In 1981, Polish canoeists (members of the Bystrze Academic Travel Club) made the first journey along the waters of the River Colca in the section located in Arequipa Province (Peru), along which the waters flow in a deep canyon. Information on this sporting achievement – and a description of the Canyon and its surrounding area filled the Peruvian press and tourist publications around the world, ensuring that the Colca Canyon became one of the most important goals for tourists anywhere in Peru from that time on. However, mass infl uxes of tourists, noisy trips, the development of hotel infrastructure and other items required in tourism have generated permanent change in the character of the Colca Valley, and done much to influence the lives of its inhabitants.

This work proposes a systematic assessment of stereophotogrammetry and noise-floor tests to characterize and quantify the uncertainty and accuracy of a vision-based tracking system. Two stereophotogrammetry sets with different configurations, i.e., some images are designed and their sensitivity is quantified based on several assessments. The first assessment evaluates the image coordinates, stereo angle and reconstruction errors resulting from the stereophotogrammetry procedure, and the second assessment expresses the uncertainty from the variance and bias errors measured from the noise-floor test. These two assessments quantify the uncertainty, while the accuracy of the vision-based tracking system is assessed from three quasi-static tests on a small-scaled specimen. The difference in each stereophotogrammetry set and configuration, as indicated by the stereophotogrammetry and noise-floor assessment, leads to a significant result hat the first stereophotogrammetry set measures the RMSE of 3.6 mm while the second set identifies only 1.6 mm of RMSE. The results of this work recommend a careful and systematic assessment of stereophotogrammetry and noise-floor test results to quantify the uncertainty before the real test to achieve a high displacement accuracy of the vision-based tracking system.

The article is an attempt to collate and present the existing works of Polish geographers who focused on public space in cities, taking two main theoretical and methodological approaches – objective and subjective – under consideration. The article discusses different definitions of the analysed term in an interdisciplinary context as well as indicates main aspects and research directions in geographical studies along with the scholars representing them. Moreover, the authors make an attempt to evaluate the existing state of the art and try to set future perspectives for geographical studies on public space in cities. The article finishes with the authors’ conclusions regarding the necessity to continue the research on public space and the role Polish geographers shall play in it.

For several decades of the last century, semiotic arrangements enriched the sociology of culture. The aim of the article is to show the achievements of the empirical school of sociology of culture in the perspective of the significant semiotic issues on the example of selectively selected works of the eminent scientist Antonina Kłoskowska and the “Łódź school” which she created. Thanks to Antonina Kłoskowska, the empirical way of the “Łódź school” sociology of culture led from literature reception research to visual arts research. Her students made a significant contribution to Polish sociology of art, sociology of literature, sociology of film, sociology of theater, and visual sociology. The text attempts to sketch semiotic theoretical inspirations, a characteristic theoretical and methodological approach to the study of symbolic culture. The problems of research on the reception of works were described in the context of selected studies on film reception. The starting point was the empirical research of Antonina Kłoskowska regarding the reception of the screening of the Wedding (dir. A. Wajda, 1973).

Over the last three decades the German Bauer Media empire has systematically invested in the Polish media market. Due to a well-devised business strategy Bauer Media Group not only have built up a strong market position but continued to expand despite the global decline of the print industry. While successfully broadening its offer to new readers, the company managed to hold on to its key segments, i.e. women’s press, entertainment and TV magazines, teen and computer magazines. This article examines Bauer Media’s presence in Poland since 1991. It combines an outline history of its Polish operations with a close analysis of the company’s key market expansion decisions, quantitative transformations of its print offer and its response to the new, more digital and more social, media environment.