necessary for human identification and verification can be extracted from the found parts of the iris
Subspace Memory Clustering
Get PDFWe present a new subspace clustering method called SuMC (Subspace Memory Clustering), which allows to efficiently divide a dataset D RN into k 2 N pairwise disjoint clusters of possibly different dimensions. Since our approach is based on the memory compression, we do not need to explicitly specify dimensions of groups: in fact we only need to specify the mean number of scalars which is used to describe a data-point. In the case of one cluster our method reduces to a classical Karhunen-Loeve (PCA) transform. We test our method on some typical data from UCI repository and on data coming from real-life experiments
Rola Chin we współczesnej globalnej gospodarce
Get PDFThe role of China in the contemporary world economyThe 21st century has been said to be the century of Asia. The dynamism of Asian economies for a few last decades is a kind of confirmation of the above statement. The contemporary world is undergoing transformation not only in its economic, but also geopolitical sphere. The changes lead to the formation of new political and economic order, where a place for new emerging powers should be found. China is one of such powers. This country is the most evident example of an Asian economy which is changing not only internally, but also causing great shift in the world order. The article shows the new position of the Chinese economy in this world order
O mojej współpracy z Edwardem Kajdańskim
Get PDFOn my cooperation with Edward KajdańskiIn the article the Author reminisces the history of his cooperation with Edward Kajdański, which began during his stay in Gdansk in 1990. In 2001, Zhang Zhenhuei translated into Chinese the book The Ambassador of the Middle Kingdom. After the release of the translation, on the invitation of Zhang Xiping, he began with his wife to translate all the works of Michal Boym previously translated from Latin by Kajdański. Cooperation of the Chinese interpreter with Kajdański lasts for several years and has been assessed by him as the only example of such extensive cooperation of Chinese scholar and Western sinologist in the study of sinological issues and translation of foreign classical sinological works. Along with E. Kajdański and Zhang Xiping he worked on the issuing in China Selected Works of Michal Boym
A World without Voiced Sonorants: Reflections on Cyran 2014 (Part 2)
Get PDFThe current part of the article evaluates the idea that sonorants and vowels are phonologically unspecified for voicing in all languages. This is the central assumption made by Cyran (2014), which, however, remains unsubstantiated and does not follow from any property of Element Theory. Sonorants do not undergo final devoicing, and voicing is never used for distinctive purposes in vowels. Cases where it is reported to be used to contrast sonorants are rare and subject to caution since it may not always be clear that the contrastive property is really voicing. The central testing ground is then intervocalic voicing. If sonorants and vowels are unable to spread voicing because they do not have any, the prediction is that intervocalic voicing is never assimilation. Instead it is argued to be a case of lenition in weak (intervocalic) position where obstruents are delaryngealized (i.e. lose their voicing prime) and therefore subject to phonetic (or interpretational) voicing. Lenition is positional and does not involve any transmission of primes. The common practice to analyse intervocalic voicing as both lenition and the spreading of some voice-related prime is inconsistent.