Rola postaw altruistycznych w cause-related marketing

This study identified factors affecting the effects of cause-related marketing (CrM). An empirical verifiation of the hypotheses confimed that an altruistic attitude, evaluated through the willingness to help others, is a differentiating factor in purchase intentions of product supporting a social cause. It was assumed that a positive correlation between variables would not be amplifid by either the type of the product or the product-cause fi. The research also shows that the more altruistic attitudes, the more favourable attitude towards the CrM campaign and that marketing initiatives based on donation are more effective in stimulating a purchase than initiatives based on fiancial compensation (price discount, cash-back) when consumers are more, rather than less willing to help a social cause.Głównym celem eksperymentu była identyfikacja czynników wpływających na skuteczność marketingu ważnej sprawy (CrM: cause-related marketing). Empiryczna weryfikacja hipotez potwierdza, że altruistyczna postawa oceniana przez pryzmat skłonności do pomagania innym, różnicuje intencję zakupu produktu wspierającego sprawę społeczną. Zgodnie z założeniem, pozytywny związek między zmiennymi nie będzie wzmacniany ani typem produktu ani stopniem dostosowania sprawy do produktu. Z badań wynika również, że im w większym stopniu przyjmujemy altruistyczne wartości tym przychylnej będziemy nastawieni do kampanii CrM, a w stymulowaniu zakupów bardziej skuteczne będą inicjatywy marketingowe oparte na darowiźnie niż na rekompensacie finansowej (rabat cenowy, zwrot w gotówce), kiedy konsumenci będą raczej bardziej niż mniej chętni pomagać sprawie społecznej.

New Road Pavement Technologies – Examples of Applications in Poland

The paper presents the applications of new road pavement technologies in Poland.The dynamic growth of car traffic in Poland has been observed. The average daily traffic on international roads has doubled over the last decade. It is estimated that it went from 6 to 12 thousand of vehicles per day. There are also road sections where the traffic flow significantly exceeds the level of 20 thousand vehicles daily. General traffic measurements which are systematically carried out by the road administration confirm this phenomenon. With this increase in traffic, the roads in Poland have been devastated. A fairly common phenomenon is rutting which is the result of driving overloaded trucks, especially in summer. The choice of the type of road pavement poses the problem for both investors and administrators. Without a doubt, factors to be taken into consideration include:1. Technical conditions2. Economic aspects3. Availability of technologies and materialsRegardless of technical and economic conditions, one cannot eliminate any road paving technology, but seriously consider the alternatives: bitumen (asphalt) or concrete pavement

A multidisciplinary study of anti-vampire burials from early medieval Culmen, Poland: were the diseased and disabled regarded as vampires?

The definitions and interpretations of anti-vampire burials have provoked impassioned discussion in archaeology over the last century. That the diseased and disabled were sometimes perceived as vampires is very intriguing and worth investigating because historical and ethnographic materials and archaeological studies indicate a connection between disease (e.g. tuberculosis and anaemia) and vampirism. Until the development of germ theory in the 19th century, some people explained the phenomenon of disease and death as its consequence by connecting it with beliefs in vampires. We investigate if the diseased and disabled were buried in anti-vampire graves based on materials from early medieval Culmen in Poland. We selected 574 skeletons from 566 graves for our analysis. The research allowed the identification of 13 antivampire graves, which include 14 skeletons. Of 574 skeletons, 299 indicate pathological lesions associated with diseases and 8 skeletons indicate lesions associated with disabilities. Among the individuals buried in anti-vampire graves (N=14), 11 had pathological lesions associated with diseases and one – lesions associated with disability. We analyse each disease and condition separately to see if it was a reason for burying individuals in anti-vampire graves. Our analyses have shown that the diseases and conditions that were identified on skeletons in anti-vampire graves were common in the past populations, including Culmen, and apparently not connected with the appearance of a vampire. Therefore, we conclude that diseases and disabilities were not the reason for perceiving someone as a vampire in Culmen

Self-supervised adversarial masking for 3D point cloud representation learning

Self-supervised methods have been proven effective for learning deep representations of 3D point cloud data. Although recent methods in this domain often rely on random masking of inputs, the results of this approach can be improved. We introduce PointCAM, a novel adversarial method for learning a masking function for point clouds. Our model utilizes a self-distillation framework with an online tokenizer for 3D point clouds. Compared to previous techniques that optimize patch-level and object-level objectives, we postulate applying an auxiliary network that learns how to select masks instead of choosing them randomly. Our results show that the learned masking function achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on various downstream tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/szacho/pointcam

Echocardiographic morphometry of the right chambers of the heart in permanent cardiac pacing

Permanent cardiac pacing is a method of choice in the treatment of specific arrhythmias and conduction disturbances. Clinical studies show that cardiac performance diminished at the site of impulse spreading. It determines local hypotrophy below the position of the pacing lead (early electric activation) with hypertrophic changes in the opposite lying myocardium (late electric activation). It seems that morphological changes, especially research by intravital methods, so relevant in permanent pacing to today™s invasive cardiologist, are not understood in full. In connection with this we decided, on the basis on the echocardiographic examination, to evaluate in detail the morphology of the right ventricle and atrium in patients with permanent pacing. Research was carried out on a group of 124 patients (68 males, 56 females) from 40±93 years of age (avg. 68 ± 14 yrs): 86 patients had implanted pacemakers or AICD (group I), the control group consisted of 38 patients with other cardiac diseases without any pacemaker devices (group II). We measured echocardiographically the following diameters: end-diastolic and systolic diameters of the right ventricle/atrium in short and long axis, diameter of the tricuspid orifice valve and calculated area of the tricuspid orifice based on a special formula. Regarding the morphometric parameters of the right ventricle and right atrium, we confirmed that all diameters of group I were overshooting in correlation to group II. Those differences, such as RVd-short and -long, RVs-long, RVinflow, RA-long and -short, TRId, were statistically significant. Regarding the area of the tricuspid orifice (TRIa), we did not observe any changes in the two examined groups. We concluded that patients with implanted devices have changes in the morphometric parameters of the right ventricle, atrium and orifice, but they do not depend on the duration of pacemaker implantation

Smart city : definitions, dimensions, and initiatives

PURPOSE: The smart city is an increasingly popular topic in the sustainable development of the city. However, there is still misunderstanding about what smart cities are. This study examined how different definition and dimensions included in the smart city concept can be categorized and how does a smart initiative make European cities smarter.DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: The paper attempts to answer the above questions through literature review and case study methods. The case study was used to present the actions of municipal authorities aimed at making cities smarter.FINDINGS: Smart city is difficult to define unequivocally due to its multidimensional character. When defining a smart city, most authors emphasize the role of information and communication technologies in city development. Urban centers are also defined in terms of human and social capital and institutions. In contrast, nowadays, there is a wide consensus at on accepting six dimension of smart city concept. According to this the development of the city is expected to make investments in economy, environment, governance, living, mobility, and people. Smart initiatives depend to a large extent on local factors. Therefore, the challenge for city authorities is to choose the most optimal city development strategy in the given economic, technological, and social conditions. In Europe, smart initiatives concern the greening of cities and the activation of elderly and disabled people.PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: The article offers useful insights for both practitioners and scientist interested in smart city initiatives. Smart city is characterized by democratism, because community, research, and development centers as well as institutional and economic entities are interested in it. The implementation of the smart concept means innovative and sustainable urban development in harmony with the natural environment, without violating social cohesion, while respecting limited resources to meet stakeholder expectations.ORIGINALITY/VALUE: The results of the study contribute in the cognitive sense to the smart city concept. Comprehensive definition of smart city is proposed. Smart city is a city that combines information and communication technologies, social infrastructure (human and social capital) and public institutions to dynamize its economic, social, environmental, and cultural development.peer-reviewe