A novel VC (voice conversion) method based on hybrid SVR (support vector regression) and GMM (Gaussian mixture model) is presented in the paper, the mapping abilities of SVR and GMM are exploited to map the spectral features of the source speaker to those of target ones. A new strategy of F0 transformation is also presented, the F0s are modeled with spectral features in a joint GMM and predicted from the converted spectral features using the SVR method. Subjective and objective tests are carried out to evaluate the VC performance; experimental results show that the converted speech using the proposed method can obtain a better quality than that using the state-of-the-art GMM method. Meanwhile, a VC method based on non-parallel data is also proposed, the speaker-specific information is investigated using the SVR method and preliminary subjective experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is feasible when a parallel corpus is not available.

Rural development policy of Agricultural Property Stock (APS) of the State Treasury in Poland is run by the National Support Centre for Agriculture (until 31.08.2017 Agricultural Property Agency). In the article, on the example of the Braniewo municipality, the size and spatial distribution of land transferred from the Agricultural Property Stock (APS) of the State Treasury to the municipality was analysed. One of the most important goals associated with this was activities related to social aspects, often part of the revitalization and renewal of the rural areas. After Poland's accession to the Euro-pean Union, it was possible to obtain subsidies that allowed the rural population to apply for financing projects, such as: road construction, creating school playgrounds or socio-cultural facilities. Authors also analysed examples of good practic-es in this area in the municipality of Braniewo, as a recommendation for other municipalities. Attempts have also been made to indicate the role of the National Support Centre for Agriculture in the transformation of the Polish countryside, with particular emphasis on the areas of former State Agricultural Farms.

The discovery of a seventeenth-century duplicate copy of two letters (one written by Cardinal Zbigniew Oleśnicki to John of Capistrano on 15.04.1452, and the latter’s reply to the Cardinal and King Casimir Jagiellonian) on sheet 191 of the manuscript marked Chigi Q II 51 kept in the Vatican Apostolic Library, made it possible to determine the previously unknown provenance of the manuscript marked 1399 I from the Princes Czartoryski Library. As a result of an analysis of the content and the layout of the duplicate copy, it was established that the text from sheet 191 was copied directly from the manuscript kept in the Princes Czartoryski Library. The Chigi manuscript contains information on the source of the duplicate: a manuscript kept in St. Anne’s Franciscan friars monastery in Warsaw. Therefore, the monastery should be recognised as the place in which the Princes Czartoryski Library manuscript marked 1399 I was kept in the 17th century. It ended up there in the second half of the 15th century, soon after the monastery was founded, and was most probably kept there as long as until the beginning of the 19th century, when it was purchased by Tadeusz Czacki.