Social activation of local communities in Poland from the perspective of 25 years of self-government

Odrodzenie samorządu terytorialnego w 1990 r. stanowiło zasadniczą zmianę ustrojową. Niedawno minęło 25 lat od tego wydarzenia, ale obraz rozwoju samorządności w Polsce trudno jednoznacznie ocenić. Celem niniejszego artykułu jest zarysowanie odpowiedzi na pytanie, w jakim stopniu oczekiwania związane z rewitalizacją społeczności lokalnych poprzez odrodzenie samorządu terytorialnego zostały spełnione, a więc w jakim stopniu realizację znalazła idea pomocniczości. Kwestia ta jest analizowana na przykładzie kilku obszarów życia społecznego: a) aktywności tzw. trzeciego sektora i współpracy organizacji pozarządowych z jednostkami samorządu terytorialnego (pomocniczość pozioma); b) stosowania procedur i technik partycypacji (włączania obywateli do procesu podejmowaniu decyzji publicznych); c) działania jednostek pomocniczych (rad osiedli i sołectw ‒ pomocniczość pionowa); d) aktywności obywatelskiej w postaci ruchów i inicjatyw społecznych (zwłaszcza tzw. ruchów miejskich); e) regionalizmu.Jeśli uznać, że celem reformy samorządowej było praktyczne zrealizowanie idei pomocniczości, to cel ten został osiągnięty. Jednak niewątpliwy sukces polskiej samorządności, który zmienił Polskę na lepsze, nie przełożył się na sukces polskiej samorządności rozumianej jako sfera harmonijnej współpracy wybieralnych władz lokalnych odpowiedzialnych wobec aktywnych społeczności. Struktury samorządu zdominowały życie lokalne, w wielu przypadkach urzędy stanowią największego pracodawcę, co ma negatywne oddziaływanie zarówno w sferze ekonomicznej, jak i społecznej. W tym sensie więc można mówić o częściowej porażce samorządności, która jest dzieckiem sukcesu reformy samorządowej.The revival of local government in 1990 constituted a fundamental change in the Polish political regime. However, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of this event the picture of local government in Poland is still unclear. The article offers answers to questions about how the expectations related to the revitalisation of local communities through the revival of local government have been met and about the scope of the idea of subsidiarity implementation. The following areas of social life are analysed: (i) the activity of what are known as third sector organisations and their cooperation with local government (horizontal subsidiarity); (ii) the use of procedures and techniques of participation by local government; (iii) the functioning of local government auxiliary units (district councils and village councils – vertical subsidiarity); (iv) activities of urban social movementsand initiatives; (v) regionalism. Considering the practical implementation of the idea of subsidiarity as the main purpose of the local government reform, the objective has been achieved. However, the unquestionable success of the Polish self-government which have changed Poland for the better does not entail the revival of Polish local communities. The harmonious  cooperation of elected local authorities accountable to an active community is still missing. Local government structures have dominated local life, being in many places the largest employer, with all negative consequences of this in terms of both economic and social life. In this sense, it can be argued that a partial failure of self-government is a side effect of the success of the self-government reform

TAPAS: Weakly Supervised Table Parsing via Pre-training

Answering natural language questions over tables is usually seen as a semantic parsing task. To alleviate the collection cost of full logical forms, one popular approach focuses on weak supervision consisting of denotations instead of logical forms. However, training semantic parsers from weak supervision poses difficulties, and in addition, the generated logical forms are only used as an intermediate step prior to retrieving the denotation. In this paper, we present TAPAS, an approach to question answering over tables without generating logical forms. TAPAS trains from weak supervision, and predicts the denotation by selecting table cells and optionally applying a corresponding aggregation operator to such selection. TAPAS extends BERT's architecture to encode tables as input, initializes from an effective joint pre-training of text segments and tables crawled from Wikipedia, and is trained end-to-end. We experiment with three different semantic parsing datasets, and find that TAPAS outperforms or rivals semantic parsing models by improving state-of-the-art accuracy on SQA from 55.1 to 67.2 and performing on par with the state-of-the-art on WIKISQL and WIKITQ, but with a simpler model architecture. We additionally find that transfer learning, which is trivial in our setting, from WIKISQL to WIKITQ, yields 48.7 accuracy, 4.2 points above the state-of-the-art.Comment: Accepted to ACL 202

SIBUTRAMINE-ASSOCIATED PSYCHOTIC SYMPTOMS AND ZOLPIDEM-INDUCED COMPLEX BEHAVIOURS: IMPLICATIONS FOR PATIENT SAFETY

Background: Sibutramine is a weight loss agent recently withdrawn from the European market due to cardiovascular risk concerns. It was used for long–term obesity treatment. Zolpidem is a short acting hypnotic agent commonly used in the treatment of insomnia. A number of case reports describing psychotic reaction to sibutramine were reported in the literature. Case report: We present a case of a 61–year–old Caucasian woman who developed two psychotic episodes related to sibutramine treatment. The second psychotic episode was complicated with complex behaviours after zolpidem use due to insomnia. Sibutramine and zolpidem discontinuation resulted in rapid resolution of psychotic symptoms. Conclusions: This case suggests a possibility of incidence of psychotic symptoms and complex behaviour disturbances in patients prescribed sibutramine or other monoaminergic reuptake inhibitors

Improving Compositional Generalization with Latent Structure and Data Augmentation

Generic unstructured neural networks have been shown to struggle on out-of-distribution compositional generalization. Compositional data augmentation via example recombination has transferred some prior knowledge about compositionality to such black-box neural models for several semantic parsing tasks, but this often required task-specific engineering or provided limited gains. We present a more powerful data recombination method using a model called Compositional Structure Learner (CSL). CSL is a generative model with a quasi-synchronous context-free grammar backbone, which we induce from the training data. We sample recombined examples from CSL and add them to the fine-tuning data of a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model (T5). This procedure effectively transfers most of CSL's compositional bias to T5 for diagnostic tasks, and results in a model even stronger than a T5-CSL ensemble on two real world compositional generalization tasks. This results in new state-of-the-art performance for these challenging semantic parsing tasks requiring generalization to both natural language variation and novel compositions of elements.Comment: NAACL 202

SIBUTRAMINE-ASSOCIATED PSYCHOTIC SYMPTOMS AND ZOLPIDEM-INDUCED COMPLEX BEHAVIOURS: IMPLICATIONS FOR PATIENT SAFETY

Background: Sibutramine is a weight loss agent recently withdrawn from the European market due to cardiovascular risk concerns. It was used for long–term obesity treatment. Zolpidem is a short acting hypnotic agent commonly used in the treatment of insomnia. A number of case reports describing psychotic reaction to sibutramine were reported in the literature. Case report: We present a case of a 61–year–old Caucasian woman who developed two psychotic episodes related to sibutramine treatment. The second psychotic episode was complicated with complex behaviours after zolpidem use due to insomnia. Sibutramine and zolpidem discontinuation resulted in rapid resolution of psychotic symptoms. Conclusions: This case suggests a possibility of incidence of psychotic symptoms and complex behaviour disturbances in patients prescribed sibutramine or other monoaminergic reuptake inhibitors

The impact of major warming at 14.7 ka on environmental changes and activity of Final Palaeolithic hunters at a local scale (Orawa-Nowy Targ Basin, Western Carpathians, Poland

There is a widespread belief that the abrupt warming at 14.7 ka had a profound impact on the environment. However, the direct correlation between the global climatic event and changes in local environments is not obvious.We examined faunal succession in an intra-mountain basin of theWestern Carpathians to assess the potential influence of the climatic change between Greenland Stadial-2a and Greenland Interstadial-1e on the local environment.We investigated three vertebrate assemblages (total number of identified specimens = 18,745; minimumnumber of individuals = 7515; 138 taxa) from Obłazowa Cave (western entrance) and a Rock overhang in Cisowa Rock, radiocarbon dated to the period before and after the global warming, between ca. 17.0 and 14.0 ka. Our data revealed that the major abrupt warming that occurred 14.7 ka had little impact on the local environment, which could suggest that ecosystems in Central Europe were resilient to the abrupt global climate changes. The increase in fauna population sizes and species diversities in local biotopes was gradual and began long before the temperature increase. This was supported by the analysis of ancient DNA of Microtus arvalis, which showed a gradual increase in effective population size after 19.0 ka. The results of palaeoclimatic reconstruction pointed out that the compared sites were characterized by similar climatic conditions. According to our calculations, the differences in the annual mean temperatures did not exceed 0.5 °C and mean annual thermal amplitude changed from 22.9 to 22.4 °C. The environmental changes before 14.7 ka had no impact on the activity of Final Palaeolithic hunters in the studied area