Polish Greatness

[SobieskiSavedEurope]

Astri Polska Provides Solutions Supporting the Jupiter Research
31 lipca 2018, 11:50

CREDITS: ASTRI POLSKA
ASTRI POLSKA

• JUICE

• ESA

• JUPITER MOONS

• JUPITER

Soon the first Polish solutions will become a part of the European JUICE programme, the goal of which is to send a probe to Jupiter and to its icy moons. Astri Polska has just started the validation process pertaining to the first system that is to be used in this mission. The hardware is to be handed off by the end of this year.

ZOBACZ TAKŻE

NEWS
POLISH COMPANY INVOLVED IN THE JUICE MISSION
JUICE (JUpiter ICy moons Explorer) remains one of the main projects within the ESA’s “Cosmic Vision 2015-2025” long-term plan. JUICE probe is to reach the Jupiter (2030), and throughout at least 3 years it should carry out detailed observations of the gas giant and its three icy moons: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. The probe is to be launched in 2022.

Tests of the Probe’s Avionics

Two „Simulation Front End” systems designed and manufactured by Astri Polska will be used to test the JUICE probe avionics. At the moment the first of such systems is being tested, in order to verify its functionality. The system is planned to be handed off until the end of this year.

Not only is participation in the JUICE project seen as a valuable experience for our company, as it also benefits the domestic space sector. This translates into a major transfer of know-how and should be seen as a major step made towards educating highly qualified experts in the domestic space industry domain. Notably, our experience accumulated across numerous leading projects undertaken by ESA places us among entities remaining in possession of competencies required to design and manufacture similar systems for the Polish satellite programme.

Jacek Mandas, CEO Astri Polska
Digital Simulation Models

Alongside the hardware, Astri Polska would also be delivering dedicated test software for the JUICE mission. Software developers of the Warsaw-based company are currently working on digital simulation models that would be used to test the probe, within the scope of a number of specific scenarios. The software is to make it possible for us to get insight into functioning of the JUICE probe’s equipment, once it is sent into the outer space.

2018: 10 readymade Astri Polska Products for ESA

Astri Polska is planning to deliver 10 readymade products destined for ESA, by the end of this year. This is a record-breaking year within that regard, which is also distinguishing Astri Polska as a company, domestically and regionally. At the moment the entity is involved in 20 projects related to development of space and satellite technologies in the area of electronics, optomechatronics and satellite applications and services,

Astri Polska Provides Solutions Supporting the Jupiter Research

 

[Taz]

Astri Polska Provides Solutions Supporting the Jupiter Research
31 lipca 2018, 11:50

CREDITS: ASTRI POLSKA
ASTRI POLSKA

• JUICE

• ESA

• JUPITER MOONS

• JUPITER

Soon the first Polish solutions will become a part of the European JUICE programme, the goal of which is to send a probe to Jupiter and to its icy moons. Astri Polska has just started the validation process pertaining to the first system that is to be used in this mission. The hardware is to be handed off by the end of this year.

ZOBACZ TAKŻE

NEWS
POLISH COMPANY INVOLVED IN THE JUICE MISSION
JUICE (JUpiter ICy moons Explorer) remains one of the main projects within the ESA’s “Cosmic Vision 2015-2025” long-term plan. JUICE probe is to reach the Jupiter (2030), and throughout at least 3 years it should carry out detailed observations of the gas giant and its three icy moons: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. The probe is to be launched in 2022.

Tests of the Probe’s Avionics

Two „Simulation Front End” systems designed and manufactured by Astri Polska will be used to test the JUICE probe avionics. At the moment the first of such systems is being tested, in order to verify its functionality. The system is planned to be handed off until the end of this year.

Not only is participation in the JUICE project seen as a valuable experience for our company, as it also benefits the domestic space sector. This translates into a major transfer of know-how and should be seen as a major step made towards educating highly qualified experts in the domestic space industry domain. Notably, our experience accumulated across numerous leading projects undertaken by ESA places us among entities remaining in possession of competencies required to design and manufacture similar systems for the Polish satellite programme.

Jacek Mandas, CEO Astri Polska
Digital Simulation Models

Alongside the hardware, Astri Polska would also be delivering dedicated test software for the JUICE mission. Software developers of the Warsaw-based company are currently working on digital simulation models that would be used to test the probe, within the scope of a number of specific scenarios. The software is to make it possible for us to get insight into functioning of the JUICE probe’s equipment, once it is sent into the outer space.

2018: 10 readymade Astri Polska Products for ESA

Astri Polska is planning to deliver 10 readymade products destined for ESA, by the end of this year. This is a record-breaking year within that regard, which is also distinguishing Astri Polska as a company, domestically and regionally. At the moment the entity is involved in 20 projects related to development of space and satellite technologies in the area of electronics, optomechatronics and satellite applications and services,

Astri Polska Provides Solutions Supporting the Jupiter Research

Looks like they're making sausages on really, really old gear.

 

[SobieskiSavedEurope]

'Hearing the Painting': Polish technology helps visually impaired 'see' paintings through sound
TRANSCRIPT

2018-04-30 17:48 GMT+8

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Imagine if people with sight difficulties could actually "hear" some artwork, such as a painting? A new technology from Poland is now making this possible. It generates different sounds to represent different colours. Take a look at this story, courtesy of Reuters.

Being partially sighted normally means Przemyslaw Rogalski isn't easily able to enjoy works of art. But this new technology from Poland is letting him hear the painting in front of him. The artwork itself is a digital copy of the original. The program maps out the precise location of each colour in the image, and then generates a sound suitable for each colour. Motion sensors detect where the viewer is pointing, with different colours converted into correlating sounds.

RADOSLAW BEDNARSKI RESEARCHER AT LODZ UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY "The application works in such a way that it allows really everyone to combine the art of painting with the art of sound. The person who wants to hear the picture approaches it, stands in the designated place and then, using their hand, points to places in the image that are then detected by the motion sensor and the colour of the location is converted to the appropriate sound."

The developers hope it could make art much more accessible to blind and visually impaired people. They're currently exploring the possibility of installing the technology in museums and art galleries

'Hearing the Painting': Polish technology helps visually impaired 'see' paintings through sound

 

[Taz]

'Hearing the Painting': Polish technology helps visually impaired 'see' paintings through sound
TRANSCRIPT

2018-04-30 17:48 GMT+8

Share



Imagine if people with sight difficulties could actually "hear" some artwork, such as a painting? A new technology from Poland is now making this possible. It generates different sounds to represent different colours. Take a look at this story, courtesy of Reuters.

Being partially sighted normally means Przemyslaw Rogalski isn't easily able to enjoy works of art. But this new technology from Poland is letting him hear the painting in front of him. The artwork itself is a digital copy of the original. The program maps out the precise location of each colour in the image, and then generates a sound suitable for each colour. Motion sensors detect where the viewer is pointing, with different colours converted into correlating sounds.

RADOSLAW BEDNARSKI RESEARCHER AT LODZ UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY "The application works in such a way that it allows really everyone to combine the art of painting with the art of sound. The person who wants to hear the picture approaches it, stands in the designated place and then, using their hand, points to places in the image that are then detected by the motion sensor and the colour of the location is converted to the appropriate sound."

The developers hope it could make art much more accessible to blind and visually impaired people. They're currently exploring the possibility of installing the technology in museums and art galleries

'Hearing the Painting': Polish technology helps visually impaired 'see' paintings through sound

That's dumb, they are not going to "see" a painting, just hear some weird music.

 

[SobieskiSavedEurope]

Mars ‘Curiosity’ rover equipped with Polish sensors
06.08.2012 11:10
NASA’s ‘Curiosity’ rover which successfully landed on Mars, Monday morning, is fitted with infrared detectors manufactured by the Polish VIGO System company.

This artist's concept depicts the moment immediately after NASA's Curiosity rover touches down onto the Martian surface: photo - EPA/NASA/JPL
“We are an official supplier of components to NASA [and] we feel great satisfaction that we have supplied limited help in achieving this ambitious mission,” Mirosław Grudzień director of VIGO System SA, a company based in Warsaw, has said.

“Uncooled MCT infrared detectors developed at VIGO System have been chosen for use in a tunable laser spectrometer instrument designed to acquire information about the Martian environment during the Mars Science Laboratory mission,” says the company web site.

The sensors will be part of the rover’s search for signs of life on the Red Planet, particularly carbon, after the vehicle, the size of a small family saloon car, touched down on the surface of the planet this morning.

Curiosity, launched eight months ago, travelled the 566 million kilometers between Earth and Mars at 17 times the speed of sound.

The 2.5 billion USD mission, launched on 26 November 20111 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, comes aims to analyze samples of soil, rocks and atmosphere on the spot and beam results back to Earth. (pg)

Mars ‘Curiosity’ rover equipped with Polish sensors

 

[Taz]

Mars ‘Curiosity’ rover equipped with Polish sensors
06.08.2012 11:10
NASA’s ‘Curiosity’ rover which successfully landed on Mars, Monday morning, is fitted with infrared detectors manufactured by the Polish VIGO System company.

This artist's concept depicts the moment immediately after NASA's Curiosity rover touches down onto the Martian surface: photo - EPA/NASA/JPL
“We are an official supplier of components to NASA [and] we feel great satisfaction that we have supplied limited help in achieving this ambitious mission,” Mirosław Grudzień director of VIGO System SA, a company based in Warsaw, has said.

“Uncooled MCT infrared detectors developed at VIGO System have been chosen for use in a tunable laser spectrometer instrument designed to acquire information about the Martian environment during the Mars Science Laboratory mission,” says the company web site.

The sensors will be part of the rover’s search for signs of life on the Red Planet, particularly carbon, after the vehicle, the size of a small family saloon car, touched down on the surface of the planet this morning.

Curiosity, launched eight months ago, travelled the 566 million kilometers between Earth and Mars at 17 times the speed of sound.

The 2.5 billion USD mission, launched on 26 November 20111 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, comes aims to analyze samples of soil, rocks and atmosphere on the spot and beam results back to Earth. (pg)

Mars ‘Curiosity’ rover equipped with Polish sensors

From a Polish website, lol. Got a real link?

 

[SobieskiSavedEurope]

Mars ‘Curiosity’ rover equipped with Polish sensors
06.08.2012 11:10
NASA’s ‘Curiosity’ rover which successfully landed on Mars, Monday morning, is fitted with infrared detectors manufactured by the Polish VIGO System company.

This artist's concept depicts the moment immediately after NASA's Curiosity rover touches down onto the Martian surface: photo - EPA/NASA/JPL
“We are an official supplier of components to NASA [and] we feel great satisfaction that we have supplied limited help in achieving this ambitious mission,” Mirosław Grudzień director of VIGO System SA, a company based in Warsaw, has said.

“Uncooled MCT infrared detectors developed at VIGO System have been chosen for use in a tunable laser spectrometer instrument designed to acquire information about the Martian environment during the Mars Science Laboratory mission,” says the company web site.

The sensors will be part of the rover’s search for signs of life on the Red Planet, particularly carbon, after the vehicle, the size of a small family saloon car, touched down on the surface of the planet this morning.

Curiosity, launched eight months ago, travelled the 566 million kilometers between Earth and Mars at 17 times the speed of sound.

The 2.5 billion USD mission, launched on 26 November 20111 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, comes aims to analyze samples of soil, rocks and atmosphere on the spot and beam results back to Earth. (pg)

Mars ‘Curiosity’ rover equipped with Polish sensors

From a Polish website, lol. Got a real link?

Mars Rover’s Laser Zaps First Target


Vigo System
Uncooled MCT (mercury cadmium telluride) infrared detectors developed at Vigo System are being used in the ChemCam instrument.

 

[SobieskiSavedEurope]

Poland attractive to foreign tourists: report
31.08.2018 13:50
Poland attracted over 18 million foreign tourists last year, more than tourism powerhouses such as Croatia or Portugal, according to a report.

Photo: Finmiki/pixabay.com/CC0 Creative Commons

At roughly 18.3 million, the number of foreign tourists visiting Poland last year was 4.5 percent higher than a year earlier and larger than in any other country in its region, the money.pl website reported, citing data by the Polish Ministry of Sport and Tourism.

The website said World Bank data showed Croatia attracted 13 million foreign tourists last year, while Romania was visited by just over 10 million and the Czech Republic drew about 9 million.

Meanwhile, Portugal reported 11 million international visitors in 2017, Switzerland had 9 million, and Norway attracted 6 million, money.pl said.

Norwegian fjords, Swiss Alps, Croatian beaches—all these attractions are beginning to pale in comparison with what Poland has to offer, money.pl commented.

France attracted over 82 million tourists in 2017, according to World Bank data, the Polish website reported.

Improving infrastructure, high customer service standards

It quoted Ewa Kubaczyk of the Polish Chamber of Tourism as saying that “Poland is not only attractive to tourists from Europe, but has also been discovered by visitors from markets with great tourist potential such as China or the Middle East.”

Poland is becoming more appealing to tourists as infrastructure improves nationwide, including roads and hotels, Kubaczyk said, adding that international tourists also valued high customer service standards in the country.

Billions from tourism

However, while Poland leads the way in its region in terms of visitor numbers, it is outperformed by other European countries when it comes to earning money from foreign tourists, money.pl said.

It quoted data by the World Tourism Organisation according to which Poland's tourism revenue totaled EUR 9.9 billion last year, significantly less than Sweden, Switzerland and Portugal.

Croatia boasted EUR 9 billion even though it was visited by far fewer people than Poland, according to the website.

Experts point out that Poland remains cheaper than destinations such as Switzerland or Portugal; besides, many foreign tourists come to Poland for just a few days on city breaks instead of longer stays, unlike in the case of some other countries, money.pl noted.

Yet industry professionals are optimistic, money.pl said, as foreign tourists are spending more money in Poland. In 2017, the average international visitor spent almost USD 500 in Poland, 4 percent more than in 2016, with non-European tourists spending more than USD 1,400 per person on average

Poland attractive to foreign tourists: report

 

[Taz]

Poland attractive to foreign tourists: report
31.08.2018 13:50
Poland attracted over 18 million foreign tourists last year, more than tourism powerhouses such as Croatia or Portugal, according to a report.

Photo: Finmiki/pixabay.com/CC0 Creative Commons

At roughly 18.3 million, the number of foreign tourists visiting Poland last year was 4.5 percent higher than a year earlier and larger than in any other country in its region, the money.pl website reported, citing data by the Polish Ministry of Sport and Tourism.

The website said World Bank data showed Croatia attracted 13 million foreign tourists last year, while Romania was visited by just over 10 million and the Czech Republic drew about 9 million.

Meanwhile, Portugal reported 11 million international visitors in 2017, Switzerland had 9 million, and Norway attracted 6 million, money.pl said.

Norwegian fjords, Swiss Alps, Croatian beaches—all these attractions are beginning to pale in comparison with what Poland has to offer, money.pl commented.

France attracted over 82 million tourists in 2017, according to World Bank data, the Polish website reported.

Improving infrastructure, high customer service standards

It quoted Ewa Kubaczyk of the Polish Chamber of Tourism as saying that “Poland is not only attractive to tourists from Europe, but has also been discovered by visitors from markets with great tourist potential such as China or the Middle East.”

Poland is becoming more appealing to tourists as infrastructure improves nationwide, including roads and hotels, Kubaczyk said, adding that international tourists also valued high customer service standards in the country.

Billions from tourism

However, while Poland leads the way in its region in terms of visitor numbers, it is outperformed by other European countries when it comes to earning money from foreign tourists, money.pl said.

It quoted data by the World Tourism Organisation according to which Poland's tourism revenue totaled EUR 9.9 billion last year, significantly less than Sweden, Switzerland and Portugal.

Croatia boasted EUR 9 billion even though it was visited by far fewer people than Poland, according to the website.

Experts point out that Poland remains cheaper than destinations such as Switzerland or Portugal; besides, many foreign tourists come to Poland for just a few days on city breaks instead of longer stays, unlike in the case of some other countries, money.pl noted.

Yet industry professionals are optimistic, money.pl said, as foreign tourists are spending more money in Poland. In 2017, the average international visitor spent almost USD 500 in Poland, 4 percent more than in 2016, with non-European tourists spending more than USD 1,400 per person on average

Poland attractive to foreign tourists: report

Nothing to do in Poland.

 

[SobieskiSavedEurope]

Tomasz Imielinski

Professor
Email:
[email protected]
Phone:
(848) 445-8358
Office:
Core 330
Teaching:
Data 101: Data Literacy
Principles of Information and Data Management*
Research Area:
Data mining.
Search engine technology.
Data extraction
Biography:
Tomasz Imieliński is a Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University.

His joint paper with Agrawal and Swami, 'Mining Association Rules Between Sets of Items in Large DataBases' initiated the Association rule mining research area, and is one of the most cited publications in computer science, with over 18,000 citations. This paper received in the 2003 - 10 year Test of Time ACM SIGMOD Award, and is included in the List of importand publications in computer science.

Imieliński has also been one of the pioneers of mobile computing and for his joint paper with Badri Nath, 'Querying in highly mobile distributed environments', he and Badri Nath received 2002 VLDB Ten Year Award.

He contributed the area of Geocast that deals with the delivery of information to a group of destination in a network identified by their geographical locations. It is a specialized form of multicast addressing used by somerouting protocols for mobile ad hoc networks. He explored geographic messaging, geographic advertising, delivery of geographically restricted services, and presence discovery of a service or mobile network participant in a limited geographic area, in his work with Navas, on "GeoCast - Geographic Addressing and Routing".

Imieliński's early work on 'Incomplete Information in Relational Databases' produced a fundamental concept that became later known as Imieliński-Lipski Algebras.

Overall, Imieliński has published over 150 papers and is an inventor and co-inventor on multiple patents ranging from search technology to web data extraction as well as multimedia processing, data mining, and mobile computing.

His papers have been cited over 34000 times Tomasz Imieliński has been listed as #3, in the area of databases, on the AMiner Most Influential Scholars List which tracks the top researchers in computer science and engineering.

He has served as chairman of Computer Science Department at Rutgers from 1996 till 2003. In 2000 he co-founded Connotate Technologies – web data extraction company based in New Brunswick NJ. Since 2004 till 2010 he has held multiple positions at Ask.com, from Vice president of data solutions to Executive Vice President of global search and answers and Chief Scientist. He has also served as VP of Data Solutions at IAC/Pronto.

Specialties: Data mining. Search engine technology. Data extraction.

less
Awards & Distinctions:
Tomasz Imieliński's joint paper with Agrawal and Swami, 'Mining Association Rules Between Sets of Items in Large DataBases' is one of the most cited publications in computer science, with over 18,000 citations, and received in the 2003 - 10 year Test of Time ACM SIGMOD Award. It is also included in the List of important publications in computer science.

For his joint paper with Badri Nath, 'Querying in highly mobile distributed environments', Tomasz Imieliński and Badri Nath received 2002 VLDB Tem Year Award.

His papers have been cited over 34000 times Tomasz Imieliński has been listed as #3, in the area of databases, on the AMiner Most Influential Scholars List which tracks the top researchers in computer science and engineering.

Tomasz Imielinski | Department of Computer Science

 

[SobieskiSavedEurope]

Which Country Would Win in the Programming Olympics?



Update: This article has been picked up by the Washington Post, Business Insider, eWeek and InfoWorld.

Which countries have the best programmers in the world?
Many would assume it’s the United States. After all, the United States is the home of programming luminaries such as Bill Gates, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Donald Knuth. But then again, India is known as the fastest growing concentration of programmers in the world and the hackers from Russia are apparently pretty effective. Is there any way to determine which country is best?
We decided to examine our data to answer this question: which countries do the best at programming challenges on HackerRank?
At HackerRank, we regularly post tens of thousands of new coding challenges for developers to improve their coding skills. Hundreds of thousands of developers from all over the world come to participate in challenges in a variety of languages and knowledge domains, from Python to algorithms to security to distributed systems. Our community is growing everyday, with over 1.5 million developers ranked.
Developers are scored and ranked based on a combination of their accuracy and speed.
According to our data, China and Russia score as the most talented developers. Chinese programmers outscore all other countries in mathematics, functional programming, and data structures challenges, while Russians dominate in algorithms, the most popular and most competitive arena. While the United States and India provide the majority of competitors on HackerRank, they only manage to rank 28th and 31st.
***We began our analysis by looking at which test types are most popular among developers. HackerRank developers can choose to participate in 15 different domains, but some are more popular than others. The following table shows the proportion of completed tests that come from each domain.


The most popular domain by far is algorithms, with nearly 40% all developers competing. This domain includes challenges on sorting data, dynamic programming, and searching for keywords and other logic-based tasks. For algorithms tests, developers can use whichever language they choose, which may partially explain why it’s so popular. Algorithms are also crucial for coding interviews, so it could explain why more coders would practice algorithm challenges. At a distant second and third, Java and data structures coming in at about 10% each. Distributed systems and security are our least popular tests, though we still receive thousands of completed challenges in those areas.
So based on these tests, which country has the programmers that score the highest?
In order to find out, we looked at each country’s average score across all domains. We standardized the scores for each domain (by subtracting the mean from each score and then dividing by the standard deviation; also known as a z-score) before finding the average. This allows us to make an apples-to-apple comparison of individual scores across different domains, even if some domains are more challenging than others. We then converted these z-scores into a 1-100 scale for easy interpretation.
We restricted the data to the 50 countries with the most developers on HackerRank. Here’s what we found:


Since China scored the highest, Chinese developers sit at the top of the list with a score of 100. But China only won by a hair. Russia scored 99.9 out of 100, while Poland and Switzerland round out the top rankings with scores near 98. Pakistan scores only 57.4 out of 100 on the index.
The two countries that contribute the greatest number of developers, India and the United States don’t place in the top half. India ranks 31st, with an overall score of 76 and the United States falls in at 28th, with a score of 78.



Though China outperformed everyone else on average, they didn’t dominate across the board. Which country produces the best developers in particular skill areas? Let’s take a look at the top countries in each domain.



China did quite well in a number of domains. Chinese developers beat out the competition in data structures, mathematics, and functional programming. On the other hand, Russia dominates in algorithms, the domain with the most popular challenges. Coming next, Poland and China nearly tie for second and third place, respectively.
What explains the different performance levels of different countries across domains? One possible explanation is that Russians are just more likely to participate in algorithms and therefore get more practice in that domain, while Chinese developers are disproportionately drawn to data structures.
Software engineer Shimi Zhang is one such programmer who ranked among the top 10 programmers in our Functional Programming domain. He hails from China’s city of Chongqing, and moved to the US just two years ago to get his master’s in computer science before coming to work at HackerRank.

On the greatness of Chinese programmers, from top-rankedChinese competitive programmer Shimi Zhang:

In universities and colleges, education resources are relatively fewer in comparison with many other countries, so students have less choices in their paths to programming. Many great students end up obsessed with competitive programming since it’s one of the few paths.



China even has a big population of students who started programming in middle school and high school. They’re trying to solve some hard challenges only few people in this world can solve.


They even host national programming contests for young programmers, like NOIp (national olympiad in informatics in provinces) and NOI (national olympiad in informatics). And after CTSC (China Team Selection Contest), 4 geniuses go to IOI (international olympiad in informatics), and at least 3 have won a gold medal this year. This has been the trend for nearly 10 years.


It’s an even greater achievement considering a special rule: if you had won a gold medal once, you won’t be selected for future IOI team, that means, most IOI team member from China won gold medal with their first try.

Next up, we also compared how the developers in each country split their time up amongst different challenge types and then compared these domain preferences to those of the average HackerRank user. This allowed us to figure out which countries are more likely than the rest to take a test in a particular domain—and which countries are less likely than the rest.

As the table above shows, China participated in mathematics competitions at a much higher rate than would be expected given the average developer’s preferences. This might help explain how they were able to secure the top rank in that domain. Likewise, Czech developers showed an outsized preference for shell competitions, a domain in which they ranked number one.
But beyond these two examples, there seems to be little relationship between a country’s preference for a particular challenge type and its performance in that domain. We also wanted to know whether countries have specific preferences when it comes to programming languages. Are Indians more interested in C++? Do Mexicans code in Ruby?
The following chart breaks down the proportion of tests taken in each language by country.

In general, developers of different nationalities participate in Java challenges more than tests in any other programming language (with a few notable exceptions like Malaysia and Pakistan, where users prefer C++, and Taiwan, where Python is king). Sri Lanka comes in at number one in its preference for Java. India, which supplies a big portion of HackerRank developers, ranks 8th.


*** While Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nigeria are currently toward the bottom of the hacker rankings, they can look to Switzerland’s steadfast developers for inspiration. When a HackerRank developer gives up on a challenge before making any progress, they earn a score of zero. Switzerland has the lowest percentage of nil scoring users, which make Swiss coders the Most Tenacious Programmers in the World.

***Every day, developers around the world compete with each other to become the next Gates or Knuth.
If we held a hacking Olympics today, our data suggests that China would win the gold, Russia would take home a silver, and Poland would nab the bronze. Though they certainly deserve credit for making a showing, the United States and India have some work ahead of them before they make it into the top 25.

Which Country Would Win in the Programming Olympics?

 

[SobieskiSavedEurope]

Tribute to Poles over key WWII victory in Italy
18.05.2018 15:50
Poland's defence minister on Friday paid tribute to soldiers who after a bloody World War II battle captured Monte Cassino in Italy, contributing to a major Allied victory over Nazi German forces.

Polish Defence Minister Mariusz Błaszczak during ceremonies marking 74 years since the hard-won 1944 Battle of Monte Cassino, in Italy on Friday. Photo: PAP/Adam Guz

Mariusz Błaszczak travelled to Italy to honour Polish soldiers during commemorations of the 1944 battle, which opened the road to Rome for Allied troops.

The Battle of Monte Cassino provided “more proof that Polish soldiers are the best in the world” and that Poles show solidarity toward other nations, he said.

“We are proud of the soldiers of the 2nd Corps under Gen. Anders. We are proud of our compatriots," Błaszczak said during the ceremonies, which marked 74 years since the 2nd Polish Corps led by Gen. Władysław Anders finally captured Monte Cassino after months of heavy fighting.

The heroes of the Battle of Monte Cassino "passed on all those basic values around which the Polish national identity is built” today, Błaszczak told reporters.

He said: "We pay tribute to all those who fought at Monte Cassino. We remember in our prayers those who gave their lives … They accomplished extraordinary deeds."

Błaszczak also said that authorities in Italy, “every time we meet and talk, underline the role played by Polish soldiers in the liberation of Italy and in the creation of a system of freedom and democracy in Italy.”

Interior and Administration Minister Joachim Brudziński was also among Polish officials taking part in the ceremonies in Italy on Friday, along with a group of war veterans and scouts.

"Go, tell Poland, O stranger passing by, that here we lie..."

The hills of Monte Cassino with their fortified Benedictine monastery were a key German defensive position along the so-called Gustav line designed to prevent the Allies from taking Rome during World War II.

The 2nd Polish Corps commanded by Gen. Anders captured Monte Cassino on May 18, 1944, after 123 days of fierce fighting.

The victory cost the lives of 923 Polish troops, with 2,931 wounded and 345 declared missing in action.

By the time the war ended in 1945, a Polish military cemetery was established on the slopes of Monte Cassino, which today is a major site of national remembrance for Poles.

A total of 1,072 Polish soldiers are buried there, among them Gen. Anders, who died in London in 1970.

A sign on the cemetery wall says: "Go, tell Poland, O stranger passing by, that here we lie—having fallen faithful in her service."

Tribute to Poles over key WWII victory in Italy

 

[SobieskiSavedEurope]

Henryk Siemiradzki's painting Nero's Torches (1877). Some of the Siemiradzki's paintings of Rome inspired how Sienkiewicz imagined the city in his best known novel, photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Man Behind Quo Vadis
#language & literature
Author: Mikołaj Gliński
Published: Jan 22 2016
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0
Many people have read and enjoyed Quo Vadis, but very few know its author. Dearly beloved in Poland, Henryk Sienkiewicz has much more to offer than just one novel. His exotic family background, his adventurous life and his other stories are all worth discovering, especially since Poland has declared 2016 the Year of Sienkiewicz.

Henryk Sienkiewicz may be the greatest world success story of Polish literature, but the reasons Poles love him so much lie somewhere else quite different. His 1896 novel Quo Vadis – a tale of love and ambition (and religious conflict) set in the decadent Rome of the 1st century CE – was translated into more than 50 languages and is one of the all-time best-sellers of world literature. In fact, it remains the only Polish book to have found a firm place in the canon of world literature.

However, in Poland Henryk Sienkiewicz is mostly celebrated as the author of quite a different series of books, one which you'll find on a bookshelf in every Polish house. The Trilogy is a historical epic set in the mid-17th century, a time of a great political turmoil which almost brought the country to its doom. In this book, Sienkiewicz crafted, much in the vein of American western novels, a most vivid cast of national heroes and villains, portrayed against the exotic backdrop of Poland's 'wild' eastern frontiers. But more importantly he created a consistent vision of Polish history, one shared by generations to come.

In a way it was Sienkiewicz who designed how Poles to this day visualise their past as a nation – with all its possible advantages and drawbacks.

A Catholic writer of Muslim heritage?

Henryk Sienkiewicz in Zakopane, 1894, photo: Kamil Kajko / Forum
Henryk Sienkiewicz was born in 1846 in Wola Okrzejska in Eastern Poland (not far from Lublin), an estate owned by his family from his mother's side. However his father's ancestors were Lithuanian Tatars, an ethnic minority which started settling in the eastern regions of the the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as early as the 14th century.



Tatars, who were an important and well-integrated minority (contributing greatly to Poland's military potential) in the commonwealth, spoke Polish but stuck to Islam as their religion (as such they were the only Muslim minority group living in Europe for centuries – find out more here). In fact, the writer's great-grandfather Michał converted to Christianity only in 1755. This may be interesting in the case of a writer whose most important books dealt with the story of ethnic and religious conflict between Christians and pagans in Quo Vadis, and Poles, Turks, Ukrainians and Tatars in The Trilogy – and who himself became the most exemplary Polish writer – a literary founding father of Polish national identity.

A childhood in the Polish countryside (in the Russian Empire)
Sienkiewicz spent most of his early childhood in the Polish countryside, a fact which explains his deep knowledge of the dialect of the peasantry, which he would later use in some of his works. It was also here that he developed his predilection for history books, delighting in the family library. It is said that some of the books read by the boy belonged to a famous historian and relative of the Sienkiewicz family: Joachim Lelewel. In 1858, Henryk moved to Warsaw – which was then (like the whole eastern part of the country) under Russian administration – where he enrolled in middle school and later continued his studies.

Reporter in America
Before Sienkiewicz made his name as the greatest national writer, he worked as journalist writing feuilletons for newspapers in Warsaw. In 1876, he was able to secure a job that would enable him to travel to America. For the next two years, Sienkiewicz travelled around the country writing reportage for the Polish press depicting the American way of life, with settlers, squatters and businessmen.

Sienkiewicz's stay in America coincided with the last years of the Native Americans’ fight for freedom, among them the Apaches. Fascinated by the adventurous reality of the American Wild West, Sienkiewicz even wrote a couple of literary western pieces in the style of James Fenimore Cooper. One of them, a short story entitled Sachem about a Native American chief, the last descendant of his tribe performing a dance in a circus in front of a white audience, remains – with its surprising and shocking ending – one of the all-time classics of Polish literature.

The Trilogy as the ultimate Polish book

Still from With Fire and Sword directed by Jerzy Hoffman, photo: promotional materials.
Upon his return to Poland, Sienkiewicz continued writing novels and short stories along with working as a journalist (including a post of editor-in-chief of a conservative newspaper). But it wasn't until 1895 when With Fire and Sword, the first part of The Trilogy, was serialised in Polish newspapers and the writer started to become a national icon.

The publication of the book in newspapers was arguably the greatest literary event in the cultural life of the nation. No book ever before or later raised such massive and unanimous interest. People would abandon their chores whenever they could go listen to the new adventures of their favourite heroes. In small towns, the local population would crowd in post offices waiting for the newspaper with the new episode to reach their town. They would listen to someone reading it aloud, and only then would they go back to their chores.

During his work on the next two volumes of the book, Sienkiewicz received thousands of letters from readers concerned about the fate of their favourite protagonists and trying to impact the author. Women, in emulation of the female characters from the book, started practising fencing at home.

Most interestingly of all, The Trilogy was read by all classes of Polish society: from the aristocracy to craftsmen and peasants – which may be especially surprising considering the way Sienkiewicz depicted the lower classes. It was also read by minorities living in Poland, among others and importantly, by Jews. If any book in Poland was ever read en masse and with such passion and equality, it was this one. The question is: what was so fascinating about this book that it enchanted contemporary readers of all sorts – along with generations of readers to come?

The Polish Iliad of the Wild East frontier

The Ukrainian areas of Polish-Turkish frontire was an exotic inspiration for many artists. Here in Józef Brandt's painting, A Cossack on Horse (1881), photo: Wikimedia Commons
In The Trilogy, Sienkiewicz wrote about arguably the biggest political crisis in the history of the Polish state. The moment when Poland, attacked by Turkey and Sweden, and torn by the inner revolts of the Cossacks, found itself on the verge of collapse… And yet somehow managed to survive. This, according to Sienkiewicz, happened thanks to the heroic patriotic efforts of Polish soldiers, whom he descibed more like Medieval knights with their ideals of honour, valour and faithfulness.

Trylogia was like the great national epic, like the new Iliad – with Zbaraż, a fortified castle at the furthest eastern frontier, becoming the Polish Troy.

It was also like an American Western story with the remote Polish-Turkish frontier, with its so-called Dzikie Pola (literally 'Wild Fields' or 'Wilderness', today part of Zaporozhya) making for the oriental setting for ruthless tales of conflict between good and evil – where good was symbolised by the Polish Christian nobles, and evil was made up of Turks, Tatars and Ukrainians.

But perhaps most of all, it was a great adventure story. In The Trilogy, Sienkiewicz created ultimate if controversial national heroes (like Andrzej Kmicic) as well as the worst villains, personifying cunning enemies like Azya Tuhaybeyovich, who in one of the final scenes of the book is impaled in a macabre coup de force – a memory that stays with many Sienkiewicz readers forever.

Sienkiewicz controversy
Almost since the publication of the book, Sienkiewicz has been criticised from various sides. The critics accused him of over-heroising his Polish protagonists, excessively idealising their characters – while at the same time portraying enemies as inhuman creatures, more demons than real people (compare the image of Khmelnicky). He was also castigated for using unnecessary cruelty (the impaling of Azya is one good example – see the scene in the Jerzy Kawalerowicz film).



More importantly though, he was also rebuked for failing to represent whole groups of Poland's society, like Jews or peasantry, as well as look into more deeper social causes behind the tragic historical events he depicted, like the Khmelnytski Uprising. Sienkiewicz’s inability to see social injustice as the backdrop and cause of the massive and ruthless character of this peasant and Kossack rebellion against ruthless Polish lords is one of many examples, symbolic of his writing method as a whole.

For Stanisław Brozowski, one of the most brilliant Polish critics of the time, Sienkiewicz was a an apologist of Polish nobility, a social class which he considered as backward and in decay. Thus Sienkiewicz was 'a classic of Polish backwardness and nobility's ignorance'.

For others, like Witold Gombrowicz, Sienkiewicz remained a powerful genius, a great master of words that one continues reading enthusiastically despite obvious cheap tricks of his craft: 'a first-class second-class author'.

Trilogy & historiosophy


Sienkiewicz's vision of history and his historiosophy may have been particularly influential. For Sienkiewicz sees the Polish-Turkish frontier in the mid-17th century as a battlefield of cultures and religions, a setting for the crash of civilisations. Also his depiction of Turks and Tatars (as Muslims) is rather one-dimensional. This itself may be interesting in case of a writer whose family descended from a Polish Tatar Muslim minority, and the author of an earlier short novel Selim Mirza which emphatically portrayed a Polish Tatar character. As such, Sienkiewicz may not have been the most obvious candidate for the ultimate national writer, and an icon of Polish concept of the nation. Still, this is what he became.

Quo Vadis, Sienkiewicz?

Paintings of Henryk Siemiradzki inspired how Sienkiewicz imagined ancient Rome. This painting The Christian Dirce may well have inspired the final scene in Quo Vadis, photo: Wikimedia Commons
Sienkiewicz’s greatest literary success however was yet to come. By writing Quo Vadis (1894), a novel set in ancient Rome during the reign of Nero, Sienkiewicz once again pushed a Christian agenda, his message being the inevitable coming of the Christian era.

The book became a huge international success, and is still the greatest hit in the history of Polish literature and one of the first global best-sellers of the 20th century. Quo Vadis has been translated into most major languages in the world (more than 50 up to this day), and the number of copies and later imprints must be impressive, if hard to estimate.

Interestingly, Sienkiewicz didn’t profit financially from the great popularity of his book. As a Russian citizen, he was not entitled to a share of the profits from the numerous translations of Quo Vadis, simply because Russia was one of the few countries not to have signed the so-called Berne convention. Had Russia signed the convention or had Sienkiewicz moved to nearby Kraków (part of Austrian Galicia) he would have made an incredible fortune. He decided however to stay in Russia-administered part of Poland, where he profited from the sales of his Polish books (which was also not altogether bad).



The global success of Quo Vadis contributed to the 1905 decision of the Swedish Royal Academy to award Sienkiewicz the Nobel Prize.

Last years

The funeral of Henryk Sienkiewicz, 1924, the main train station in Warsaw, photo: NAC
In the years to come he went to publish another set of monster best-selling hits (if only of local fame), like In Desert and Wilderness or Teutonic Knights, books that to this day remain compulsory reading for all Polish school children.

Sienkiewicz died in 1916, two years before Poland regained independence after 123 years of partition. But the political determinacy of many Poles fighting for Poland's independence in WWI owed much to Sienkiewicz’s historical vision and sense of national pride

The Man Behind Quo Vadis

 

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Michał Piotr Boym[1] (Chinese:;[2] c. 1612–1659) was a Polish Jesuit missionary to China,[3][4] scientist and explorer.

He is notable as one of the first westerners to travel within the Chinese mainland, and the author of numerous works on Asian fauna, flora and geography.

Boym authored the first published Chinese dictionaries for European languages, both of which were published posthumously: the first, a Chinese–Latin dictionary, was published in 1667, and the second, a Chinese–French dictionary, was published in 1670.[5][6]

Contents

• 1Biography
• 2Works
• 3See also
• 4Notes and references
• 5External links

Biography[edit]

Drawings of Chinese fruit trees from Michael Boym's "Briefve Relation de la Chine" (Paris, 1654). Depicted are the Cinnamomum cassia, the durian, and a variety of banana (or plantain) tree, with their Chinese names.
Michał Boym was born in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), around 1614, to a well-off family of Hungarianancestry. His grandfather Jerzy Boim came to Poland from Hungary with the king Stefan Batory, and married Jadwiga Niżniowska.[7][3] Michał's father, Paweł Jerzy Boim (1581–1641),[7] was a physician to King Sigismund III of Poland.[3][4] Out of Pawel Jerzy's six sons, the eldest, the ne'er-do-well Jerzy was disinherited; Mikołaj and Jan became merchants; Paweł, a doctor; while Michał and Benedykt Paweł joined the Society of Jesus.[7] The family had their own family chapel in Lviv's central square, which was constructed around the time of Michał's birth.[7]

In 1631, Boym joined the Jesuits in Kraków,[3] and was ordained a priest. In 1643, after almost a decade of intensive studies in the monasteries of Kraków, Kalisz, Jarosław and Sandomierz, Boym embarked on a voyage to Eastern Asia. He first traveled to Rome, where he obtained a blessing for his mission from Pope Urban VIII, and then proceeded to Lisbon. Later that year he embarked with a group of nine other priests and clerics on a voyage to Portuguese Goa, and then Macau. Initially he taught at St. Paul Jesuit College (Macau). He then moved to the island of Hainan, where he opened a small Catholic mission. After the island had been conquered by the Manchus, Boym had to flee to Tonkin in 1647.

Even as Jesuits in northern and central China were successfully switching their loyalties from the fallen Ming Dynasty to the newly established Qing, the Jesuits in the south of the country continued to work with the Ming loyalist regimes still controlling some of the region. Accordingly, in 1649 Boym was sent by the Canton-based Vice-Provincial of the China Mission Alvaro Semedo with a diplomatic mission to the court of the Yongli Emperor, the last Chinese ruler of the Ming Dynasty, still controlling parts of the Southwestern China.[3]

As the Yongli regime was endangered by the encroaching Manchus, the Jesuit Andreas Wolfgang Koffler, who had been at the Yongli court since 1645, had succeeded in converting many of the members of the imperial family toChristianity believing this would attract help from Western monarchs for the Southern Ming's struggle to continue to rule China. Among the Christians at the Yongli's court were Empress dowager Helena Wang (Wang Liena), the wife of the emperor's father; Empress dowager Maria Ma (Ma Maliya), the mother of the emperor; and the heir to the throne, prince Constantine (Dangding), Zhu Cuxuan.[3] The Emperor's eunuch secretary Pang Tianshou (), known by his Christian name Achilles, had become a Christian as well, years earlier.[3][8]

Boym was chosen to present the situation of the Chinese Emperor to the Pope. He received letters from Empress dowager Helena and from Pang Achilles, to give to Pope Innocent X, the General of the Jesuit Order,[9] and Cardinal John de Lugo. Additional letters were dispatched to the Doge of Venice and to the King of Portugal. Together with a young court official named Andrew Zheng (Chinese; pinyin: Zhèng Āndélè),[10][11] Boym embarked on his return voyage to Europe. They arrived at Goa in May 1651, where they learned that the King of Portugal had already abandoned the cause of the Chinese (Southern Ming) Emperor, and that Boym's mission was seen as a possible threat to future relations with the victorious Manchu. This view was also supported by the new local superior of the Jesuits, who believed the Jesuit Order should not interfere in the internal power struggles of China.

Boym was placed under house arrest. However, he managed to escape and continue his voyage on foot. By way of Hyderabad, Surat, Bander Abbas and Shiraz, he arrived at Isfahan, in Persia. From there he continued his journey to Erzerum, Trabzon and İzmir, where he arrived near the end of August 1652. As the Venetian court was having conflicts with the Jesuits, Boym discarded his habit and dressed up as a Chinese Mandarin, before he arrived in Venice in December of that year. Although he had managed to cross uncharted waters and unknown lands, his mission there would not be easy, as the political intrigues at the European courts proved to be extremely complicated.

Initially the Doge of Venice refused to grant Boym an audience, as Venice wanted to maintain a neutral stance in regards to China. Boym managed to convince the French ambassador to support his cause, and the Doge finally saw Boym and accepted the letter. However, the French involvement caused a negative reaction from the Pope, as Innocent X was actively opposed to France and its ambitions. Also the newly elected General of the Jesuits, Gosvinus Nickel, believed Boym's mission might endanger other Jesuit missions in China and other parts of the world. A new Pope was elected in 1655, and after three years, Alexander VII finally saw Boym on 18 December1655. However, although Alexander was sympathetic to the Ming dynasty and its dilemma, he could not offer any practical help and his letter to the Chinese emperor contained little but words of empathy and offers of prayers. However, the letter from the new Pope opened many doors for Boym and his mission. In Lisbon, he was granted an audience by King John IV, who promised to help the Chinese struggle with military force.

In March 1656, Boym started his return trip to China. Out of eight priests accompanying him, only four survived the journey. Upon reaching Goa it turned out that Yongli's situation was dire and that the local Portuguese administration, despite direct orders from the monarch, did not want to let Boym travel to Macau. This was in order not to compromise their commercial enterprises with the victorious Manchu. Boym again ignored the Portuguese monopoly by travelling on foot, this time by an uncharted route to Ayutthaya, the capital of Siam. He arrived there in early 1658, and hired a ship from pirates, with which he sailed to northern Vietnam. In Hanoi, Boym tried to procure a guide to lead him and the priests travelling with him to Yunnan. However, he was unsuccessful and he had to continue the journey alone, with the assistance only of Chang, who had travelled with him all the way to Europe and back. They reached the Chinese province of Guangxi, but on 22 June 1659 Boym died, before reaching the emperor's court. The location of where he was buried is not known today.

Works[edit]

A squirrel (松鼠) chasing a green-haired turtle (綠毛龜), in Boym's Flora Sinensis
Boym is best remembered for his works describing the flora, fauna, history, traditions and customs of the countries he travelled through. During his first trip to China he wrote a short work on the plants and animals dwelling in Mozambique. The work was later sent to Rome, but was never printed. During his return trip he prepared a large collection of maps of mainland China and South-East Asia. He planned to expand it to nine chapters describing China, its customs and political system, as well as Chinese science and inventions. The merit of Boym's maps was that they were the first European maps to properly represent Korea as a peninsula rather than an island. They also took notice of the correct positions of many Chinese cities previously unknown to the westerners or known only by the semi-fabulous descriptions of Marco Polo. Boym also marked the Great Wall and the Gobi Desert. Although the collection was not published during Boym's lifetime,[12] it extended the knowledge of China in the west.

The best known of Boym's works is the Flora Sinensis ("Chinese Flora"), published in Vienna in 1656. The book was the first description of an ecosystem of the Far East published in Europe. Boym underlined the medicinal properties of the Chinese plants. The book also included pleas for support of the Catholic Chinese emperor and a poem containing nearly a hundred chronograms pointing to the date of 1655, the date of coronation of Emperor Leopold I as the King of Hungary, as Boym wanted to gain support of that monarch for his mission.

Athanasius Kircher heavily drew on the Flora Sinensis for the chapters on the plants and animals of China in his celebrated China Illustrata (1667).[13]

In his other works, such as Specimen medicinae Sinicae ("Chinese medicinal plants") and Clavis medica ad Chinarum doctrinam de pulsibus ("Key to the Medical Doctrine of the Chinese on the Pulse") he described the Chinese traditional medicine and introduced several methods of healing and diagnostics previously unknown in Europe, particularly measurement of the pulse.[14][15][16]

Michał Boym - Wikipedia

 

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Polish Enigma codebreaker commemorated in UK
02.09.2018 13:00
A memorial plaque in tribute of a Polish mathematician who helped crack the Enigma code was unveiled in the southwestern town of Chichester, UK, according to a report.

Henryk Zygalski. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/public domain

Henryk Zygalski, who jointly with fellow mathematicians Marian Rejewski and Jerzy Różycki cracked Germany’s encrypted military communications during World War II, lived in Chichester after the war.

However, due to the confidential character of Zygalski’s work and later speaking difficulties brought on by a stroke, Zygalski’s role in breaking the Enigma remained little known for decades, Zygalski’s nephew, Jeremy Russell, told Polish Radio’s IAR news agency.

Chichester Mayor Martyn Bell, who attended the unveiling ceremony, also expressed regret over not discovering Zygalski’s accomplishments earlier. “It’s sad in a way; Otherwise we might have gotten to know him and know more about him,” Bell said.

“But it was true of many people who worked undercover and in the secret world of World War II and the 1930s. Afterwards, they were kept under the radar,” he added.

The breakthrough of Zygalski, Rejewski and Różycki in cracking the Enigma code contributed to the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany.

Polish Enigma codebreaker commemorated in UK

 

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Feliks Koneczny’s theory of civilization and the collapse of Europe
14:12 21-11-2017 gefira.org

photo shutterstock.com

The Old Continent is suffering from a deadly illness, an illness of helplessness. Millions of immigrants have come to Europe, mainly from the Middle East and Africa. Other millions are standing at Europe’s gates. In many Western countries small Muslim minorities will soon become large politically influential minorities. For many years the elites lacking in common sense have propagated a model of multicultural society on our continent. As it is, in return for altruism and goodwill, Europeans have been receiving violence and death in terrorist attacks. A clash of civilizations is being fought in London, Hamburg, Barcelona, Paris and Amsterdam. Europe has lost its spirit and the warrior ethos, which it was formerly known for.

We can only look back at the days when in 1683 the coalition of Christian troops under the command of Polish King John III Sobieski defeated the invading Turkish army at the Battle of Vienna and defended Europe against Islam. Those soldiers were imbued with an invincible spirit of their heritage. Polish historian Feliks Koneczny, creator of an original theory of civilization, wrote about the role of the human spirit in history. European and American readers are familiar with Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations?”, while the Polish scholar worked out his theory much earlier. Some experts say that Huntington drew on Koneczny’s thought.1)

Feliks Koneczny believed that the human spirit is the fundamental factor which gives rise to religion, race, language or technology. For example, the Latin civilization is made up of British, Polish or Spanish cultures. Civilization, a term broader than culture, is a way of collective life which to be perpetuated must work for at least a few generations. The historian posited that at present there are seven civilizations: Arab, Byzantine, Brahmin, Chinese, Latin, Turanian and Jewish (as well as Tibetan and Numidian in the residual phase). He defined five civilization building blocks: good and truth (material constituents), health and well-being (spiritual constituents), which are combined by beauty. People perceive these five concepts differently, so naturally they form such associations whose common denominator is the same understanding of them.

The Latin civilization originated in Western and Central Europe and was transferred to the Americas. It draws on the Greek understanding of the objective truth (science), Roman law and Christian morality. This civilization seeks to ensure the greatest possible public participation in the governance of the state by each individual and values his personal freedom highly. It accepts the superiority of ethics over law. The law itself is split in public and private law. Even politics and warfare are subordinated to ethical requirements.

Europe is different now from what it was during Koneczny’s lifetime (1862-1949). A long time of prosperity and consumerism, a carefree life without war plus Neo-Marxist ideology have led to the fall of the European spirit.

Apart from the Latin, we also have the Turanian civilization, which originated in Eurasian steppes. Genghis Khan’s Empire belonged to it as well as peoples of Afghanistan, the Turks, Russians and Cossacks (Ukrainians). This civilization’s peculiarity is its military-like social structure since in order to exist it must conquer lands. A sovereign is above the law and all citizens are his ownership. Religion is not autonomous from the state, science is not in high demand.

Next we have the Byzantine civilization, where religion is dependent on the state which has an all-embracing influence on all areas of life. This civilization didn’t end with the fall of the Empire of Constantine the Great; it was adopted in Germany at the turn of 9th and 10th centuries due to the influence of Empress Theophano (956-991), a niece of the Byzantine Emperor John I Tzimiskes. Koneczny believed that the Byzantine civilization had a negative influence on the countries of Western Europe, through bureaucracy, elimination of ethics from collective life.

The scholar defines the Jewish civilization as sacral because all life of an individual and community is subordinated to religious law. Its distinctive characteristic is the consciousness of being chosen, which paved the way for double moral standards towards Jews and Gentiles. What’s interesting, the historian considers the ideology of the Third Reich as an example of the Jewish concept of chosenness being adopted by the Germans.

Europe is the place where the Latin is being undermined by the Byzantine, Turanian and Jewish civilizations. Koneczny didn’t predict the threat from the Arab civilization. Koneczny believes that civilization is only vital when it seeks to expand. If it stops expanding, it begins to fall. Healthy civilizations do not want to mingle with others; contrarily, they tend to suppress others and replace them. Expansion may be militant or peaceful by means of propagating one’s own style of life and mass migration, like the settlement of the Americas centuries ago.

Immigrants coming now to Europe don’t play the role the settlers in America once did. They do not create new values, build buildings, roads, cities or provide capital and new ideas. They are predominantly interested in economic benefit. Current migration into the US and Europe is incomparable with the European migrattion to the predominantly empty land in Australia and the Americas. The economic and social superiority of the European and American societies is luring today’s Third World migrants. Permanence of civilization is determined by the consistency and compatibility of its values, which makes it resistant to foreign influences. Koneczny said: “never and nowhere is it possible to be civilized by two methods”. According to the Polish scholar a synthesis of civilizations is impossible. Attempts to combine different ways of life create a mixture but never a new civilization. Mixed civilizations are unable to develop because they are torn by internal contradictions.

Both in relation to nations and civilizations artificial unities are doomed to failure. Nations come into being on their own and develop a community spirit, common will and tradition shared by their members. That is why there wasn’t a Yugoslavian or a Soviet nation, but, contrarily both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia broke up along national lines. Internal cultural contradictions caused the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Czechs and Slovaks didn’t want to live in one country. Catalans wants to leave Spain. There are many conflicts in multinational, multiracial and multicultural India and South Africa. On the other hand divided nations tend to unite. Case in point: reunification of Germany and Vietnam. We may be sure that one of these days Taiwan will be reunited with China, and North and South Korea will eventually merge.

In “On the Plurality of Civilizations” by Feliks Koneczny we can find arguments and explanations concerning the current difficult situation in Europe. The influx of immigrants is the Old Continent’s death. The European Union as a mixture of the Latin, the Byzantine and the Jewish civilizations, currently exposed to the Arab onslaught has no chance to survive, at least that is what we can learn from Feliks Koneczny’s work.

Feliks Koneczny’s theory of civilization and the collapse of Europe

 

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To Be Alive and a Polish Writer: Tadeusz Konwicki, 1926–2015


By Morgan Meis

February 12, 2015

Tadeusz Konwicki; 1990.

Photograph by Ulf Andersen / Getty

Iwill never forget a late-night conversation I had seven years ago, around the table of a modest kitchen in a small town in southern Poland, when an impressively inebriated man—a distant relative—implored me with tear-filled eyes to get the message to Obama, as quickly as possible, that a missile shield pointed east, at Moscow, was a dire necessity. Every morning, this man told me, he looked to the east and expected to see Russian hordes cresting the hill just beyond the outskirts of his defenseless town. Then he pointed his finger at the window. We both looked out warily into the night.

There is a special mix of vindictiveness, paranoia, and persecution complex that can bubble to the surface in countries that have been betrayed too often. The opening line to the Polish National Anthem—“Poland has not yet perished”—gives you a good impression of the national disposition. Many Poles, even twenty years after the fall of Communism, live in a state of fatalistic, half-amused anticipation, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Historically, it’s been the Russians who come to administer the boot. This happened, for instance and notoriously, in the January uprising of 1863, when Poles started a rebellion against forced conscription into the Imperial Russian Army. The rebellion ended, as many did, in misery and mass executions. And don’t even get a Pole started about the partitions of the late eighteenth century, in which Russia, Prussia, and Austria carved Poland up into so many pieces that there was no independent state left.

Tadeusz Konwicki, who died last month, wrote fiction that is steeped in this history, in these agonies and conundrums. His great novel “The Polish Complex” begins like this: “I was standing in line in front of a state-owned liquor store. I was twenty-third in line.” The book was written in the late nineteen-seventies, in a Poland behind the Iron Curtain and two decades removed from the brave, foolish, and short-lived Poznan Uprising against Soviet domination, in 1956. The entire novel takes place in line on Christmas Eve. Standing in that line, waiting to buy goods that never arrive, is Konwicki himself. Just behind him is a Polish man who has been waiting for an opportunity to kill Konwicki since the Second World War. “I owe you a bullet,” the man says to Konwicki. “A slug in the back of the head.” “I know,” responds Konwicki. “I betrayed the old faith for the new one. Then the new one for the old. But I never wanted to betray anything or anybody.”

The end of the Second World War replayed the ongoing tragedy of Polish independence—or, rather, the lack thereof: having painfully thrown off the yoke of Nazi occupation, Poles watched as the Soviets marched in to fill the power vacuum and set up shop. Konwicki himself was a party to these events. As a young man, he’d joined the Home Army and was involved in the double-jeopardy game of armed resistance both to the Wehrmacht and the R.K.K.A. (Red Army). Konwicki was a soldier fighting in the forests around his home town of Wilno (now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania). Somehow, he survived. He moved to Warsaw and began a career as a writer within the indirectly Moscow-directed new Poland of the Cold War era.

And that is why the man in line outside the state-owned liquor store in “The Polish Complex” wants to kill Konwicki: he sees him as a traitor to the true cause of absolute freedom for Poland. He sees Konwicki’s writing as veiled excuses for Konwicki’s “collaboration” in a compromised Poland that was unable to throw off Russian domination in the aftermath of the Second World War. The man in line is, you guessed it, Konwicki’s own conscience, which vexes him day and night.

Konwicki and his conscience step away from the line to drink vodka and talk about the bad old times. On several occasions, Konwicki falls into a swoon, from drink and a bad heart, and dreams about failed uprisings from Poland’s past, or about amorous adventures with the bored young woman sitting behind the desk at the store. Always, he awakens surrounded by his countrymen, freezing cold, waiting in line to buy something for Christmas. Finally, at the end of the novel . . . well, I won’t spoil it.

Perhaps the most moving aspect of “The Polish Complex” is the degree to which Konwicki struggles not to have to struggle with the heavy burden of Polish history. Konwicki didn’t want to be faced with the daily moral dilemmas that confront a person who lives in a country ruled by a rotten regime. Who does? He realizes that an obsession with historical resentments is poisonous and corrosive to the soul. “How did it happen?” Konwicki asks himself,

that I am the author of Polish books, good or bad, but Polish? Why did I accept the role which I had renounced forever? Who turned me, a European, no, a citizen of the world, an Esperantist, a cosmopolitan, an agent of universalism, who turned me, as in some wicked fairytale, into a stubborn, ignorant, furious Pole?

Konwicki has no answer to these questions. The novel simply breaks here and begins a new section in which Konwicki and his friends are back in line, waiting endlessly for a shipment of goods and knowing that word

To Be Alive and a Polish Writer: Tadeusz Konwicki, 1926–2015

 

[SobieskiSavedEurope]

Remembering Alan Kulwicki’s famous ‘Polish Victory Lap’ on #TBT
foxsportsMar 10, 2016 at 10:00a ET
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Alan Kulwicki takes his famed "’Polish Victory Lap" at Phoenix International Raceway.

RacingOne/ISC Archives via Getty Images
The late Alan Kulwicki was nothing if not methodical.

Kulwicki, a college-educated engineer from Wisconsin, began racing in what is now known as the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series in 1985.

Unlike today’s huge NASCAR operations, the frugal Kulwicki had a modest shop near Charlotte Motor Speedway, maybe a dozen full-time employees, and he lived on a shoestring budget in a one-bedroom apartment.

It wasn’t easy for Kulwicki, who was the ultimate outsider in the insular NASCAR community.

"It would have been real easy to quit and turn back and say that it just wasn’t meant to be or I can’t do it," he said. "But I kept on. When I first came down South, I’ve got to be honest with you, I was really scared. I was just swimming for my life. The fear of failure is a good motivator, and I think that’s what drove me in the early years."

For three long years, Kulwicki dreamed of what it would be like to finally win a race in NASCAR’s top division.

And he also dreamed of what he’d do when he actually won one.

In fact, Kulwicki sought out the advice of legendary promoter H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler, then the president and general manager of Charlotte Motor Speedway. Wheeler challenged Kulwicki to be daring and different and do something out of the ordinary when he finally won a race.

And as fate would have it, Kulwicki did just that.

On Nov. 6, 1988, Kulwicki was running second to Ricky Rudd in the Checker 500 at Phoenix International Raceway, the track that will host this weekend’s NASCAR tripleheader. Rudd led 183 of 312 laps but then the engine in his car failed, handing the lead to Kulwicki, who claimed his first Sprint Cup victory in his 85th career start. Kulwicki won $54,100 and won by 18.5 seconds, an eternity by today’s standards.



10 INTRIGUING TIDBITS YOU PROBABLY DON'T KNOW ABOUT PHOENIX INTERNATIONAL RACEWAY
And then, in the first NASCAR Premier Series race ever run at PIR, Kulwicki did something that had never been done before.

He drove his No. 7 Ford Thunderbird in the opposite direction that the cars raced, so he could look into the stands and see the cheering fans, who are especially enthusiastic in Phoenix. Kulwicki’s move became known as the "Polish Victory Lap" and it instantly made him a legend with race fans.

"He told me months before that he was going to do this," said Tom Roberts, then Kulwicki’s spotter. "He was scared to death that NASCAR was going to really come down on him, maybe even take the victory away from him."

In reality, NASCAR loved it. Kulwicki’s bold move drew national headlines and helped focus attention on the sport.

"There will never be another first win and, you know, everybody sprays champagne or stands up on the car," said Kulwicki after the victory. "I wanted to do something different for the fans."

That he did.

"When you work for something so hard for so long, you wonder if it’s going to be worth all of the anticipation," Kulwicki said after winning in Phoenix. "Believe me, it certainly was."


https://www.foxsports.com/nascar/sh...ursday-alan-kulwicki-sprint-cup-series-031016

 

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Stanisław Dobosiewicz [edytuj]

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Stanisław Dobosiewicz (born 1910, died in 2007) - Polish teacher , school theoretician, social activist and writer. During the Second World War, he was a prisoner of concentration camps , after the war he was the author of a series of monographs about the Mauthausen-Gusen camp complex . He also co-created post-war education reforms in Poland.

Table of Contents

• 1Biography
• 2See also
• 3Sources
  • 3.1Footnotes
  • 3.2.Subject bibliography
  • 3.3Subject bibliography

Biography [ edit | edit code ]
Stanisław Dobosiewicz was born on October 28, 1910 in Maków Mazowiecki [1] . During World War I, he and his family were evacuated by the Russian army to Kaluga , where he spent the rest of the war [2] . At the end of the 1920s, he moved to Warsaw, where he began studying Polish at the University of Warsaw [1] . In the student years he was active in leftist scientific circles, including together with Leon Chajne , Mieczysław Popiel and Jadwiga Wasilewskain the Academic Association of Freethinkers and the Circle of Rationalists [3] [4] . In 1932, he defended his master 's thesis on the subject of the Maków Mazowiecki dialect and the surrounding area [5] . The work was rated very highly, and an enthusiastic review was issued by its prof. Witold Doroszewski [5]. After graduation he worked as a teacher [1] .

Shortly after the occupation of Mazovia by the Germans during the September campaign, Dobosiewicz was arrested [1] . After two weeks in detention in Ostrołęka, he was released, but since then he was on the German proscription list [1] . Finally, on April 6, 1940, he was arrested again under the so-calledIntelligenzaktion , or the action of the German invader against the Polish intelligentsia [1] . Initially placed in the concentration camp in Działdowo , on 17 April he was sent to the camp in Dachau and at the end of May to Gusen I, sub-camp of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex , where he was one of the first prisoners with the camp number 166 [1] .

Initially, he worked on the construction of the sub-camp, and then he was assigned to a commando working in stone quarries [1] . During his stay in the concentration camp he was active in the leftist conspiracy, he also supported cultural initiatives among inmates [6] [1] . He was also a co-organizer of scientific courses for inmates, he taught art history, literature and economics [7] . In the camp he survived until the liberation in the last days of the war, in the spring of 1945 [1] . After liberation, he stayed in Austria for some time, where he was active in the Polish Committee dealing with the organization of the return of former prisoners to the country [1] .

After returning to Poland, he joined the organization of Polish education in the Western Territories [1] , he was also one of the first post-war education curators in the Warsaw region [8] . Then for many years he worked as the director of one of the departments at the Ministry of Education [8] . In 1949 he received the Order of the First Class Labor Banner [9] . In 1954 he published a book "10 years of folk school in Poland" summarizing the first decade of changes in the Polish educational system [10] . The book has several editions in the country, as well as foreign editions: in English [11] , German [12] , French [13] and Russian [14] . He was active in the popularization and reform of education, he was one of the co-authors of the so-called school reform 1961 transforming primary schools into eight-grade [15] . He was also the co-author of the project, which eventually led to the construction of "Thousand schools for the thousandth anniversary of Poland" [1] .

For many years he headed the Mauthausen-Gusen Club operating within the framework of ZBoWiD [1] . Among his former inmates, he collected documents, reports and materials about the sub-camps of the Mauthausen-Gusen system, which he published in four volumes forming together the most comprehensive of their monograph [1] . In 1977 he published the book "Mauthausen-Gusen: extermination camp" which was one of the first monographs on the history of the camp [16] . In the following years he published three more parts, documenting various aspects of the history of Mauthausen-Gusen camps. In 1980, the book "Mauthausen-Gusen: self-defense and conspiracy" appeared describing the resistance movement inside the camp, attempts to escape and ways to preserve life and dignity [17] . The next volume of the monograph was published in 1983, the book "Mauthausen-Gusen: poetry and a song of prisoners" focusing on the private life of prisoners, cultural, artistic and self-educational activities [18] . The last volume of the monograph was published in 2000książka "Mauthausen-Gusen: in defense of life and human dignity", which is an attempt to synthesize earlier items [19] .

He died on May 18, 2007 [5] .

In 2011, after the death of Dobosiewicz, his master's thesis in the form of a book was issued by the Academy of Humanities Aleksandra Gieysztora [5] [20] .

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[SobieskiSavedEurope]

MAY
31
Lander built by students closer to Mars

Wrocław students have taken up the challenge space agencies have been facing for years, which is a barrier to the possibility of colonizing Mars. Their idea for a large Mars lander is one of the world’s top five solutions in the "Red Eagle" contest.

Now they are looking for funds for a trip to the competition finals in the United States.

The biggest problem associated with the colonization of Mars is sending all the equipment necessary for survival. The students were given the task of designing a lander that would enable delivering a minimum of 10 tons of cargo to the Red Planet. The machine should be possible to be built and sent to Mars by 2026.

The Eagle project was developed by members of the OFF-ROAD Unconventional Vehicles Science Club at Wrocław University of Science and Technology. It is the only Polish project selected for the finals of the "Red Eagle - International Student Engineering Contest to Design Mars Lander," organized by The Mars Society in cooperation with NASA. The finals will take place in August in Pasadena.

According to the group leader Justyna Pelc, the students from the OFF-Road science club have received awards many times at the international competition of Mars rovers. This year, they tackled a more difficult challenge that has been bugging all space agencies for many years and blocking the possibility of colonizing Mars and other nearby planets. The largest load humanity delivered to Mars so far was the Curiosity rover weighing about one ton.

The problem is braking
"The atmosphere of Mars has much lower density than the Earth’s atmosphere, so commonly used methods such as a parachute, will not work. Another problem is that the current rockets (and rockets that are expected to be built by 2026) significantly limit the dimensions and weight of the lander. An additional difficulty is the possible return from Mars to Earth," explained deceleration specialist Krzysztof Basiak.

The competition forced the participants to work out solutions to many problems in just a few months. The interdisciplinary team members included mechanic and electronic engineers, materials engineers as well as biologists and physicists. Due to the specific nature of the project, the support of industry specialists was also necessary. ESA, CERN and Mars Society Polska employees offered their help.

The Eagle lander had to make the best possible use of the available space on the NASA’s Space Launch System. A half-shell hull was used as a supporting structure. This allowed to obtain the required optimal strength to mass ratio.

The cargo bay located in the lower central part of the lander is at the same time a freight lift, which facilitates the unloading process. The lift module can be easily replaced with a module that sustains life.

The most difficult task was finding the right braking methods for a lander with a significant weight. Basiak points out that with larger masses, such a low-density atmosphere completely excludes the use of braking methods such as parachutes, for example. Speed reduction using engines (as was the case with Moon landings) was also out of the question due to the need to use a large amount of rocket fuel, and hence huge costs associated with the need to transport fuel between planets.

Wrocław students combined several deceleration methods: aerodynamic braking using the Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (HIAD) module, and rocket engines in the final landing phase. HIAD module allows to increase the effective area of aerodynamic braking by filling a dozen rings with increasing diameter, forming a cone with gas. This technology allows to significantly reduce speed. After completing its task, the module is ejected, which allows to reduce the weight of the entire lander and finally land using engines.

Students also used innovative 3D printing for the lander electronics. As a result, they significantly reduced the mass of the systems while maintaining low production costs. Printed electronics can be very thin and flexible at the same time. At the current technological level it is possible to print most of the sensors used in the space industry, including temperature, humidity, pressure, wind power, UV radiation sensors.

The students are now looking for funds to finance their participation in the competition finals in the U.S. They need money for flight and accommodation. "We are looking for people and entities that would like to support us. As one of the five teams in the world and the only one from Poland, we will represent not only our university, but also the entire Polish Space Sector," said Ania Wójcik, technical leader of the project. Information about the collection can be found on the website: www.s corpio.pwr.edu.pl

Lander built by students closer to Mars