Identifying and Interpreting Prewar and Wartime Jewish Photographs in Polish Digital Collections

Prewar and wartime photographs of Polish Jews are historical documents and unique records. A worldwide interest in photographs presenting Jewish life in Poland on the eve of the Holocaust and during the war has been sustained by the traveling exhibit And I Still See Their Faces: Images of Polish Jews, which first opened in Poland in 1996. In recent years, some Polish archives and research institutes have begun digitizing their photography collections, including prewar and wartime photographs of Polish Jews and their communities. In this article, the author focuses on two main questions: the archiving and retrieval of digitized photographs and the identification and subject analysis of the digitized collections, including participatory or social “tagging.”     

Calibration against a reference set: A quantitative approach to assessment of the methods of assessment of scientific output

A set of authors whose scientific output can be unequivocally ranged from the highest to the lowest is used to assess the methods of assessment of scientific output. The rank-rank correlation coefficient between the known order in the calibration set and the order produced by certain method of assessment is a quantitative measure of the quality of that method. A common-sense-based reference may play a positive role in the communication between the enthusiasts and antagonists of bibliometric indices.     

Nemo iudex in causa sua?

Newly introduced bibliometric indices may be biased by the preference of scientists for bibliometric indices, in which their own research receives a high score. To test such a hypothesis, the publication and citation records of nine scientists who recently proposed new bibliometric indices were analyzed in terms of standard indicators, their own indicators, and indicators recently proposed by other scientists. The result of the test was negative, that is, newly introduced bibliometric indices did not favor their authors.     

“We Cooperate,or We Die”: Sustainable Coexistence in Terry Pratchett’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents</Emphasis>

This article examines Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice as a modern example of environmentally informed social dreaming about sustainable coexistence. In our increasingly ecologically-conscious world sustainability and coexistence have become key words in the discourse about social, economic and political relations. The problem of relating to what lies beyond the human, however, remains a challenge. This article argues that this problem is central to Pratchett’s novel, making it a serious commentary on ecoliteracy and ecodesign. The Amazing Maurice, it is claimed, is a work with a transformative purpose. It suggests that cooperation and coexistence are workable beyond what we assume to be their limits.

INTELLECTUAL ABILITIES AND DEALING WITH UNEXPECTED CHANGES IN TASK REQUIREMENTS

Intelligence is often conceptualized as concerned with coping with novelty, adapting to change, and the like: with ‘thinking’ rather than ‘knowing’. Highly intelligent people would be expected to adapt more effectively to unexpected changes. Using the method of ‘mental chronometry’, the performance of 72 seventh graders on a computer controlled reaction time experiment was measured and results compared with Raven's Matrioes IQs. The children with higher IQs were faster, more stable and more accurate in their reactions. Nonetheless, there was no simple, general tendency for children with higher IQs, to deal more effectively with change — rather, the necessity to perform additional stages of information processing seems to be less harmful for intelligent than less intelligent people.