Lidia Stopyra, Karolina Banach, Magdalena Wood
et al.
Background: The 2022 conflict in Ukraine triggered mass migration, leading to a significant influx of Ukrainian refugee children into Poland. This situation raises concerns about hepatitis B virus immunity, as Ukraine’s hepatitis B vaccination coverage has been inconsistent compared to Poland’s high vaccination rates. Objective: To evaluate hepatitis B immunity and infection prevalence among Ukrainian refugee children residing in Southern Poland and to assess implications for vaccination strategies in the host country. Methods: A prospective cross-sectional study was conducted on 1322 Ukrainian refugee children (0–18 years) presenting to a pediatric infectious diseases department in Southern Poland between February 2022 and March 2024. Data on vaccination history, demographic characteristics, and selected laboratory parameters, including hepatitis B surface antigen and anti-HBs antibody levels, were collected. Protective immunity was defined as anti-HBs antibody levels ≥10 IU/L. Results: Among the participants (mean age 9.9 years; 50.2% female), 83.2% were reported as vaccinated according to national immunization programs, but only 64.9% demonstrated protective anti-HBs antibody levels. Protective antibody prevalence declined significantly with age, with less than half of adolescents aged 15–18 years showing immunity. Five children (0.4%) were diagnosed with chronic hepatitis B, four of whom were unvaccinated. Conclusions: This study identifies a significant gap in hepatitis B immunity among Ukrainian adolescent refugees residing in Southern Poland, with less than half possessing protective anti-HBs antibody levels. This immunity gap and the high risk of sexual transmission of the hepatitis B virus in adolescents highlight the urgent need for comprehensive surveillance, screening, and catch-up vaccination programs.
The article examines petitions submitted to Polish authorities between 2015 and 2025 concerning policies on migration and ethnic diversity. Petitions are an opportunity to articulate claims not only among citizens but also among immigrants from various groups interested in political participation. Petitions provide a space for political claims and a forum for negotiation, within which two models emerge: an ethno-cultural community model and a normative community model. This dichotomy can be described as the opposition between a liberal society based on international regulations and economic competitiveness, and a conservative society based on shared values, language and culture. According to the liberal normative community model, citizenship is not a decisive category of community belonging. On the other hand, the petitioners promoting a community based on ethno- cultural foundations often refer to the concept of citizenship as a legal status that should differentiate access to various services and rights provided by the state.
The Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus merger was a major event in the history of the Milky Way. Studies on Milky Way satellite dwarf galaxies show that key elemental abundance patterns, which probe different nucleosynthetic channels, reflect the host galaxy's star formation history. We gather Mg, Fe, Ba, and Eu abundance measurements for Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus stars from the SAGA database and use [Fe/Mg], [Ba/Mg], [Eu/Mg], and [Eu/Ba], as a function of [Fe/H] to constrain the star formation history of Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus. We use the known star formation histories and elemental abundance patterns of the Sculptor and Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxies as comparison. The elemental abundance ratios of [Fe/Mg], [Ba/Mg], [Eu/Mg], and [Eu/Ba] all increase with [Fe/H] in Gaia-Sausage- Enceladus. The [Eu/Mg] begins to increase at [Fe/H]= -2.0 and continues steadily, contrasting with the Sculptor dSph galaxy. The [Eu/Ba] increases and remains high across the [Fe/H] range, contrasting with that of the Sculptor dSph galaxy and deviating from the Fornax dSph galaxy at high [Fe/H]. The [Ba/Mg] is higher than those of the Sculptor dSph galaxy at the lowest [Fe/H] and gradually increases, similar to the Fornax dSph galaxy. We constrain three main properties of the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus star formation history: 1) star formation started gradually, 2) it extended for over 2 Gyr, and 3) it was quenched around [Fe/H] of -0.5, likely when it fell into the Milky Way.
Stellar halos of galaxies retain crucial clues to their mass assembly history. It is in these galactic components that the remains of cannibalised galactic building blocks are deposited. For the case of the Milky Way, the opportunity to analyse the stellar halo's structure on a star-by-star basis in a multi-faceted approach provides a basis from which to infer its past and assembly history in unrivalled detail. Moreover, the insights that can be gained about the formation of the Galaxy not only help constrain the evolution of our Milky Way, but may also help place constraints on the formation of other disc galaxies in the Universe. This paper includes a summary of work undertaken during a PhD thesis aiming to make progress toward answering the most fundamental question in the field of Galactic archaeology: "How did the Milky Way form?" Through the effort to answer this question, we summarise new insights into aspects of the history of assembly and evolution of our Galaxy and measurements of the structure of various of its Galactic components.
We develop and apply a new framework for reconstructing the ionization history during the epoch of recombination with combinations of cosmic microwave background (CMB), baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) and supernova data. We find a wide range of ionization histories that are consistent with current CMB data, and also that cosmological parameter constraints are significantly weakened once freedom in recombination is introduced. BAO data partially break the degeneracy between cosmological parameters and the recombination model, and are therefore important in these reconstructions. The 95% confidence upper limits on H0 are 80.1 (70.7) km/s/Mpc given CMB (CMB+BAO) data, assuming no other changes are made to the standard cosmological model. Including Cepheid-calibrated supernova data in the analysis drives a preference for non-standard recombination histories with visibility functions that peak early and exhibit appreciable skewness. Forthcoming measurements from SPT-3G will reduce the uncertainties in our reconstructions by about a factor of two.
There are about 6000 stars, that can be seen with the naked eye and have been observed for centuries for various purposes. More modern investigations using advanced telescopes show that our Milky Way, a quite common galaxy, consists of about 100 -- 400 billion stars. And, it is estimated that there are between 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe -- all of them consist mostly of stars, and sending observable signals which also represents nothing more than a superposition of the light of individual stars. So we can conclude that the most common observable objects in the Universe are $\textit{stars}$. In this chapter, we focus on the long history of the observation of stars (compared to studies in other fields of science) to find out more about the nature of these objects.
The article presents the history of MeSH, the information and retrieval query language in Poland, in the context of cooperation between academic medical libraries. It also discusses the role of the Central Medical Library in the implementation of medical subject headings. Particular attention was focused on an attempt to explain the reason for the functioning of two Polish-language versions of the file, which are translations of the American version of MeSH’s Medical Subject Headings run by U.S. National Library of Medicine.
Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
The pushed-back migrants are the main subjects of the humanitarian crisis on the Belarusian-Polish border; however their presence as public discourse producers are rather scarce. The aim of this research is to trace the narrative agency of these people and explore its link to their emancipation. Drawing on the postcolonial theory, we address the question of how the subaltern(ised) subjects produce their discourse. With the analysis of media content, literature, and artistic materials, we argue that the discourse production of pushed-back migrants in Poland is heavily limited, restricted, and often interrupted, however they manifest agency by manoeuvring victimisation and contesting the enemisation of themselves. Using these results, we conclude that the researcher’s role during this crisis should be a mix of translation and representation of what the pushed-back said and were forbidden to say.
A statistical combination of various searches for pair-produced leptoquarks is presented, using the full LHC Run 2 (2015–2018) data set of 139 fb−1 collected with the ATLAS detector from proton–proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of s=13 TeV. All possible decays of the leptoquarks into quarks of the third generation and charged or neutral leptons of any generation are investigated. Since no significant deviations from the Standard Model expectation are observed in any of the individual analyses, combined exclusion limits are set on the production cross-sections for scalar and vector leptoquarks. The resulting lower bounds on leptoquark masses exceed those from the individual analyses by up to 100GeV, depending on the signal hypothesis.
This article is a review of Ewa Stańczyk's monograph entitled Comics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Change in Poland. The book is a comprehensive and well-documented analysis of the complicated relationship between political power and citizens' pursuit of freedom of thought and entertainment during Poland's over one hundred years of comics history. The research spans the interwar period (1919-1939), communist-era Poland, and the thirty-plus years of democracy. Comics and Nation provides an invaluable perspective on the history of Polish comics, seamlessly linking ideology, politics, economics and pop culture’s pleasures. Stańczyk's meticulous examination of the subject serves as an indispensable reference for foreign scholars, while some of its gaps provide opportunities for future research to expand and enrich the study of Polish comics in the changing landscape of global culture and society.
Drawing. Design. Illustration, Literature (General)
Celem badania było znalezienie odpowiedzi na pytanie, jak Meksykanie (obywatele państwa goszczącego) postrzegają strategie akulturacyjne obcokrajowców, przybywających do Meksyku (płaszczyzna realna), oraz jakie są ich oczekiwania względem akulturacji przybyszy (płaszczyzna idealna). Ramy teoretyczne badania tworzy Relatywny Model Względnej Akulturacji (RAEM) (Navas i in. 2005). Próba liczyła 363 osób w wieku od 17 do 72 lat (M = 25,92; SD = 11,97). W badaniu udział wzięły przeze wszystkim osoby młode. Respondentów proszono o ustosunkowanie się do przybyszy pochodzących z krajów o różnym dystansie kulturowym wobec Meksyku, tj. z USA, Francji, Polski, Hiszpanii, Korei Południowej i Ekwadoru. W płaszczyźnie realnej Meksykanie sądzą, iż obcokrajowcy w sferach publicznych stosują integrację (z wyjątkiem Korei Południowej, dla której zidentyfikowano mieszaną strategię integracji i separacji), zaś w prywatnych sferach integrację i/lub separację. W płaszczyźnie idealnej Meksykanie oczekują od gości z USA, Francji, Polski i Korei Południowej separacji w sferach publicznych oraz separacji/integracji od Hiszpanów (dla Ekwadoru nie można było przyporządkować jednoznacznie żadnej z orientacji akulturacyjnych); zaś w prywatnych sferach życia oczekiwano integracji obcokrajowców z sześciu badanych krajów. Wykazano, iż Meksykanie postrzegają
AbstractThis essay examines the information‐gathering practices of papal nuncios and legates to argue that they performed much of the same intelligence work, and in a similar manner, as other diplomatic agents in the early modern Europe. It focuses in particular on papal diplomats’ efforts to gather information regarding two areas that proved especially challenging for the papacy – England and Poland‐Lithuania – both of which were far from Rome and which contained large numbers of non‐Catholics, who would understandably be wary of these diplomats’ intelligence work. The essay explores the mechanisms by which nuncios gathered information, including via ambassadors, members of religious orders, and informal networks of informants; their efforts to verify the information they received; and their methods to securely convey that information to their superiors in the Roman curia.
As the core technique of online recruitment platforms, person-job fit can improve hiring efficiency by accurately matching job positions with qualified candidates. However, existing studies mainly focus on the recommendation scenario, while neglecting another important channel for linking positions with job seekers, i.e. search. Intuitively, search history contains rich user behavior in job seeking, reflecting important evidence for job intention of users. In this paper, we present a novel Search History enhanced Person-Job Fit model, named as SHPJF. To utilize both text content from jobs/resumes and search histories from users, we propose two components with different purposes. For text matching component, we design a BERT-based text encoder for capturing the semantic interaction between resumes and job descriptions. For intention modeling component, we design two kinds of intention modeling approaches based on the Transformer architecture, either based on the click sequence or query text sequence. To capture underlying job intentions, we further propose an intention clustering technique to identify and summarize the major intentions from search logs. Extensive experiments on a large real-world recruitment dataset have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.
Environments in Reinforcement Learning are usually only partially observable. To address this problem, a possible solution is to provide the agent with information about the past. However, providing complete observations of numerous steps can be excessive. Inspired by human memory, we propose to represent history with only important changes in the environment and, in our approach, to obtain automatically this representation using self-supervision. Our method (TempAl) aligns temporally-close frames, revealing a general, slowly varying state of the environment. This procedure is based on contrastive loss, which pulls embeddings of nearby observations to each other while pushing away other samples from the batch. It can be interpreted as a metric that captures the temporal relations of observations. We propose to combine both common instantaneous and our history representation and we evaluate TempAl on all available Atari games from the Arcade Learning Environment. TempAl surpasses the instantaneous-only baseline in 35 environments out of 49. The source code of the method and of all the experiments is available at https://github.com/htdt/tempal.
Fabian Paischer, Thomas Adler, Vihang Patil
et al.
In a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), an agent typically uses a representation of the past to approximate the underlying MDP. We propose to utilize a frozen Pretrained Language Transformer (PLT) for history representation and compression to improve sample efficiency. To avoid training of the Transformer, we introduce FrozenHopfield, which automatically associates observations with pretrained token embeddings. To form these associations, a modern Hopfield network stores these token embeddings, which are retrieved by queries that are obtained by a random but fixed projection of observations. Our new method, HELM, enables actor-critic network architectures that contain a pretrained language Transformer for history representation as a memory module. Since a representation of the past need not be learned, HELM is much more sample efficient than competitors. On Minigrid and Procgen environments HELM achieves new state-of-the-art results. Our code is available at https://github.com/ml-jku/helm.
Artykuł składa się z dwóch części. Pierwsza prezentuje czynniki decydujące o roli kobiet w powstaniu styczniowym (kilkudziesięcioletnia tradycja, elementy strategii non-violence, struktura „państwa podziemnego”, partyzancki charakter wojny), organizacje kobiece oraz formy zaangażowania, jakimi były manifestacje, agitacja i propaganda, praca konspiracyjna, walka zbrojna, wywiad, łączność i aprowizacja oddziałów, służba zdrowia, opieka nad więźniami i rodzinami powstańców. Część druga przedstawia przekrój społeczny i działalność uczestniczek powstania w ujęciu statystycznym, na podstawie wykazu zesłańców z Królestwa Polskiego autorstwa Zofii Strzyżewskiej oraz kartoteki powstańców i zesłańców styczniowych gromadzonej w Instytucie Historii Polskiej Akademii Nauk w Warszawie. Autorka analizuje dane kobiet represjonowanych za udział lub wspieranie powstania, 95 z Królestwa Polskiego i 2242 z ziem litewskich i białoruskich dawnej Rzeczypospolitej: wiek, pochodzenie społeczne i terytorialne, przyczyny oskarżenia, rodzaje działalności (na podstawie aktu oskarżenia), rodzaje kar, miejsca pobytu na zesłaniu. Do tekstu dołączono 11 zbiorczych tabel.
Under British rule Palestine gradually emerged as the new centre of Zionism. The Zionist centre shifted from Eastern and Central Europe to Mandatory Palestine through a combined process of mass migration and the creation of transnational institutions. By exploring the building of transnational institutions in the 1920's, this article shows how the Labour Zionist leadership in Palestine turned its communities of origin in Eastern Europe into their supporters. With the rapid decline of the former Russian centre under the communist dictatorship, independent Poland emerged as a new centre of Zionism and the labour movement outside Palestine. The two new centres were connected by a dual structure, with Poland as the demographic centre and Palestine the political-cultural one. The dual-centre structure was unique to Labour Zionism, building a mass movement between Eastern Europe and Palestine in the 1930s, and leading ultimately to the transition of power from liberal Zionism to a Labour hegemony.
A card from the family life of Zamość Armenians. Murder of Helena Kistesterowiczowa (1680)
Death of Helena Kistesterowiczowa, who was murdered by her husband only one year after their marriage, was the most shocking event in the history of the Zamość Armenian commune. On the basis of case files and other sources, the author presents circumstances of this crime and course of the case. Analysing the testimonies of the accused and witnesses as well as the report about examination of the corpse, he reconstructs the events, depicting relations in the marriage of Kistesterowicze, for which the conflict between Eliasz Kistesterowicz and his father-in-law Serhij Zachariaszewicz Browar was the background. This affair constitutes a minor contribution to family relations of Zamość Armenians in the second half of the 17th century.
<i>Background and Objectives</i>: Due to the specific working conditions dental professionals represent a group of high risk of infection and COVID-19 pandemic in many ways have influenced their working environment. The aim of this study was to evaluate effects of COVID-19 pandemic on working conditions of dentists in Poland and Turkey. <i>Materials and Methods</i>: The study was an anonymous online questionnaire conducted among thedentists in two countries: Poland and Turkey. The survey consisted of general questions, COVID-19 pandemic infection and working history as well as working conditions before and during pandemic. Chi-square test, Fisher’s Exact test, Fisher Freeman Halton test and Continuity (Yates) Correction were used to compare qualitative data. <i>Results</i>: The study was conducted with a total of 400 participants, 162 (40.5%) men and 238 (59.5%) women, aged between 23 and 67. The mean age of the participants was 42.39 ± 9.99 years. Positive COVID-19 test results among dentists in Poland were found to be significantly higher than in Turkey. Time of dental procedures during the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland and Turkey was significantly increased. The usage of N95/FFP2 or N99/FFP3 masks and surgical gowns during COVID-19 pandemic compared to pre-COVID-19 periods was clearly higher (<i>p</i> < 0.05). Reusable full-face and half-face elastomeric respirators are increasingly used in Turkey. During the COVID-19 pandemic a 25% decrease in dentists’ income in Poland (81%) was significantly high than in Turkey (47.5%). <i>Conclusions</i>: COVID-19 pandemic has influenced working conditions of dentists. Many dentists got infected during the pandemic, dental procedures’ time has increased, and protective equipment usage has become higher. Further studies analyzing the working conditions of dentists during COVID-19 pandemic should be conducted for better planning of future decisions taken by governments and authorities.
This paper proposes two algorithms, namely "back-tracking" and "history following", to reach consensus in case of communication loss for a network of distributed agents with switching topologies. To reach consensus in distributed control, considered communication topology forms a strongly connected graph. The graph is no more strongly connected whenever an agent loses communication.Whenever an agent loses communication, the topology is no more strongly connected. The proposed back-tracking algorithm makes sure that the agent backtracks its position unless the communication is reestablished, and path is changed to reach consensus. In history following, the agents use their memory and move towards previous consensus point until the communication is regained. Upon regaining communication, a new consensus point is calculated depending on the current positions of the agents and they change their trajectories accordingly. Simulation results, for a network of six agents, show that when the agents follow the previous history, the average consensus time is less than that of back-tracking. However, situation may arise in history following where a false notion of reaching consensus makes one of the agents stop at a point near to the actual consensus point. An obstacle avoidance algorithm is integrated with the proposed algorithms to avoid collisions. Hardware implementation for a three robots system shows the effectiveness of the algorithms.