Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History

The purpose of this study was to develop and test an instrument to measure self-efficacy in persons with epilepsy. With Bandura's self-efficacy theory serving as the conceptual basis for instrument development, the study was divided into two phases, an instrument development phase and a reliability and validity assessment phase. In phase one, self-efficacy and epilepsy literature along with discussions with epilepsy patients served as sources for item derivation. A panel of experts reviewed the instrument for content validity. In phase two, testing of the instrument for reliability and validity was done using different groups of epilepsy patients. Reliability coefficients ranged from .81 for test-retest reliability to .93 for internal consistency. A strong positive correlation between self-efficacy and social support (r = .48, p less than .001) and between self-efficacy and self-management (r = .50, p less than .001) provided evidence to support the construct validity of the instrument.

A number of genes other than BRCA1 and BRCA2 have been associated with breast cancer predisposition, and extended genetic testing panels have been proposed. It is of interest to establish the full spectrum of deleterious mutations in women with familial breast cancer.We performed whole-exome sequencing of 144 women with familial breast cancer and negative for 11 Polish founder mutations in BRCA1, CHEK2 and NBS1, and we evaluated the sequences of 12 known breast cancer susceptibility genes. A truncating mutation in a breast cancer gene was detected in 24 of 144 women (17%) with familial breast cancer. A BRCA2 mutation was detected in 12 cases, a (non-founder) BRCA1 mutation was detected in 5 cases, a PALB2 mutation was detected in 4 cases and an ATM mutation was detected in 2 cases. Polish women with familial breast cancer who are negative for founder mutations in BRCA1, CHEK2 and NBS1 should be fully screened for mutations in BRCA1, BRCA2 and PALB2. The PALB2 founder mutation c.509_519delGA should be included in the panel of Polish founder mutations.

Abstract The natural pruning of branches and their biological conditions. III. The fungal flora of common maple, grey alder, silver beam, hornbeam and common ash . A study was made on the mycoflora of dead twigs during natural pruning of branches from Acer pseudoplatanus, Alnus glutinosa, Betula pendula, Carpinus betulus and Fraxinus excelsior . Each species is characterized by an extreme hostspecific fungal flora. Most of the fungi belong to the ascomycetes and deuteromycetes.

Abstract As the result of the communist terror in Poland, during years 1944–1956 more than 50,000 people died. Their bodies were buried secretly, and most places are still unknown. The research presents the results of identification of people buried in one of many mass graves, which were found at the cemetery Powązki Military in Warsaw, Poland. Exhumation revealed the remains of eight people, among which seven were identified genetically. Well‐preserved molars were used for the study. Reference material was collected from the closest living relatives. In one case, an exhumation of victim's parents had to be performed. DNA from swabs was extracted with a PrepFiler ® BTA Forensic DNA Extraction Kit and organic method. Autosomal, Y‐ STR amplification, and mt DNA sequencing were performed. The biostatistical calculations resulted in LR values from 1608 to 928 × 10 18 . So far, remains of more than 50 victims were identified.

The aim of this paper is to explore the popular perception of men in family roles. In a broader perspective, it explores the effects of social changes under state-socialism on men’s identities and the perception of gender difference. I focus on popular understandings of masculinity, taking advantage of massive ego-documents (contest memoirs). I argue that in the 1960s and the 1970s, people in Poland negotiated gender roles in marriage, questioned traditional masculinity, and shaped new understandings of men’s roles based on ideas of companionship and partnership. These new understandings directed men towards assuming selected female tasks and rejecting some features of traditional masculinity. Major changes were occurring within the role and identity of the father, whereas household duties were still considered “unmanly.” State socialism encouraged these changes through ideology and policies (industrialization, low wages, and reform of family law).

This article is a contribution to the debate on the role and character of women’s organizations in Eastern Europe after 1945, including the role they played in the process of women’s emancipation. The purpose of the article is to offer insight into the relation between the communist party (that is the PPR and its successor – the PZPR) and the women’s movement in Poland in the years 1945–89 and to provide a new interpretation of the movement’s history under state socialism. I contend that women’s organizations should be viewed as part of the communist system and the roles they played should be understood in the context of the policies pursued by the communist states.

Although recent findings suggest that gender-discriminatory practices unduly increased female mortality rates during infancy and childhood in historical Europe, especially in Southern and Eastern Europe, there is little research on the conditions that triggered these practices. Relying on child sex ratios (the number of boys per hundred girls in a particular age group) as a cumulative measure of sex-differential mortality around birth, infancy, and childhood, this article explores whether the notion of patriarchy – i.e., varying degrees of sex- and age-related social inequalities – helps to explain the variation in such discriminatory practices. For our analysis, we rely on the NAPP/Mosaic census database, which provides detailed information on more than 300 populations in historical Europe and western Siberia. Using a range of harmonised variables from the combined Mosaic and NAPP data, our results show that the Patriarchy Index, a recently developed composite measure of gendered and generational power relations in marital and family dynamics, is positively associated with child sex ratios across Europe. More specifically, we find that patrilocal norms, a low female age at marriage, and a direct measure of son preference – namely, the prevalence of having a boy as the last child – are strongly correlated with higher child sex ratios.

The article brings to light the relationship between politics and social sciences in interwar Poland in its local and transnational dimensions. It explores the beginnings of expertise in ethnology and the evolution of the discipline’s tools and methods as closely linked to the political goals of the interwar Polish state, and the post-coup Sanacja [Sanation] regime in particular. Ethnologists carried out fieldwork focused on multiethnic territories, such as Eastern Galicia, which were subjected to international territorial disputes. The collaboration with politicians and the administration – developed mostly in the framework of research institutes – was a source of inspiration and, at the same time, stiff competition between scientific schools. To illustrate some consequences of this collaboration, the article traces an argument over scientific approaches to the ‘ethnic question’ which involved ethnologists and empirical sociologists, and the connection of this argument to the objectivity principle in science. These different approaches reflect international theoretical and epistemological divisions at the time as much as they show the direct and indirect exchange of ideas within the European scholarship.

The article summarises the results of analyses of temporal and spatial changes in the location of small water bodies in the upper Sanna River catchment between the fifteenth and twenty-first centuries. The investigations were conducted on historical sources and cartographic data using GIS tools and inventory files. Natural (location of springs, groundwater depth, geomorphology of valleys), anthropogenic factors (quarries, excavations) and historical determinants of construction of the water reservoirs are presented. Additionally, changes in the economic (fish farming, mills), defence and industrial (paper and steel mills, bloomeries, fulleries) functions of the water bodies have been analysed. The changes in the functions of the water bodies were often influenced by the changing ownership. The results have application significance on a local and regional scale.

The paper sets out from a central proposition that the concept of adaptive case management (ACM) bears on the evolution of business decision support and knowledge management in modern businesses. While presenting the state of the art in efforts to blend enterprise resources planning/business process management (ERP/BPM) systems with knowledge management systems (KMS) and decision support systems (DSS), the authors observe that the classical platform combining ERP/BPM with KMS and DSS was based on the interaction of three separate layers/subsystems and that, throughout the past decade, that approach proved satisfactory. However, in the last few years it has been increasingly felt that the approach to business process management and enterprise resource planning, as well as to their integration with knowledge management and decision support, needs to be modified. The dynamic and adaptive nature of some business processes poses challenges that the classical BPM approach cannot adequately address. Adaptive case management has been developed to better cope with such challenges. It makes it, on the one hand, easier to align a business to rapidly changing requirements and conditions, and, on the other, it allows organizations to more effectively exploit the potential inherent in organizational knowledge and information resources. The paper discusses the evolution of KMS and DSS from the perspective of their application in ACM environments.

The paper sets out from a proposition that the concept of Case Based Reasoning could improve business decisions and optimize case processing in modern Adaptive Case Management (ACM) systems. While depicting the state of the art in the continued efforts to blend Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Business Process Management (BPM), Knowledge Management (KM) and Adaptive Case Management, the authors take notice of how the classical ACM platform has recently been evolving. The dynamic and adaptive nature of some business processes poses challenges that the classical BPM approach cannot adequately address. Adaptive Case Management has been developed to better cope with such challenges. ACM not only makes it easier to align a business to rapidly changing requirements and conditions, but it also enables organizations to more effectively exploit the potential inherent in the organizational knowledge and information resources. The paper discusses the evolution of ACM systems and proposes to apply Case Based Reasoning (naturally coupled with AI) in optimizing ACM outcomes.

Advances in electronic systems, wireless communication protocols, and intelligent devices allowed the development of networks of mobile devices such as cars, drones, and robots. The field of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) comprises networks where the mobility of the devices is one of the fundamental elements that characterise these networks. However, the node’s mobility leads to constant changes in the network’s topology, representing a challenge to routing protocols designed for MANETs. Although there is effort from researchers to tackle the intricacies of routing protocols in MANETs, there is still room for improvement as new applications with challenging specifications continue to arise. This research enriches the existing theoretical perspective by presenting an innovative method for optimising the routing performance of the ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) protocol. Grounded on multi-objective metaheuristics, we aim to improve AODV’s routing recovery performance concerning routing delay, energy consumption, packet loss ratio, and route load metrics. To gauge the quality of our contribution, we compare its performance to the standard AODV, a mono-objective optimised AODV, and four other well-known routing protocols with different routing approaches. The results indicate that the proposed solution was superior to the original AODV with average improvements of 56.0%, 59.3%, 48.1% and 0.7% on route load, routing delay, packet loss ratio and energy consumption, respectively. It also presented competitive results compared to other routing protocols.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the problem of describing an urban plot and to propose a definition that can be used in comparative studies of historic towns. The need for a uniform definition results from comparative research using spatial databases and historical GIS (hGIS). The article discusses the problems in vectorization of plots for the purposes of hGIS analyses, as well as the methods of presenting urban plots on historical plans that have been used so far, on the example of the Historic Towns Atlas series. We compared the results of the analysis with the plot definitions appearing in the literature on urban studies. Based on the literature review and research discussed in the article, we developed and proposed a plot definition for the ontology of historical urban spaces.

This paper aims to present and discuss the method of geocoding historical place names from historic maps that cannot be georeferenced in the GIS environment. This concerns especially maps drawn in the early modern period, i.e., before the common use of precise topographic surveys. Such maps are valuable sources of place names and geocoding them is an asset to historical and geographical analyses. Geocoding is a process of matching spatial data (such as place names) with reference datasets (databases, gazetteers) and therefore giving them geographic coordinates. Such referencing can be done using multiple tools (online, desktop), reference datasets (modern, historical) and methods (manual, semi-automatic, automatic), but no suitable approach to handling inaccurate historic maps has yet been proposed. In this paper, selected geocoding strategies were described, as well as the author’s method of matching place names from inaccurate cartographic sources. The study was based on Charles Perthées maps of Polish palatinates (1:225,000, 1783–1804)—maps that are not mathematically precise enough to be georeferenced. The proposed semi-automatic and curated approach results in 85% accuracy. It reflects the manual workflow of historical geographers who identify place names with their modern counterparts by analysing their location and proper name.

The paper discusses the problem of diachronic criteria of identity for historic localities. We argue that such criteria are needed not just for the sake of ontological clarity but also are indispensable for database management and maintenance. Our survey of the current research in database management and engineering ontology literature found no satisfactory candidates thereof. Therefore we attempt to search for such criteria in the historic-geographical scholarship by exposing the ontological assumptions the researchers made there and by stating them explicitly. This attempt consisted of us presenting a number of brief scenarios taken from the historical studies whereby localities are claimed to maintain their identity through certain types of change or to be destroyed due to other types of change. Generalising these cases we provide a tentative formulation of the criterion and discuss its limitations.

Abstract Ever since the beginnings of the modern historiography, the court books have posed a challenge for editors in Poland, both due to their number and variety. They constitute one of the richest sources enabling a variety of historical research. The publication of the sources’ content can be shared owing to new approaches stemming from constant development of IT tools and their application in the humanities. The solution proposed in our article is a digital indexing based on a relational database enabling access to the sources’ scans. The characterization of the method is preceded by a description of the theoretical foundations of the presented method. The assumed principals are implemented by the use of a dedicated to this project online INDXR application which functionalities is thoroughly described. Using the INDXR application, the data acquired from the sources are collected and stored in the database which structure is also illustrated along with its theoretical foundations. The database is established in order to better reflect the typical elements comprising the court books as well as to store the acquired information. The issues stemming from the process of indexing the court books, such as categorizing of the entries, their spatial context, and the problem of how to describe the persons appearing in the manuscript are also presented.

The article presents the methods of computing the size of urban population in the Kingdom of Poland in the second half of the 16th century. As there are no sources such as censuses the assessments of the population have had to be carried out on the basis of indirect sources, which cannot be precise. The most popular method of computing the size of urban population consists in counting the buildings situated in the town in question, which had been registered in inventory or tax sources. The authors analysing the date of the whole early modern period, especially the 18th-century Austrian registers have come to the conclusion that the value of the conversion factor should be related to the type of buildings. In the case of most Polish towns dominated by wooden buildings the conversion factor should be six people per one house. If we have the information on the number of houses, the calculations of the size of population should be carried out on the basis of the data contained in the land tax collection registers, which register the number of urban mansi and the heads of households of the population composed of craftsmen, tradesmen and landless tenants.

In early modern world, cross-cultural contacts were not a monopoly of Western European ‘trading nations’ and they were not made exclusively through trans-ocean trade. Buddhist Kalmyks arrived in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century and have remained there until today. Following the medieval tradition when Christian Europe looked for allies in Inner Asia against ‘the Muslim danger’, Moscow and Warsaw competed to win the Kalmyks over so that they would become their allies against the Crimean Tatars. In 1653, the Polish court prepared an embassy to the Kalmyks, proposing to help them conquer the Crimean Peninsula in return for a military alliance. Curiously, the letters of the Polish king and chancellor were written in Turkish and drawn in Arabic script, as in that period these were the accepted media of Eurasian communication, even though the letters’ tenor was anti-Muslim. Both letters are extant today and their content is analysed in the article.

In this article, we examine personal narratives on premarital sex by two generations of Polish men and women—one born in the 1950s and 1960s, and their parents’ generation, born in the 1920s and 1930s and coming of age during or after World War II—and place these in dialogue with discourses surrounding young sexuality in state-socialist Poland. Using sociological surveys, popular sexological literature, and Catholic marriage preparation material, we contextualize accounts of premarital heterosexual experiences, provided through oral history interviews and contest memoirs—ego documents submitted for autobiographic writing competitions in the 1960s and 1970s. We show there was no clear division between public secular and Catholic approaches to premarital (hetero)sexuality, with both opposing sexual experimentation before and beyond marriage throughout the state-socialist period (1945–1989). However, across the same period, young people’s acceptance of premarital sexual experimentation increased and the importance of a woman remaining a virgin until marriage declined. Our analysis of discourses and experiences reveals the connections and intersections of secular and Catholic realms. While secular experts did not conceptualize premarital sex as a sin, they often mirrored Catholic views by framing their discourse in terms of love, sex, responsibility, and potential risk. Young people negotiated various elements of these teachings in their premarital sexual practices, which, during the final decades of state socialism, were largely normalized, especially when couples were planning to marry.

Even though settlement network reconstruction was (and still remains) a popular topic in geographical and historical research, it seldom considers questions of reconstruction of natural landscape. Lack of such studies could have been described both by focusing on other research goals, and by the absence of appropriate tools, which are now encapsulated in the GIS (Geographic Information System). The aims of the present study are as follows: to analyse previous works concerning afforestation reconstruction in a cartographic manner for Early Modern Times; to indicate the usage capabilities of Dutch-type (Polish: olędrzy or olendrzy) privileges in this respect; and – last but not least – to provide a scientific edition of selected documents from the Poznań State Archive (Archiwum Państwowe w Poznaniu). The present state of art clearly indicates two approaches dominant in the afforestation reconstruction. The first one is based on the assumption that there used to be a sort of “pre-forest” growing almost everywhere before the Medieval colonization started. This statement can be undermined as even in prehistoric times the activity of mankind had a significant impact on natural landscape (e.g. forests grubbing). According to the second approach, some works (e.g. Historical Atlas of Poland of the 16th c.) show forest network as being based on 18th and 19th c. cartographic sources. Within this framework, the remains of the so-called pre-forest can be distinguished in scrubs and bushes. The main assumption is that a huge forest on the borders of two 16th c. districts of Poznań and Kościan had existed until the turn of 17th c., when it was cut down by Dutch-type settlers during the 18th c. The above mentioned Dutch-type privileges give some insight into the forest (including its type) which had grown on the particular area before the colonization began. Relying on the information about the amount of land given to the settlers by land owners not only can we distinguish the scale of deforestation, but also indicate the specific forest type, i.e. deciduous, coniferous or mixed. This information can be compared with maps and also verified against the contemporary state. It transpires that a reconstruction of 16th c. afforestation might be possible, but rather than being based on privileges data, it should also refer to other information like cartography, soil data, onomastics, and archaeology.