The Crimean Caraites in the Portrayal of the 19th-Century Polish Travellers

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Domain Objects and Microservices for Systems Development: a roadmap

This paper discusses a roadmap to investigate Domain Objects being an adequate formalism to capture the peculiarity of microservice architecture, and to support Software development since the early stages. It provides a survey of both Microservices and Domain Objects, and it discusses plans and reflections on how to investigate whether a modeling approach suited to adaptable service-based components can also be applied with success to the microservice scenario

Jan Grzegorzewski’s Karaite materials in the archive of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków

The article focuses on the survey of Jan Grzegorzewski’s Karaite-related materials kept in the archive of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków. The article also analyzes the biography and contribution to the field of Karaite studies of Jan Grzegorzewski (1846/9-1922), one of the earliest students of the Karaim language in Europe. Quite an eccentric person, Grzegorzewski was at the same time traveller, litterateur, Slavicist, and Orientalist. Although some academicians (e.g. T. Kowalski) have expressed their scepticism about Grzegorzewski’s scholarly activity, there is no doubt that his Karaitica articles remain highly significant contribution to the field of the history of the Karaim language and folklore. Jan Grzegorzewski’s archival collection contains varied materials such as ethnographic and linguistic data, fairy-tales, proverbs, poetry, letters, drafts of articles, statistics, and official documents. Some interesting documents from Grzegorzewski’s collection are published as appendices at the end of the article

Measurement of feeder performance during coal discharge from an underroof seam using machine vision

The technology for extracting and discharging coal from an underroof seam uses the so-called gravitational extraction method in which coal is extracted and discharged from under the roof by gravity. Here, coal can be discharged onto the main conveyor (face conveyor, located in the supported area), central conveyor (rear conveyor in Western literature), and tail conveyor (discharge conveyor, located in the unsupported area). The most common facilities used currently are longwall sets of equipment providing discharge onto tail conveyors. The purpose of this study is to measure the performance of a motorised plate feeder supplying coal from the outlet port of a roof support to a conveyor during the extraction of thick seams with discharge onto the face conveyor. To achieve the goal, it is proposed to measure the coal volume using machine vision. Methods for calculating a unit volume in a measuring section using a three-dimensional model were investigated. Laboratory studies were carried out to estimate the relative errors of the methods. The research allowed properly defining: a method for collecting data to calculate the unit volume of coal; a method for calculating the unit volume in the measuring section; a method for calculating the feeder performance using machine vision, and approaches for physically simplifying the video scene examined by machine vision. A relative error of less than 10 % with the existing measurement accuracy for constructing a coal layer surface height map indicates the sufficiency of the proposed calculation method for engineering use. The developed mathematical apparatus for calculating the unit volume of coal at the measuring section and measuring the feeder performance allows creating algorithmic software using the elementary mathematical functions of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. This aspect is important because it lower sights for the software development environment, and therefore expands the range of hardware suitable for calculating the feeder performance

The press and the ethnic identity: Turkicisation of Karaite printing in interwar Poland and Lithuania

In the late mediaeval and early modern period scattered communities of the Karaites (i.e. non-Talmudic Jews) settled in several regions of Eastern Europe such as the Crimea, Poland and Lithuania. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Karaites printed their books (mostly exegetical and theological works in Hebrew) in several Karaite and Rabbanite typographies. Nevertheless, after 1917 the centre of Karaite printing shifted from the Russian Empire to interwar Poland and Lithuania. Surprisingly, a tiny Karaite community of interwar Poland and Lithuania (ca. 800 individuals) had been publishing as many as five periodicals in three languages! Furthermore, the Karaites also printed quite a number of separate brochures and leaflets, and published articles in non-Karaite periodicals. From the 1930s the Karaite community started losing its Judeo-Karaite identity and accepted a new Turkic ethnic self-identification which was based mostly on the use of the Turkic Karaim language and a few pseudo-scholarly theories testifying to the non-Semitic origins of the Karaites. The renaissance of Karaite printing was stopped in 1939, with the Soviet intervention in Poland and the beginning of the Second World War. The paper analyses the main tendencies in the development of the Karaite printing in Poland and Lithuania in the interwar period. A special emphasis is placed upon the role of printing in the unusual transformation of the East European Karaites’ ethnic identity — from pious non-Talmudic Jewish believers to an isolated ethnic enclave with a bogus Khazaro-Turkic identity