Castability of thin-walled castings is sensitive to variation in casting parameters. The variation in casting parameters can lead to undesired casting conditions which result in defect formation. Variation in rejection rate due to casting defect from one batch to other is common problem in foundries and the cause of this variation usually remain unknown due to complexity of the process. In this work, variation in casting parameters resulting from human involvement in the process is investigated. Casting practices of different groups of casting operators were evaluated and resulting variations in casting parameters were discussed. The effect of these variations was evaluated by comparing the rejection statistics for each group. In order to minimize process variation, optimized casting practices were implemented by developing specific process instructions for the operators. The significance of variation in casting parameters in terms of their impact on foundry rejections was evaluated by comparing the number of rejected components before and after implementation of optimized casting practices. It was concluded that variation in casting parameters due to variation in casting practices of different groups has significant impact on casting quality. Variation in mould temperature, melt temperature and pouring rate due to variation in handling time and practice resulted in varying quality of component from one batch to other. By implementing the optimized casting instruction, both quality and process reliability were improved significantly.

Good practices in the creation of the Commune Revitalization Program – cooperation between the University of Adam Mickiewicz and the City of Kalisz, The entry of the Revitalization Act on November 18, 2015 enabled municipalities to efficiently plan and conduct the process of moving degraded areas out of the crisis. The Act introduced key regulations affecting the programming of revitalization in Poland. One of the most important instruments is the Municipal Revitalization Program. In order to be able to fully use the potential of this document, we should look for solutions that allow creating the most comprehensive solutions. One of the examples of such activities is cooperation between the university and the local government. Thanks to this combination of practical knowledge of officials with theoretical knowledge of academic experts, we can say that it is a project unique in the country. It is also unique due to the fact that spatial economy students who actively participated in the document creation process were included in the work. The aim of the work is to present the course of the cooperation process of the University of Adam Mickiewicz with the Office during the preparation of the Municipal Revitalization Program for the city of Kalisz and showing the role that the students included in the project played in this project

An autobiographical lecture at the Faculty of Social Sciences of The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, presents the genesis and evolution of my research projects in their tight connection with the ontology of development and educational achievements in science and school practice. It is an introspective and socio-historical insight into the emergence of ideas, the scope of my personal involvement in radical changes in pedagogy as science and practice from kindergarten to university professor. My works have been appreciated, among other things, by rewarding the third honorary doctorate honoris causa.

The UK’s decision to leave the EU illustrates some of the tensions embedded in European integration, enabling us to examine how nationalism and cosmopolitanism operate simultaneously, thus reinforcing each other. Furthermore, the prolonged Brexit negotiations have created a climate of protracted insecurity where the only certainty is uncertainty. This is particularly reflected in the migratory experiences of European citizens currently residing in the UK. Academic research has begun exploring the affective impact of Brexit; however, little is known about how processes of connection and disconnection operate simultaneously, nor which coping strategies European migrants have employed to navigate this state of in-betweenness. Using the anthropological notion of liminality as a lens, we draw on participant observation and semi-structured interviews to explore the experiences of Brexit and the coping practices of a range of (new) Bulgarian and (old) Italian European migrants. We argue that Brexit results in a loss of frames of reference for European migrants in the UK – which can be both liberating and unsettling, depending on migrants’ positioning as unequal EU subjects as well as their views on the nature of their future re-incorporation in post-Brexit Britain.

Health psychology was founded as a response to social needs for better understanding and regulation of psychological aspects of biological, mental, and social well-being. Despite initial enthusiasm and optimism in its early days, three decades of development yielded results that are disappointing to many scholars in terms of health psychology practical meaning. Thus, in this paper we review several challenges for health psychology. We believe that health psychology might benefit from revival of aims and values that distinguished the discipline at its onset such as bio-psycho-social perspective that has been narrowed to somatic illness in recent days. Second, more integration is needed in theory and terminology to eliminate overlapping concepts labeled with different names. Furthermore, social practice would benefit from greater responsiveness of health psychologists to new technologies. Finally, health psychology is likely to derive benefits from more general well-established perspectives on diffusion of innovation in social practice. We conclude that health psychology as a practice-related scientific discipline is likely to regain its initial momentum once these problems are solved and novel areas of scientific exploration are identified.

In a follow-up to Ryszard Nycz’s work Culture as Verb this article outlines a new way of bringing forward his great project. The challenge it has to face is the cognitive dilemma that lurks at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences, or, in other words, the dissonance between the traditional paradigm of accumulating and developing the store of cultural knowledge and cognitive procedures that underpin new, experimental and inductive knowledge with a potential to effect qualitative change. The article contends that Nycz’s study allows us to bypass that dilemma. The ‘Third Way’, as it is called here, would open up new forms of innovation, i.e. not just knowledge whose value is determined by its utility for the systems of late capitalism, but a mode of concrete practice of rediscovering the outer world for the humanities. In the process of capturing and transforming of that world, the metaphors of embodied labour and of knowledge production (conceptualized as the verb) function as extraordinarily important tools of the humanities reinvented as a practical, embodied theory.

The current model of hunting economy, focused mainly on killing innumerable number of game species and finding joy and benefit in it, does not totally fulfil criteria of sustainable, ethical and rational management. This work provides an overview of evidences that the moral evil of hunting, together with the whole hunting culture, are not rationally justifiable. I am going to validate there is no reasonable argument for maintaining hunting economy and culture in the on-going, archaic condition. I maintain that therefore an immediate system reform of our hunting economy is necessary. There is a broad list of objection to the different aspects of hunting practices, which are presented and discussed in short in the paper. A reformed hunting institution, endowed with veterinary service, should guard some animals’ interests by different strategies of assuaging some conflicts among people and animals, as catching alive, flushing, separating or biosafety and professional reprocessing of infected corpses. The main recommendation for the ossified hunting tradition is the appeal for listening to the opinion of experts in natural sciences.

This article is an analysis, based on school textbooks, of the norms governing literacy practices in elementary education. These latter are treated as a kind of ritual: the symbolic behaviour impacting not so much the manner of the mental representation of reality as the corporeal-perceptive organization of experience. The aim of the article is to show that (1) contrary to classic literacy theory, writing is not always a tec because in many situational and institutional contexts writing practices are not instrumental but ritual practices, and (2) writing is not solely a tool of the intellect corresponding to a set manner of conceptualizing the world, language, and the self, but also a kind of social tool for the discipline of the body: the acquiring of a certain corporeal-perceptive disposition.

In the paper, problem of proper tuning of second-order Reduced Active Disturbance Rejection Controller (RADRC2) is considered in application for industrial processes with significant (but not dominant) delay time. For First-Order plus Delay Time (FOPDT) and Second-Order plus Delay Time (SOPDT) processes, tuning rules are derived to provide minimal Integral Absolute Error (IAE) assuming robustness defined by gain and phase margins. Derivation was made using optimization procedure based on D-partition method. The paper also shows results of comprehensive simulation validation based on examplary benchmark processes of more complex dynamics as well as final practical validation. Comparison with PID controller shows that RADRC2 tuned by the proposed rules can be practical alternative for industrial control applications.

The aim of the text is to describe some use of literary studies for the studies of history. First of all the recent evolution of the literary studies is outlined, with special stress on expansion of the notion of the subject. It is not any more limited to a human actor, but can be applied to an animal or even an inanimate object. The notion of discursive practice is introduced as a one of the principal key notions of contemporary literary studies. Then few application of literary analysis of discourse for history is enumerated, such as: expanding the scope of historical sources so as to include literary works and other piece of art; critical analysis of historiographical discourse as a text; a new approach to traditional historical sources consisting in treating them as autonomic texts of culture deserving interpretative activity in themselves.