Assoc. Prof. Agata Gąsiorowska of the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities ponders if the Poles know how to manage their money wisely.

Dr. Krystyna Skarżyńska from the PAS Institute of Psychology talks about how Poles perceive their freedom.

Prof. Tandong Yao and Prof. Fahu Chen describe our growing understanding of climate change impacts in the “Pan-Third Pole” region, discussing both coping strategies and research initiatives focusing on the region.

Kazakh Poles arriving in Poland through the repatriation program still feel a close bond with the country where they were born, and for many of them it is an integral part of their daily existence. Maintaining regular contacts with Kazakhstan (direct or mediated by modern means of communication) and the family left there exerts a constant impact on the repatriates, and shapes their way of life. In this article, I attempt to highlight the actions or lifestyles that depend on this relationship, captured in the course of field research, using the categories of the theory of transnationality in the context of research on migration movements. By placing these activities and analysing them within the trans-local social network operating at various levels, I present a number of factors stimulating and hindering transnational activities. One of the outcomes of these deliberations is diagnosis of how the repatriates’ two-culture potential is put to use.

Demographic challenges of regional development of Poland. The goals of the article are dichotomous. First of all, it is the recognition of the main problems of regional development in Poland, resulting from the current and forecast demographic and settlement situation, including depopulation and population aging. An increasing mismatch between jobs, housing, education and services, increasingly scattered and inefficient settlement and inefficiency of the administrative and territorial system in terms of income and expenditure balancing and ensuring an adequate standard of services resulting from the administrative hierarchization of the settlement network, territorial delimitation and spatial accessibility have been identified. Then, in the second place, an attempt was made to formulate remedial measures related mainly to the optimization of spatial development and stimulation of innovative economic growth based in particular on endogenous poles of growth. In the article, among others the results of the author’s research and analyzes were used, which were carried out for practical purposes for government diagnostic and strategic documents in the years 2000–2017 [incl. “Report of the spatial development of Poland”, “Concept of Spatial Development of Poland 2030”, “National Strategy for Regional Development 2010–2020”, delimitation of “State Intervention Strategic Areas: Growth Areas and Problem Areas” and “Responsible Development Strategy”].

To study the principle of loss and heat at the end region of large 4-poles nuclear power turbine generator, 3D transient electromagnetic field and 3D steady temperature field finite element (FE) models of the end region are established respectively. Considering the factors such as rotor motion, core non-linearity and time-varying of electromagnetic field, the anisotropic heat conductivity and different heat dissipation conditions of stator end region, a 50 Hz, 1150 MW, 4-poles nuclear power turbine generator is investigated. The loss and heat at the generator end region are calculated respectively at no-load and rated-load, and the calculation results are compared with the test data. The result shows that the calculation model is accurate and the generator design is suitable. The method is valuable for the research of loss and heat at the end region of large 4-poles nuclear power turbine generator and the improvement of the generator’s operation stability. The method has been applied successfully for the design of the larger nuclear power turbine generators.

With the Act on the Polish Card Poland followed the pattern of some European states (mostly Central and Eastern European ones) of enacting specific domestic legislation conferring special treatment and benefits to persons who are recognized as its kin-minorities. The most important analysis of this phenomenon from the perspective of international law was the 2001 Venice Commission’s report entitled “Report on the Protection of National Minorities by their Kin-State.” The Polish legislation was adopted in 2007, so for obvious reasons it was not considered by the Venice Commission. However, a rather unexpected and unusual examination of the Polish kin-state legislation from the perspective of international law came from Belarus. The Constitutional Court of the Republic of Belarus (CCRB) conducted a comprehensive examination of the Act on the Polish Card in 2011. The main aim of this article is to present and comment on the reasoning of the CCRB. Beginning with the broader context, this article starts with a presentation of the origins and a short description of the Act on the Polish Card, followed by a discussion of why the Polish Card and other kin-state legislation instruments are topics of concern in international law. The main part of the article is devoted to the presentation and assessment of the 2011 CCRB decision on the Act on the Polish Card. The author’s assessment confirms at least some of the concerns put forward by the CCRB, i.e., that both the Act on the Polish Card and the practice based on it contradict some norms and principles of international law, namely the principle of territorial sovereignty, the norms of consular law, and several bilateral treaties in force between these two states. Bearing in mind that despite those concerns more than a quarter-million Polish Cards (also sometimes called Pole’s Cards) have been issued so far by the Polish authorities, the article ends with a discussion of why such a prolonged nonconformity with international law is possible.

Although currently pole dancing is growing in popularity due to its sport dimension, it seems that such a form of expression is still commonly associated with strip clubs and connotes above all the erotic performance of a woman in front of a male audience. And yet, as one can find by frequenting dance studios that teach pole dancing, it is practiced not only by women, but also by men and children. Thus keeping in mind the ambiguity that arises at the intersection of competing optics in decoding the pole dance—with regard to “perpetuate interpretation logic” and the everyday experience of people undertaking the activity—the aim of this paper is to reflect on the issue of constructing and interpreting the meanings of actions and processes within the context of pole dancing. These processes can be seen as a reflection of the everyday life in which they occur.

Electromagnetic mill installation for dry grinding represents a complex dynamical system that requires specially designed control system. The paper presents model-based predictive control which locates closed loop poles in arbitrary places. The controller performs as gain scheduling prototype where nonlinear model – artificial recurrent neural network, is parameterized with additional measurements and serves as a basis for local linear approximation. Application of such a concept to control electromagnetic mill load allows for stable performance of the installation and assures fulfilment of the product quality as well as the optimization of the energy consumption.

Tuning rules for PID and PI-PI servo controllers are developed using a pole placement approach with a multiple pole, i.e. a triple one in the case of PID and a quadruple for PI-PI. The controllers involve complex roots in the numerators of the transfer functions. This is not possible in the classical P-PI structure which admits real roots only. The settling time of the servos determined by the multiple time constant is the only design parameter. Nomograms to read out discrete controller settings in terms of the time constant and control cycle are given. As compared to the classical structures, the upper limit on the control cycle is now twice longer in the case of PID, and four times in the case of PI-PI. This implies that the settling times can be shortened by the same ratios. Responses of a PLC-controlled servo confirm the validity of the design.

The article presents the roots of contemporary Jewish-Polish relations in Poland. The Author analyses various phenomena and processes, leading to initiation of the Polish-Jewish dialogue in the years 1979- -1997, as well as evaluates the mutual relations between the two social groups in the turn of 1980s to 1990s.

Poles and zeros assignment problem by state feedbacks in positive continuous-time and discrete-time systems is analyzed. It is shown that in multi-input multi-output positive linear systems by state feedbacks the poles and zeros of the transfer matrices can be assigned in the desired positions. In the positive continuous-time linear systems the feedback gain matrix can be chosen as a monomial matrix so that the poles and zeros of the transfer matrices have the desired values if the input matrix B is monomial. In the positive discrete-time linear systems to solve the problem the matrix B can be chosen monomial if and only if in every row and every column of the n x n system matrix A the sum of n-1 its entries is less than one. Key words: assignment, pole, zero, transfer matrix, linear, positive, system, state feedback

This paper investigates the possibilities for developing a pole-changing winding with a pole ratio of 3:4 with improved electromagnetic properties. Such a winding can be used in two-speed induction motors for turbo mechanisms. The scheme of the new winding was obtained by using a discretely-specified spatial function method developed at the Tashkent State Technical University. A comparison of the parameters obtained for a similar winding received by the pole amplitude modulation method has been presented. Design of a new motor with a new winding is developed based on the standard induction motor. The paper presents results of laboratory tests, too.

The content of this paper is dedicated to the analysis of the flat planarity of forklift stacker’s track and cross sections of lanes between racks in a warehouse. These results will serve as a basis for a possible reconstruction of the track and racks and shall contribute to the overall reduction of costs related to an unexpected bad technical condition. The contribution aims to assess the geometric parameters of warehouse racks at the selected company operation in terms of their suitability for further use. The choice of the selected topic represents a relevant issue, which can be possibly encountered in daily practice related to the storage and transport processes of products. The measurements and processing of longitudinal profiles and cross-sections were made in the local coordinate and local vertical system. Points on the lower, middle and upper level of racks were measured for good and correct interpretation of results. Testing the measured positional change of poles is on the end of this paper. The immediate readiness of interest groups of subjects for adopting necessary actions to ensure the stability and safe operation of the whole network of lanes of the warehouse spaces is the expected contribution of the presented results.

This paper presents a state feedback controller (SFC) for position control of PMSM servo-drive. Firstly, a short review of the commonly used swarm-based optimization algorithms for tuning of SFC is presented. Then designing process of current control loop as well as of SFC with feedforward path is depicted. Next, coefficients of controller are tuned by using an artificial bee colony (ABC) optimization algorithm. Three of the most commonly applied tuning methods (i.e. linear-quadratic optimization, pole placement technique and direct selection of coefficients) are used and investigated in terms of positioning performance, disturbance compensation and robustness against plant parameter changes. Simulation analysis is supported by experimental tests conducted on laboratory stand with modern PMSM servo-drive.

The motto of Zofia Nałkowska’s short-story collection Medaliony [Medalions] – “People doomed people to this fate” [Polish, “Ludzie ludziom zgotowali ten los”] – as obvious as it may apparently seem, has aroused various controversies. Henryk Grynberg believed that the only right formula, the one that would do justice to those persecuted, would have been “People doomed Jews to this fate”. Recently, the discussion was resumed in a book on the portrayal of the Holocaust in Medaliony – Zagłada w „Medalionach” Zofii Nałkowskiej, edited by Tomasz Żukowski: one of its essays (by Żukowski and Aránzazu Calderón Puerta) notices that endeavours to universalise the Holocaust is at least premature for the Poles tending to avoid facing the truth about their own contribution to annihilation of the Jews. While the threads addressed in these debates are important, they disregard the beliefs and the system of values Nałkowska adhered to. The Polish novelist adopted the view that man and the pleasure he takes in inflicting pain is the actual cause of evil. This inclination revealed itself not only during the war. This more general observation was rooted in her knowledge of life, relations between people, and daily cruelty. Supported by an ideology and furnished with technical resources, the war added a historical dimension to this bent. Moreover, Nałkowska was definitely not one among those who stayed silent in respect of the Jewish victims. Conversely, a few of the stories in Medaliony speak exactly about this problem, never trying to conceal anti-Semitic attitudes among Poles.

The paper addresses the problem of constrained pole placement in discrete-time linear systems. The design conditions are outlined in terms of linear matrix inequalities for the Dstable ellipse region in the complex Z plain. In addition, it is demonstrated that the D-stable circle region formulation is the special case of by this way formulated and solved pole placement problem. The proposed principle is enhanced for discrete-lime linear systems with polytopic uncertainties.

The article examines the coverage of Cieszyn Silesia in the Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny, a respected nation-wide daily based in Cracow, during the escalating crisis in Polish-Czechoslovak relations in August–October 1938. An analysis of over four hundred articles shows that while the primary focus was on the situation of ethnic Poles in the disputed region (Zaolzie, or Trans- Olza) and the problems facing Czechoslovakia on the international stage, the IKC also took care to provide its readers with information about the history and economic importance of the former Duchy of Cieszyn (Těšín, Teschen).