Potential of city networks in shaping the world’s ecumene

The contemporary global space is characterised by huge disproportions of social inequalities, drastic division between a core and peripheries, unequal access to education and general mobility, and many more. These phenomena lead to a feeling of dependence and marginalisation of specific social classes as well as ethnic, national and religious minorities. In the extreme situations that might evoke a feeling of humiliation. The scale of tensions results in unpredictable acts of aggression. The need for taking actions in order to reduce these disproportions has emerged. It is necessary to aim at achieving the balance on a world scale. This means creating the world ecumene defined by Ulf Hannerz as a ‘region of persistent culture interaction and exchange.’ To a certain extent, the state of balance is an ideal state. Reaching it fully is very challenging, or perhaps even impossible. Nevertheless, we should aim at achieving the balanced state by implementing the further steps of its pursuit. Activities related to a city network might become the mechanism which enables to create the ecumene. The efficiency of public engagement is based on: (1) an anti-ideology syndrome – focusing on basic problems of living, which are universal to all of us; (2) an overlap of two basic self-organisational activities: protest politics and social participation (based on deliberative democracy); (3) performance phenomenon – depends on generating the audience for the protest politics; (4) consistency and firmness of protests practices, which results in high efficiency. In terms of architecture, aiming at the ecumene means shaping public spaces which are crucial to multiculturalism. The theory of thirdspace of Edward W. Soja (which is contradictory to the concept of Homi K. Bhabha) might be an inspiration for creating of the ecumene. The theory holds that public spaces are superpositions for two ‘worlds’ – real and symbolic. Spaces which are formed in this way enable to reveal in a performative way the potential of unexpected meetings of remote cultures

Bezławki - ocalić od zniszczenia. Wyniki prac interdyscyplinarnych prowadzonych w latach 2008‒2011, red. Arkadiusz Koperkiewicz (Gdańskie Studia Archeologiczne. Seria Monografie, Nr 3), Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, Gdańsk 2013, 323 pp. + CD-ROM

Bezławki - ocalić od zniszczenia. Wyniki prac interdyscyplinarnych prowadzonych w latach 2008‒2011 , red. Arkadiusz Koperkiewicz (Gdańskie Studia Archeologiczne. Seria Monografie, Nr 3), Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, Gdańsk 2013, 323 pp. + CD-ROM, ISBN: 978-83-7865-176-5

Tomasz Larczyński. Ziemia gdańska w okresie panowania zakonu krzyżackiego: Struktura własności i organizacja osadnictwa wiejskiego [The Danziger Land in the Era of the Teutonic Order’s Reign: Ownership Structures and Organization of Rural Settlements]

Tomasz Larczyński. Ziemia gdańska w okresie panowania zakonu krzyżackiego: Struktura własności i organizacja osadnictwa wiejskiego [The Danziger Land in the Era of the Teutonic Order’s Reign: Ownership Structures and Organization of Rural Settlements]. Oświęcim: Napoleon V, 2017. 385 pp., 14 Maps, 18 Tab. ISBN: 978–83–7889–491–9.Tomasz Larczyński. Ziemia gdańska w okresie panowania zakonu krzyżackiego: Struktura własności i organizacja osadnictwa wiejskiego [The Danziger Land in the Era of the Teutonic Order’s Reign: Ownership Structures and Organization of Rural Settlements]. Oświęcim: Napoleon V, 2017. 385 pp., 14 Maps, 18 Tab. ISBN: 978–83–7889–491–9

Generalprobe Burzenland. Neue Forschungen zur Geschichte des Deutschen Ordens in Siebenbürgen und im Banat, hg. v. Konrad Gündisch (Siebenbürgisches Archiv. Archiv des Vereins für siebenbürgische Landeskunde, D.F., Bd. 42), Böhlau Verlag, Köln‒Weimar‒Wien

Generalprobe Burzenland. Neue Forschungen zur Geschichte des Deutschen Ordens in Siebenbürgen und im Banat , hrsg. v. Konrad Gündisch (Siebenbürgisches Archiv. Archiv des Vereins für siebenbürgische Landeskunde, D.F., Bd. 42), Böhlau Verlag, Köln‒Weimar‒Wien 2013, 278 S., ISBN: 978-3-412-21094-6

Ritter, Verwalter und Repräsentanten – Priester und Seelsorger: Burgen, Residenzen und Kirchen des Deutschen Ordens [Knights, Administrators, and Representatives – Priests and Pastors: Castles, Residences, and Churches of the Teutonic Order]

Ritter, Verwalter und Repräsentanten – Priester und Seelsorger: Burgen, Residenzen und Kirchen des Deutschen Ordens [Knights, Administrators, and Representatives – Priests and Pastors: Castles, Residences, and Churches of the Teutonic Order]. Herausgegeben von Helmut Flachenecker. Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte des Deutschen Ordens 79 = Veröffentlichungen der Forschungsstelle Deutscher Orden an der Universität Würzburg 1. Weimar: vdg, 2016. 192 + 8 pp., 76 maps and illustrations. ISBN: 978-3-89739-875-7

Learning Abstract Visual Reasoning via Task Decomposition: A Case Study in Raven Progressive Matrices

One of the challenges in learning to perform abstract reasoning is that problems are often posed as monolithic tasks, with no intermediate subgoals. In Raven Progressive Matrices (RPM), the task is to choose one of the available answers given a context, where both contexts and answers are composite images featuring multiple objects in various spatial arrangements. As this high-level goal is the only guidance available, learning is challenging and most contemporary solvers tend to be opaque. In this study, we propose a deep learning architecture based on the transformer blueprint which, rather than directly making the above choice, predicts the visual properties of individual objects and their arrangements. The multidimensional predictions obtained in this way are then directly juxtaposed to choose the answer. We consider a few ways in which the model parses the visual input into tokens and several regimes of masking parts of the input in self-supervised training. In experimental assessment, the models not only outperform state-of-the-art methods but also provide interesting insights and partial explanations about the inference. The design of the method also makes it immune to biases that are known to exist in some RPM benchmarks.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure