The article discusses the matter of portraying Suleiman I the Magnificent in 16th century Croatian and Slovakian literature. The source material comprises three texts: Ferenc Črnko’s Croatian chronicle titled Podsjedanje i osvojenje Sigeta [The Siege and Capture of Siget], the Croatian epic tale Vazetje Sigeta grada [The Caputure of Siget Town] by Brne Karnarutić and the Slovakian anonymous historical song Píseň o Sigetském zámku [A Song about Siget Castle]. By looking at these texts the author hereof contemplates what image of the Turkish ruler has been recorded in Slavic literatures.

This article analyzes the heuristic value of the possible application of postcolonial approaches to nineteenth-century Habsburg Galicia. It critically reviews some contemporary usages of “postcolonial” in Ukrainian historiography, and political and literary criticism. The article finds original postcolonial historical approaches to be of great heuristic value, especially for practitioners of social history. Using “postcolonial” tools, historical research may yield new insights into the history of nineteenth-century Galicia

Ethicists have thus far not paid much attention to uncertainty, very often concentrating on highly idealized hypothetical situations where both empirical (e.g. the state of the world, the spectrum of possible decisions and their consequences, the causal connections between events) and normative (the content of norms, value scales) matters were clearly defined and well-known to the decision-maker. In this article, which stems from a project on different types of decisions under uncertainty related to the rapid progress in biomedical research, I analyze some situations of normative uncertainty, cases when an agent must make a decision, but does not know which choice is correct, for example, because he/she has contrary intuitions about the permissibility of available decisions. The view termed comparativism claims that in such cases the appropriate decision depends not only on the credences that one assigns to different norms, but also on how much possible decisions are worth taking in the light of these norms. I analyze a few cases of normative uncertainty, and a specific counter-argument against the current versions of comparativism, showing that under normative uncertainty this view imposes risk neutrality, although it permits us to have different risk attitudes under empirical uncertainty. I also argue that a precautionary approach to situations of normative uncertainty is overly simplistic.

The reviewed book was written basing on Piotr Szlanta’s habilitation thesis defended in 2015 at the University of Warsaw. It deals mainly with “the Polish question”, by describing the relations between Emperor Wilhelm II and his Polish subjects. The title deals with stereotypes of the Emperor and his Polish subjects, and its evolution during subsequent decades. Piotr Szlanta managed to grasp the ambiguous relation between these two sides. On the one hand, the Emperor sought for acceptance and recognition from the side of “his Poles”, on the other hand, he underlined on almost every occasion the historical role of Germans in civilising east territories and its inhabitants. The last attempt of gaining support of Poles towards his politics and himself was an attempt of creating “The Kingdom of Poland” in autumn 1916. Piotr Szlanta’s book, basing on a broad research in various archives managed to highlight this complicated chapter of Polish-German relations.

We propose an empirical equation to predict the martensite start temperatures of highly alloyed steels containing more than 3 wt.% of Ni or Cr or 2 wt.% of Mo, W, or Co. The martensite start temperature calculated by the proposed equation was in good agreement with experimental data owing to not only the derivation from experimental data of alloy steels with a wide range of chemical compositions but also the interaction term between carbon and carbide-forming alloying elements.

To study the difference in seismic vulnerability of multiple typical structures in multiple intensity zones, the seismic damage of 7099 buildings of Dujiangyan masonry structure (MS), reinforced concrete structure (RC) and bottom frame seismic wall masonry (BFM) in the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China is summarized and analysed. First, a statistical analysis of the data is carried out, the empirical seismic vulnerability matrix and model curves are established by considering the number of storeys, the age and the fortification factors.The vulnerability curves of the cumulative exceeding probability of the empirical seismic damage and the grade of the seismic damage in multiple intensity zones are shown. The mean damage index vulnerability matrix model is proposed and verified using the empirical seismic damage matrix of typical structures.

The most challenging in speech enhancement technique is tracking non-stationary noises for long speech segments and low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). Different speech enhancement techniques have been proposed but, those techniques were inaccurate in tracking highly non-stationary noises. As a result, Empirical Mode Decomposition and Hurst-based (EMDH) approach is proposed to enhance the signals corrupted by non-stationary acoustic noises. Hurst exponent statistics was adopted for identifying and selecting the set of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMF) that are most affected by the noise components. Moreover, the speech signal was reconstructed by considering the least corrupted IMF. Though it increases SNR, the time and resource consumption were high. Also, it requires a significant improvement under nonstationary noise scenario. Hence, in this article, EMDH approach is enhanced by using Sliding Window (SW) technique. In this SWEMDH approach, the computation of EMD is performed based on the small and sliding window along with the time axis. The sliding window depends on the signal frequency band. The possible discontinuities in IMF between windows are prevented by the total number of modes and the number of sifting iterations that should be set a priori. For each module, the number of sifting iterations is determined by decomposition of many signal windows by standard algorithm and calculating the average number of sifting steps for each module. Based on this approach, the time complexity is reduced significantly with suitable quality of decomposition. Finally, the experimental results show the considerable improvements in speech enhancement under non-stationary noise environments.