Safety of Poznań residents after 1989 (selected aspects)

Safety is one of the fundamental human needs which greatly affects the quality of people’s lives. It is also a collective need the satisfaction of which is a task of public authority. That is why this authority takes many measures intended to protect society and individuals as well as their property against threats posed by violent acts of people and violent natural forces. According to the Polish legal regulations, ensuring safety and public order is a task of a commune, also an urban one. To this end towns set up such services as the police, the fire brigade, emergency medical teams, city guards, etc., intended to serve their inhabitants. Their feeling of safety and a low crime rate are indicative of a town’s high level of civilisational and cultural development, but also make the town attractive as a place of residence for both, current and future inhabitants as well as to potential investors. The aim of this paper is to examine selected aspects of the safety of Poznań residents and changes that have taken place in this respect since 1989, the year when the systemic transformation started in Poland. A detailed analysis will be made of interventions by the Poznań police, fire service and ambulance service as factors that contribute the most to the safety of the city residents and their property

Analysis of translated tropes: metaphors, similes & analogies in a case study of the English & Dutch translations of the Russian poet Alexander Galich

Since Even-Zohar and Toury introduced a target-culture approach in translation studies, research focus turned to the effect of the target text on the reader. Consequently, it is, among other things, important to study the translation of typical elements of literary texts and their potential effect. This paper concentrates on the translation of a certain types of tropes dealing with comparison: metaphors, similes & analogies. Three categories of these tropes were selected for this paper: (i) lexicalized, (ii) conventional and (iii) private, because each of them requires a different strategy from linguistic and literary points of view in translation. This paper contains an analysis of the metaphors, similes and analogies used by a Russian poet Alexander Galich, which were translated from Russian into English and Dutch. The aim of the paper is twofold: (i) on the one hand, to look how the above-mentioned tropes were rendered in existing translations and (ii) on the other hand, to explore how they could have been rendered in a potential translation and to compare both versions. Besides, since tropes can be creative and decorative, the analyzed tropes are examined in order to establish which of them are truly relevant for translation and which are not in order to avoid possible overtranslating. Finally, conditions that favour or hamper trope translation are discussed

A note on fibrations of Campana general type on surfaces

We construct examples of simply connected surfaces with genus 2 fibrations over the projective line which are of "general type" according to the definition of Campana. These fibrations have special fibres such that the minimum of the multiplicities of the components is greater or equal to 2 while the g.c.d is 1. We can extend the construction to any even genus g.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, minor change

X-ray diagnostics of massive star winds

Nearly all types of massive stars with radiatively driven stellar winds are X-ray sources that can be observed by the presently operating powerful X-ray telescopes. In this review I briefly address recent advances in our understanding of stellar winds obtained from X-ray observations. The winds of OB dwarfs with subtypes later than O9V may be predominantly in a hot phase, and X-ray observations offer the best window for their studies. The X-ray properties of OB supergiants are largely determined by the effects of radiative transfer in their clumped stellar winds. The recently suggested method to directly measure mass-loss rates of O stars by fitting the shapes of X-ray emission lines is considered but its validity cannot be confirmed. To obtain robust quantitative information on stellar wind parameters from X-ray spectroscopy, a multiwavelength analysis by means of stellar atmosphere models is required. Independent groups are now performing such analyses with encouraging results. Joint analyses of optical, UV, and X-ray spectra of OB supergiants yield consistent mass-loss rates. Depending on the adopted clumping parameters, the empirically derived mass-loss rates are comparable (within a factor of a few) to those predicted by standard recipes (Vink et al. 2001). All sufficiently studied O stars display variable X-ray emission that might be related to corotating interaction regions in their winds. In the latest stages of stellar evolution, single red supergiants and luminous blue variable stars do not emit observable amounts of X-rays. On the other hand, nearly all types of Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars are X-ray sources. X-ray spectroscopy allows a sensitive probe of WR wind abundances and opacities.Comment: review, to appear in the special issue of Advances in Space Research "X-ray emission from hot stars

γ\gamma-ray flux from Dark Matter Annihilation in Galactic Caustics

In the frame of indirect dark matter searches we investigate the flux of high-energy $\gamma$-ray photons produced by annihilation of dark matter in caustics within our Galaxy under the hypothesis that the bulk of dark matter is composed of the lightest supersymmetric particles. Unfortunately, the detection of the caustics annihilation signal with currently available instruments is rather challenging. Indeed, with realistic assumptions concerning particle physics and cosmology, the $\gamma$-ray signal from caustics is below the detection threshold of both $\check {\rm C}$erenkov telescopes and satellite-borne experiments. Nevertheless, we find that this signal is more prominent than that expected if annihilation only occurs in the smoothed Galactic halo, with the possible exception of a $\sim 15^{\circ}$ circle around the Galactic center if the mass density profile of our Galaxy exhibits a sharp cusp there. We show that the angular distribution of this $\gamma$-ray flux changes significantly if DM annihilation preferentially occurs within virialized sub-halos populating our Galaxy rather than in caustics.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures. Accepted for publication in JCA

Pad\'{e}-type approximations to the resolvent of fractional powers of operators

We study a reliable pole selection for the rational approximation of the resolvent of fractional powers of operators in both the finite and infinite dimensional setting. The analysis exploits the representation in terms of hypergeometric functions of the error of the Pad\'{e} approximation of the fractional power. We provide quantitatively accurate error estimates that can be used fruitfully for practical computations. We present some numerical examples to corroborate the theoretical results. The behavior of the rational Krylov methods based on this theory is also presented

On the detectability of gamma-rays from Dark Matter annihilation in the Local Group with ground-based experiments

Recent studies have suggested the possibility that the lightest supersymmetric particle is a suitable dark matter candidate. In this theoretical framework, annihilations in high density environments like the center of dark matter haloes may produce an intense flux of gamma-rays. In this paper we discuss the possibility of detecting the signatures of neutralino annihilation in nearby galaxies with next generation ground-based detectors.Comment: to appear in Proceedings of ICRC 200