The subject of the present study is the persuasive function of irony in a special type of media discourse called socio-political editorial. The use of irony enables the journalist to establish the axiological domain of editorial in order to reinforce the information content and manipulate the readers’ opinions. Therefore, the main aim of the paper is to describe the problem of language manipulation in verbal irony considered by the author as one of semantico-rhetorical means of evaluation. The analyzed articles were culled from selected web pages of French journals and magazines (2005-2008) treating about two types of social reforms and the urban violence in French suburbs.

The paper presents analytical relationships based on the theory of Green’s functions. The relationships refer to instantaneous and continuous as well as point and ring heat sources which are discussed. The relationship relating to continuous ring source is the basis for modelling and designing of spiral ground heat exchangers. Heat transfer in the infinite and semi-infinite body was considered. In the latter case, the image method was discussed. Using the results of measurements regarding heat transfer in the ground with a heat exchanger in the form of a single coil installed, a comparison of calculated ground temperatures with measured values was presented.

Introduction: The Dundee Ready Education Environment Measure (DREEM) is an instru-ment that assesses the educational environment.
Aim: The aim of this study was to psychometrically evaluate a Polish version of the DREEM instrument.
Material and Methods: 203 medical students who fully completed the DREEM questionnaire were included in the study. Validity was evaluated through the analysis of construct validity and reliability.
Results: After language validation the internal consistency was assessed. Cronbach’s alpha for the overall score was 0.93 and the five subscales were: perceptions of learning 0.86, perceptions of teachers 0.82, perceptions of atmosphere 0.75, academic self-perceptions 0.61, and social-self perceptions 0.61. The exploratory factor analyses, however, yielded dimensions that did not fully correspond to the original DREEM subscales.
Conclusions: Internal consistency of the Polish version of the DREEM scale as a whole was excellent, however for each of five originally developed subscales it was lower and vary a lot; construct validity of Polish version was not compatible with the original structure of the DREEM scale but was reasonable. A new five-factor solution obtained in this study could be a reliable tool for assessing the medical education environment in the Polish circumstances, but it will require confirmation in future study.

B a c k g r o u n d: Articular cartilage is highly-organized nonvascularized tissue which is responsible in humans for pressure absorption under load, as well as for the smoothness of the opposite tangential bone surfaces.

The purpose of our research is to study structural and functional features of articular cartilage at lightoptical level by using state-of-the-art research methods of bone-cartilage tissue.

M a t e r i a l a n d M e t h o d s: The study was conducted on samples of femoral heads. Hyperfine sections were subject to hematoxylin and eosin, Van Gieson’s and PAS staining. In order to identify the receptor profile of chondrocytes and the features of protein arrangement in extracellular matrix we undertook an immunohistochemical study.

R e s u l t s: An articular cartilage is quite organized tissue. As any other organ, it has parenchyma and stroma. Parenchyma is represented by one type of cells — chondrocytes, which, depending on how deep they are located in cartilage, have a different shape, size and functional features. The chondrocytes and extracellular matrix have different degrees of receptors expression.

C o n c l u s i o n s: Th e cartilage is being constantly self-renewed, what is manifested by means of a rather slow division of the surface-located chondrocytes and programmed death of dystrophic-modified cells. The features of extracellular matrix structure determine the originality of cell location in different areas of cartilage tissue. Due to synthesis of specific proteins, chondrocytes self-regulate properties of cartilage tissue.

The main objective of the article is an attempt to indicate factors which determine the image of a city as a good place to live as well as to reveal the ways in which they affect the citizens’ quality of life. In order to do so, the author selected the city of Gdynia which is perceived as the best city to live in by its citizens. Among the most important factors determining the quality of life in general there are: the scale of a city, local identity, public spaces, symbolic places, housing environment, perception of a place, personal satisfaction of a place where a particular person lives, urban policies as well as presence and activeness of local leaders. The article presents the results of a social study carried out by the author herself during two periods of time – in 2004 and 2014 as well as the results of the Social Diagnosis 2015.

In this paper the authors propose a decision support system for automatic blood smear analysis based on microscopic images. The images are pre-processed in order to remove irrelevant elements and to enhance the most important ones – the healthy blood cells (erythrocytes) and the pathologic ones (echinocytes). The separated blood cells are analysed in terms of their most important features by the eigenfaces method. The features are the basis for designing the neural network classifier, learned to distinguish between erythrocytes and echinocytes. As the result, the proposed system is able to analyse the smear blood images in a fully automatic way and to deliver information on the number and statistics of the red blood cells, both healthy and pathologic. The system was examined in two case studies, involving the canine and human blood, and then consulted with the experienced medicine specialists. The accuracy of classification of red blood cells into erythrocytes and echinocytes reaches 96%.