The idea of a Multilateral Investment Court seems to be one of the most prominent initiatives of the “multilateralization” of international investment law during this century. The creation of a new international, permanent court concentrated on settling investor – state disputes is an extraordinary challenge. Possible problems relate not only to the negotiations concerning the organizational and procedural aspects necessary to ensure the efficient operation of this type of body. It is also necessary to take into account the dynamics of the functioning of international adjudication as such, as well as the controversies surrounding the international legal protection of foreign investments.

The judgment of the Court of Justice in the Achmea case evoked significant repercussions regarding the application and operation of the bilateral investment treaties (BITs) concluded between EU Member States. As a result of this decision, EU Member States have decided to terminate almost 190 intra-EU BITs. Nevertheless, full implementation of the Achmea judgment remains a complex issue, entangled in political and legal controversies concerning intra-EU BITs which have been present for more than a decade. On a more general level, the implementation process is simultaneously entwined in two other significant debates: the specifics of the rights of investors, and the relationship between EU law and international law.

Drawing on the stressor–emotion model, the study examines the mechanisms of counterproductive work behavior (CWB) development: specifically (1) the direct effect of job stressor (bullying at work); (2) the moderation effect of the Dark Triad (DT) and job control (JC); and (3) the moderated moderation effect (DT x JC) on the job stressor–CWB link. Data were collected among 763 white- and blue-collar workers. The hypotheses were tested by means of the PROCESS method. As expected in the hypotheses, high job stressor was directly related to high CWB, and DT moderated (increased) the link. JC also moderated the job stressor–CWB link, but the moderation effect was in a direction opposite to expectations. High job control participants were more likely to report CWB when they reported a high level of the stressors. The moderated moderation effect was supported. JC increases the moderation effect of DT on the job stressor–CWB link. The highest level of CWB was observed when DT and JC were high. The findings provide further insight into processes leading to the development of CWB.

The research reported in this paper is a continuation of the experimentation on the articulation of the Polish /r/ in the intervocalic and postconsonantal positions (cf. Stolarski 2013a and 2013b, respectively). According to Biedrzycki (1978: 83-84), in these two phonetic contexts the rhotic happens to be articulated as a tap. Such an assumption stands in contrast to the widely accepted view that the Polish rhotic is generally realised as a trill. The results reported in Stolarski (2013a) and (2013b) amply prove that in these two environments tapping of the Polish /r/ is extremely frequent. In this article the articulation of the Polish rhotic is examined in the preconsonantal and word-final phonetic contexts. Biedrzycki’s account suggests that in these environments /r/ should be realised as a trill. The results obtained in the current research, however, indicate that even in such contexts the rhotic is mostly tapped. The conclusion which must be drawn from these findings is that the basic allophone of the Polish /r/ is the tap, and not the commonly assumed trill.

The height of the fundamental frequency (F0) is frequently cited as the major acoustic feature that distinguishes the female voice from the male voice. Women tend to have a signifi cantly higher mean F0 than men. Some studies have indicated that the variability of the fundamental frequency also differs between the two genders and women’s voices may involve higher prosodic explicitness than men’s voices. This study investigates the way in which these features are utilised in rendering the voice of male and female characters in the reading aloud of fiction. To achieve this aim, a representative sample of dialogues selected from audiobooks was analysed acoustically. The results reveal that the reader’s F0 tends to slightly increase in fragments with female characters, but other predictions have not been confirmed. There is no decrease of F0 in dialogues with male characters and, in general, the reader’s variability of F0 seems not to be influenced by the character’s gender.

This study analyses and compares the fertility behaviour and childbearing plans of Polish migrant fam-ilies in Ireland and those of their counterparts – families in Poland. The study has a comparative and explanatory character and applies both quantitative and qualitative methods. The analysis is based on the author’s own data collected from an online survey of Polish family units in Ireland in 2014 and compared with secondary data on families in Poland retrieved from the 2011 Gender and Generation Survey (GGS). My research reveals fertility postponement and fewer families with children among mi-grant families; nonetheless, migrant parents have more children than their counterparts in Poland. The results highlight the significance of socio-economic and institutional contexts. The study also reveals a dichotomisation of fertility strategies within the migrant population, with distinct differences in the number of children, transition age to parenthood, and further fertility intentions between migrants who became parents in Poland and those who did so after the move. The results also provide insights into the childbearing motivations and fertility patterns of recent Polish migrants and contribute to the dis-cussion of migrants’ fertility in general.

The Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland was brought to life in March 1945 as a central institution entitled to conduct investigations and collect evidences of war crimes committed during the German occupation of Poland (1939-45). In 1949, the Commission was renamed as the Main Commission for the Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes in Poland, in order to mark the propagandist division between the ‘progressive’ and ‘antifascist’ East Germany and the ‘revisionist’ West Germany; yet, its activities were at the same time put on halt. In 1958, West German authorities created the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, based in Ludwigsburg. The first, semi-official, contacts between these two institutions were inaugurated in 1960, despite the lack of official diplomatic relations between Warsaw and Bonn at that time. The venue of the contact was the Polish Military Mission in West Berlin, where the prosecutors from Ludwigsburg could get acquainted with documents from the Commission’s archive.

Elusive phenomena such as the parental care habits of prehistoric animals would seem to be forever inaccessible to paleontological research. However, new spectacular finds offer some deeper insight into such behavior.

The human desire to grasp the nature of fast phenomena has been driving technological progress for years, including in the field of ultrafast photography.

The first part of the paper concentrates on the motive of desire, strictly related to the concept of will, in two stories from Les Ombres sanglantes [The Bloody Shadows] (1820) by J. P. R. Cuisin. Afterwards, the theme of power, considered firstly in the physical aspect and then in its supernatural dimension, is analyzed in further four stories. The article concludes with thoughts on the literary objectives of Cuisin’s book and on its potentially caricatural side.

This paper presents the design of digital controller for longitudinal aircraft model based on the Dynamic Contraction Method. The control task is formulated as a tracking problem of velocity and flight path angle, where decoupled output transients are accomplished in spite of incomplete information about varying parameters of the system and external disturbances. The design of digital controller based on the pseudo-continuous approach is presented, where the digital controller is the result of continuous-time controller discretization. A resulting output feedback controller has a simple form of a combination of low-order linear dynamical systems and a matrix whose entries depend nonlinearly on certain known process variables. Simulation results for an aircraft model confirm theoretical expectations.

Image-guided High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) technique is dynamically developing technology for treating solid tumors due to its non-invasive nature. Before a HIFU ablation system is ready for use, the exposure parameters of the HIFU beam capable of destroying the treated tissue without damaging the surrounding tissues should be selected to ensure the safety of therapy. The purpose of this work was to select the threshold acoustic power as well as the step and rate of movement of the HIFU beam, generated by a transducer intended to be used in the HIFU ablation system being developed, by using an array of thermocouples and numerical simulations. For experiments a bowl-shaped 64-mm, 1.05 MHz HIFU transducer with a 62.6 mm focal length (f-number 0.98) generated pulsed waves propagating in two-layer media: water/ex vivo pork loin tissue (50 mm/40 mm) was used. To determine a threshold power of the HIFU beam capable of creating the necrotic lesion in a small volume within the tested tissue during less than 3 s each tissue sample was sonicated by multiple parallel HIFU beams of different acoustic power focused at a depth of 12.6 mm below the tissue surface. Location of the maximum heating as well as the relaxation time of the tested tissue were determined from temperature variations recorded during and after sonication by five thermo-couples placed along the acoustic axis of each HIFU beam as well as from numerical simulations. The obtained results enabled to assess the location of each necrotic lesion as well as to determine the step and rate of the HIFU beam movement. The location and extent of the necrotic lesions created was verified using ultrasound images of tissue after sonication and visual inspection after cutting the samples. The threshold acoustic power of the HIFU beam capable of creating the local necrotic lesion in the tested tissue within 3 s without damaging of surrounding tissues was found to be 24 W, and the pause between sonications was found to be more than 40 s.

Every change in the bottle geometry aswell as every change of physical and rheological properties poses a risk of excessive gas entrainment during a filling process. To maintain satisfactory filling efficiency there is a need to optimise this process with respect to all adverse phenomena which affect the fluid flow, such as spluttering on the bottom, air caverns formation and air entrainment with incoming liquid. This paper comprises numerical simulations of two filling methods. The first method involves dosing with a pipe placed over the free liquid surface of a fully filled bottle. The second method covers filling with a pipe located near the bottom. Moreover, the influence of rheological properties and surface tension values is considered. The comprehensive analysis of amount of entrained air represented by air volume fraction in dispensed liquid let the authors define the influence of filling speed on the mechanism and amount of entrapped air.