There are many ways of choosing or creating a name, the ways of which vary from culture to culture, and from language to language. Chinese onyms are usually constructed of one or more elements, being mostly lexical items (morphemes or words), and retaining in most cases their own lexical meaning in a name, therefore they are usually semantically transparent. However, the “true” significance of some names is sometimes very difficult to discover, and the conclusion is often based upon guesswork. What is evident, Chinese onyms are not random combinations; they usually have a certain underlying significance, reflecting the reason or reasons why particular lexical items are used in the naming process. Chinese researchers usually do not mention “the meaning” of names as a criterion for their semantic divisions. Their classifications are mainly based upon the variously termed “reasons”, “methods”, “motivations”, or “sources of naming”. Therefore, this paper deals with some selected, typical and untypical, “methods” of creating Chinese names, especially given names and place names.

Polska od lat zmaga się ze złą jakością powietrza, co bezpośrednio przekłada się na zdrowie ludzkie. Badania wskazują, że największy wpływ na przekraczanie poziomów dopuszczalnych i docelowych stężeń zanieczyszczeń, szczególnie pyłów oraz bezno(a)pirenu, ma niska emisja, w szczególności z sektora gospodarstw domowych. Powodem takiego stanu jest spalanie złej jakości paliwa w starych, mało efektywnych i wysokoemisyjnych paleniskach. Mając na uwadze powyższe zagrożenia, idąc śladem Krakowa i Małopolski, kolejne województwa, miasta i gminy wprowadzają lub rozważają wprowadzenie ograniczenia spalania paliw stałych na swoim terenie oraz całkowitą likwidację kotłów na paliwa stałe niespełniające wymogów ekoprojektu lub ewentualnie normy 5 klasy emisji spalin.

Określenie wielkości emitowanych zanieczyszczeń do atmosfery ma kluczowe znaczenie w przypadku podejmowania wysiłków i określania działań zmierzających do poprawy jakości powietrza. W Polsce ruszyły ambitne programy zarówno na poziomie rządowym, jak i regionalnym, które mają na celu wymianę kotłów i pieców w kilku milionach domów. Na przykład szacuje się, że prawie pół miliona kotłów należy wymienić w ramach realizacji uchwały antysmogowej w województwie małopolskim. W artykule zostały przedstawione opracowane współczynniki emisji zanieczyszczeń mających bezpośredni wpływ na lokalną jakość powietrza tj.: współczynniki emisji pyłów, bezno(a)pirenu, tlenków siarki i azotu, tlenku węgla. Zostały wskazane zakresy stosowanych i prezentowanych współczynników emisji dla różnych technologii oraz różnych paliw. Wskazane zostały również standardy emisji obowiązujące dla nowych kotłów oraz ilości zużywanych paliw w gospodarstwach domowych w Polsce.

Przedstawiono możliwe zmiany wielkości emisji w przypadku likwidacji starych kotłów i używania nowoczesnych urządzeń do spalania biomasy oraz węgla w gospodarstwach domowych oraz przeprowadzenia termomodernizacji.

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.

The public character of school has recently been called into question more often. I examine the question given in the title in terms of three different aspects (juridical, institutional and performative), each of which is linked with a number of disturbing transformations of public schools (privatization of that which is public, re-feudalization, and commodification of education). By virtue of such an analysis and with reference to research on the essence of what is public, I make an attempt to formulate the key meanings of the public character of school.

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).

The development of linear infrastructure increases the degree of fragmentation of natural areas and has a negative impact on biodiversity and the range of available ecosystem services. The basic competing land use model is expanded to include infrastructure development. The extended model leads to the conclusion that due to the dual impact of the infrastructure (lowering the value of ecosystem services and increasing the private rents to developed land), the size of the natural area in the long-term equilibrium will be lower compared to the basic model. The preservation of nature ceases to be profitable enough. Infrastructure also reduces the marginal costs of conversion and thus increasing the volume of natural land being converted at avery moment along the transition path. If the decisions on optimal management of natural areas and infrastructure development are undertaken together, the result is a lower density of the infrastructure network and a larger ecosystem area in the steady state.

The paper presents the implementation of the method of own residual magnetic field to identify damages occurring in a steel rope. A special measuring head with 4 residual magnetic field sensors, spaced evenly every 90 degrees, was used. The measuring head was also equipped with a path or a time sensor. The measurement consists in recording normal and tangential components of the residual magnetic field and their gradients. This method has a number of advantages with regard to classic magnetic methods. It does not require special magnetisation of the rope or its special preparation for testing. Validation of the obtained test results of this rope was conducted by the classic MTR method and a very good compliance in the detection of damage was demonstrated. It was found that the strong magnetisation used in the MTR method does not affect the detection of damage to the rope using the residual magnetic field method.

The multicriteria decision process consists of five main steps: definition of the optimisation problem, determination of the weight structure of the decision criteria, design of the evaluation matrix, selection of the optimal evaluation method and ranking of solutions. It is often difficult to obtain the optimal solution to a multicriterion problem. The main reason is the subjective element of the model – the weight functions of the decision criteria. Expert opinions are usually taken into account in their determination. The aim of this article is to present a novel method of minimizing the uncertainty of the weights of the decision criteria using Monte Carlo simulation and method of data reconciliation. The proposed method is illustrated by the example of multicriterion social effectiveness evaluation for electric power supply to a building using renewable energy sources.

The paper deals with a solution of radiation heat transfer problems in enclosures filled with nonparticipating medium using ray tracing on hierarchical ortho-Cartesian meshes. The idea behind the approach is that radiative heat transfer problems can be solved on much coarser grids than their counterparts from computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The resulting code is designed as an add-on to OpenFOAM, an open-source CFD program. Ortho-Cartesian mesh involving boundary elements is created based upon CFD mesh. Parametric non-uniform rational basis spline (NURBS) surfaces are used to define boundaries of the enclosure, allowing for dealing with domains of complex shapes. Algorithm for determining random, uniformly distributed locations of rays leaving NURBS surfaces is described. The paper presents results of test cases assuming gray diffusive walls. In the current version of the model the radiation is not absorbed within gases. However, the ultimate aim of the work is to upgrade the functionality of the model, to problems in absorbing, emitting and scattering medium projecting iteratively the results of radiative analysis on CFD mesh and CFD solution on radiative mesh.

The paper presents the adaptation of the modified pulse method for investigating temperature characteristics of thermal diffusivity in the vicinity of the second-order phase transition points. The principle of the adaptation consists in the modified in relation to the original method, development of the characteristics of temperature changes between boundary surfaces of a flat-parallel specimen after the laser shot onto its front surface. The application of this adaptation was illustrated with investigation into thermal diffusivity of nickel (99.9% wt) in the temperature range of 20-380◦C. In all cases the measurement error was less than 3%, and the averaging interval for the measured values of thermal diffusivity was not greater than 1.2 K.

The objective of the study is to assess the hearing performance of cochlear implant users in three device microphone configurations: omni-directional, directional, and beamformer (BEAMformer two-adaptive noise reduction system), in localization and speech perception tasks in dynamically changing listening environments. Seven cochlear implant users aided with Cochlear CM-24 devices with Freedom speech processor participated in the study. For the localization test in quiet and in background noise, subjects demonstrated significant differences between different microphone settings. Confusion matrices showed that in about 70% cases cochlear implant subjects correctly localized sounds within a horizontal angle of 30-40◦ (±1◦ loudspeaker apart from signal source). However localization in noise was less accurate as shown by a large number of considerable errors in localization in the confusion matrices. Average results indicated no significant difference between three microphone configurations. For speech presented from the front 3 dB SNR improvements in speech intelligibility in three subjects can be observed for beamforming system compared to directional and omni-directional microphone settings. The benefits of using different microphone settings in cochlear implant devices in dynamically changing listening conditions depend on the particular sound environment

Tires play an important role in the automobile industry. However, their disposal when worn out has adverse effects on the environment. The main aim of this study was to prepare activated carbon from waste tire pyrolysis char by impregnating KOH onto pyrolytic char. Adsorption studies on lead onto chemically activated carbon were carried out using response surface methodology. The effect of process parameters such as temperature (°C), adsorbent dosage (g/100 ml), pH, contact time (minutes) and initial lead concentration (mg/l) on the adsorption capacity were investigated. It was found out that the adsorption capacity increased with an increase in adsorbent dosage, contact time, pH, and decreased with an increase in lead concentration and temperature. Optimization of the process variables was done using a numerical optimization method. Fourier Transform Infrared Spectra (FTIR) analysis, X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and scanning electron microscope were used to characterize the pyrolytic carbon char before and after activation. The numerical optimization analysis results showed that the maximum adsorption capacity of

93.176 mg/g was obtained at adsorbent dosage of 0.97 g/100 ml, pH 7, contact time of 115.27 min, initial metal concentration of 100 mg/and temperature of 25°C. FTIR and TGA analysis showed the presence of oxygen containing functional groups on the surface of the activated carbon produced and that the weight loss during the activation step was negligible.

This paper presents a new model that describes the physical phenomena occurring in an individual Outer Hair Cell (OHC) in the human hearing organ (Cochlea). The new model employs the concept of parametric amplification and piezoelectricity. As a consequence, the proposed model may explain in a natural way many as yet unresolved problems about the mechanisms of: 1) power amplification, 2) non- linearity, 3) fine tuning, or 4) high sensitivity that take place in the human hearing organ. Mathematical analysis of the model is performed. The equivalent electrical circuits of an individual OHC are established. The high selectivity of the OHC parametric amplifier is analyzed by solving the resulting Mathieu and Ince differential equations. An analytical formula for the power gain in the OHC’s parametric amplifier has been developed. The proposed model has direct physical interpretation and all its elements have their physical counterparts in the actual structure of the cochlea. The numerical values of the individual elements of the electrical equivalent circuits are consistent with the experimental physiological data. It is anticipated that the proposed new model may contribute in future improvements of human cochlear implants as well as in development of new digital audio standards.

The aim of performed research was to evaluate weed seedbank in soil under the influence of four different winter wheat tillage systems. Winter wheat was grown in the following cultivation systems: A – monoculture with direct drilling into white clover mulch; B – monoculture with direct drilling into wheat stubble; C – monoculture with conventional tillage; D – crop rotation with conventional tillage. It was shown that pre-sowing wheat tillage had a more considerable effect on weed species and weed seedbank in soil than type of crop rotation. The least seedbank was observed when plough system was replaced by direct drilling. In the soil layer of 0–20 cm, under wheat no-plough tillage, 20.3% less weed diaspores wasfound compared to monoculture with plough tillage and by 40.1% lessthan in crop rotation. The plough tillage increased amount of weed diaspores in the whole plough layer, while direct drilling increased it only in 0–1 cm of soil layer. After direct drilling of wheat into stubble (B) the number of weed diaspores in 1 dcm³ of soil in 0–1 cm layer was over twofold higher than in direct sowing in mulch (A), and threefold higher than in crop rotation (D) and almost six times higher than in wheat monoculture with conventional tillage (C). Dominating weed species in the soil over the types of wheat cultivation systems were: Chenopodium album L., Amaranthus retroflexus L., Apera spica-venti L., Lamium purpureum L., and Viola arvensis Murr.

This study presents the rheological properties of sewage sludge after conditioning with the application of biomass ash. The impact of sewage sludge pre-treatment on its viscosity, flow curves and thixotropy was investigated. The increase of shear stress and the decrease of viscosity were observed with the increase of shear rate. Obtained results were compared with raw sewage sludge and the sludge after modification by means of polyelectrolyte in the dosage of 1.5 g (kg d.m.)^-1. The findings proved that samples of raw and conditioned sewage sludge had thixotropic characteristics. The correlation between moisture content and capillary suction time reduction as well as selected rheological parameters were also determined. On the basis of the obtained results it was stated that the Ostwald de Vaele model best fits the experimental data.

Single-branch filters are still popular and are commonly used for power quality improvement purposes. Analysis of a single-branch filter is a relatively simple task. Although individual filters tuned to specific harmonics can be easily designed, after connecting them into a group it turns out that the capacitance and inductance mutually influence each other, distorting the resulting frequency characteristics. This article presents a matrix method for design a group of single-branch filters, so that the resultant frequency characteristic satisfies the design requirements including the requirements for location of the frequency characteristic maxima. Designer indicates the frequencies of the parallel resonances.

Post-Versailles Europe saw the emergence of new, quasi-state territorial corporations (enjoying a great deal of autonomy, but not sovereignty). These included the Free State of Fiume/Rijeka (1919- 1924), Free City of Danzig/Gdańsk (1920-1939), Free State of Memel/ Klaipeda (which emerged between 1920 and 1923, before being incorporated into Lithuania with partial autonomy still remaining), as well as, slightly later, the autonomous Åland Islands (1922), and the Republic of Hatay (1938-1939). In theory, those international law constructs were supposed to resolve tensions (including those erupting on the grounds of nationality) between neighbours vying for control over strategic territories (and cities). However, they proved to primarily spark new conflicts of varying length. The article constitutes an attempt at comparing the geneses and development of the first three of the abovementioned “free cities”, as well as identifying their role in the newly-formed League of Nations. In addition, the article attempts to determine the degree to which the principle of national self-determination played a role in the establishment of these entities, as well as the methods used to ensure that the national minorities which found themselves within the borders of these “free cities” were protected.

The paper presents the cellular automaton (CA) model for tracking the development of dendritic structure in non-equilibrium solidification conditions of binary alloy. Thermal, diffusion and surface phenomena have been included in the mathematical description of solidification. The methodology for calculating growth velocity of the liquid-solid interface based on solute balance, considering the distribution of the alloy component in the neighborhood of moving interface has been proposed. The influence of solidification front curvature on the equilibrium temperature was determined by applying the Gibbs Thomson approach. Solute and heat transfer equations were solved using the finite difference method assuming periodic boundary conditions and Newton cooling boundary condition at the edges of the system. The solutal field in the calculation domain was obtained separately for solid and liquid phase. Numerical simulations were carried out for the Al-4 wt.% Cu alloy at two cooling rates 15 K/s and 50 K/s. Microstructure images generated on the basis of calculations were compared with actual structures of castings. It was found that the results of the calculations are agreement in qualitative terms with the results of experimental research. The developed model can reproduce many morphological features of the dendritic structure and in particular: generating dendritic front and primary arms, creating, extension and coarsening of secondary branches, interface inhibition, branch fusion, considering the coupled motion and growth interaction of crystals.

One of the biggest problems for sand casting foundries must be the waste produced from disposable molds. Stricter environmental regulations make it harder to dispose of waste sand, so a truly competitive foundry does no longer only make great products, but also concentrates on a sustainable casting process. While methods for repurposing waste foundry sand are still limited, the internal circulation of such sands proves significant possibilities. This paper will focus on thermal reclamation of foundry sands in a special rotating drum furnace in a central facility to serve several foundries. Thermal reclamation is a process for handling foundry sands in elevated temperatures to combust unwanted substances from reusable base sand. The introduction focuses on background of the Finnish foundry business, the most common sand systems in Finland and their reclaim properties. The experimental part features presentation of the new reclamation plant process and the conducted test runs. The samples collected from each test run have been laboratory tested to assure proper sand quality. The results of this work showed that the reclamation of alkaline phenolic no-bake sands was excellent. Reclamation of green sands did not provide satisfactory results as expected and the reclamation of furan no-bake sands provided mixed results, as the raw material was imperfect to begin with. The most important result of this work is still the successful initiation of a centralized thermal reclamation plant, with the ability to reclaim sands of several foundries. With this all of industrial symbiosis, circular economy and sustainability advanced in Finland, and the future development of this plant provides even further opportunities and a possibility to spread the ideas on a global scale.

Neutralisation of the terrorist explosive devices is a risky task. Such tasks may be carried out by robots in order to protect human life. The article describes chosen design problems concerning the new neutralisation and assisting robot SMR-100 Expert. The robot was to be designed for the use in confined spaces, particularly inside the air-crafts, buses and rail cars. In order to achieve this ambitious plan, new advanced technological designing tools had to be applied. A number of interesting design issues were approached. The successful development of the prototype robot Expert in Poland resulted in the creation of the first intervention robot in the world able to perform all necessary anti-terrorist tasks inside the passenger planes.

An essay comparing Jan Kochanowski’s epigram Do Anny simultaneously with Sappho’s famous fr. 31 Voigt, which is preserved in Pseudo-Longinus’ De sublimitate, and Catullus 51 ( Ille mi par esse). An attempt is made to ascertain the exact debt of Kochanowski’s epigram to both poems.

This paper discusses the contribution of linguistics to theology, taking the specific example of L.-M. Chauvet’s thought. First, the critique of language as a tool is analyzed. According to Chauvet, language can no longer be considered as a tool, but as a mediation, understood as a “matrix” or environment ( milieu). Linguistic mediation is thus explained from the conceptual perspective of symbol and symbolic order: human subjectivity is inseparable from language, and language has a symbolic structure. Theological reflection follows the concept of mediation and symbol as an important anthropological fact. Faith, then, involves rejecting the illusion of direct contact with God and accepting the mediation of the Church and the sacraments as a process of “accepting ourselves” as children of God and accepting one another in Christ as brothers.