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    Are we creating the future seen by Stanisław Lem? Polish scientists join forces with online creators on Facebook and Instagram

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    Are we creating the future seen by Stanisław Lem? Polish scientists join forces with online creators on Facebook and Instagram
    Facebook Press Office

    Facebook celebrates the 100th anniversary of Stanisław Lem’s birth and encourages us to peek into the future of science and technology in reference to the works of the Polish master of science fiction. In a campaign launched by the company, popular creators give the floor to scientists who take over their social media feeds and compare the future that Lem saw with their research and reflections. The vision of the future created by Polish researchers can be found on the channels of Make Life Harder, Kasia Gandor, Michał Korkosz “Rozkoszny”, Remigiusz Maciaszek “Rock” and Patryk Mikiciuk, among others.

    One hundred years ago, Stanisław Lem – the leading Polish futurist and science fiction author – was born. In his work, he asked questions that have grown in importance over time: about the direction of the development of society, the boundaries between man and machine, or our place in the universe. Many of his bold visions have become reality before our eyes: the so-called “optons” described in “Return from the Stars” are today’s ebooks. In “Dialogues” Lem described the possibility of a computer network, which today we would call the Internet.  Virtual reality, or Lem’s “fantomatics”, is, in turn, the subject of one of the essays contained in “The Megabyte Bomb”. 

     

    There are many more such examples – Stanisław Lem’s imagination and the accuracy of his projections amaze us so far. And which of Lem’s visions are still waiting to be fulfilled? This question will be answered by Polish scientists and inventors working on solutions in the field of artificial intelligence, robotics, biology, and virtual reality. As part of the action initiated by Facebook on the occasion of Stanisław Lem’s Year, they host popular Polish artists on Instagram and Facebook.

     

    Among them are Petros Psyllos, electronics engineer and inventor recognized by the American edition of Forbes magazine as one of the 30 best young European innovators. Petros studies artificial intelligence, social robots, virtual assistants, and human-machine interactions. As part of a Facebook initiative via the satirical channel Make Life Harder, he talked about whether machines can write poetry and how technology can help us overcome the limitations of the human body.

     

    Will encounters on the moon, at the bottom of the ocean, or in the middle of the Amazon Forest soon be our everyday reality? Is it possible to create the perfect illusion? Jowita Guja, a philosopher and culture expert, who heads the EduVRLab Virtual Reality Research Laboratory at the AGH University of Science and Technology in Cracow, will talk about virtual reality, the possibilities it offers, and the new questions it raises. And it will be hosted by a veteran of the Polish gaming scene, Remigiusz Maciaszek “Rock”.

     

    We will be brought down to earth by Marcin Popkiewicz, climatologist and megatrend analyst, who knows the answer to the most burning questions concerning the links between the economy, energy, natural resources, and the environment. Through the channels of science popularizer Kasia Gandor, Marcin will talk about the latest findings of climate researchers and where we are in the fight against global warming, as well as what we can do to win this battle.

     

    Aleksandra Przegalińska is a philosopher, artificial intelligence researcher, and futurologist whose scientific work is concerned with the development of new technologies, especially those that have a positive impact on the environment. As part of Facebook’s series, she will touch on the transportation of the future – talking about how artificial intelligence can improve city life and why streets full of autonomous vehicles are still sci-fi. She will talk about Stanislaw Lem and his visions of the future with automotive journalist Patryk Mikiciuk. 

     

    According to Aleksandra Przegalińska, Lem’s works have been important to her since her early youth: 

     

    “I read Stanislaw Lem when I was still in high school and I think he really inspired me to do what I do today. We have all heard of Lem, but especially today we should listen to him more.  He had an extremely serious approach to technology – he wondered what it could give us, how it could enrich our lives, but he also paid attention to the risks it could bring. His work is truly the world’s diamond of science fiction.

     

    Finally, Stanisław Łoboziak, a molecular biologist and head of the biological laboratory at the Copernicus Science Centre, where he also grows insectivorous plants and explores the secrets of cultivating luminous marine algae, bacteria, and fungi, will talk about the food of the future and how to grow meat in spinach leaves using muscle cells. You can listen to the story of the future that awaits our plates on Facebook and Instagram of food blogger Michał Korkosz “Rozkoszny”.

     

    “Science permeates Lem’s work throughout: from the description of the laborious but fascinating research project in “His Master’s Voice” or the completely new branch of science in “Solaris” to the characters of Trurl and Klapauciusz – the great Constructors, protagonists of the brilliant and humorous “The Cyberiad”. His work fascinates and attracts successive generations to science, and we hope to achieve the same through this campaign,” explains Robert Bednarski, General Manager of Facebook in Central and Eastern Europe.

     

    You can follow the action on the creators’ channels and the Polish Facebook App page. The whole series will be preceded by a live broadcast from the Megabit Bomb festival, devoted to the works of Stanisław Lem. On Facebook App, you can watch recorded discussions with the participation of experts such as Natalia Hatalska, Prof. Jerzy Bralczyk, and Karol Bielecki, who talked about the future from the point of view of, among others, ethics, language, and sport.

     

    Provoking futuristic discussions is a recurring theme in Facebook’s efforts – they are also the subject of the second season of the Facebook Conversations podcast available on all major streaming platforms. 

     

    You can find photos of the participants here, and more information about the researchers involved in the initiative is attached.

    International Day of Democracy

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    International Day of Democracy
    Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

    Democracy is a universal value based on the freedom to decide on the shape of political, economic, and social systems – this is the message of the holiday proclaimed by the United Nations.

    International Day of Democracy is an opportunity to draw the world’s attention to the work being done by the United Nations to support countries’ efforts to promote and develop democracy. These actions are carried out under the UN Charter and only at the request of the State concerned.

     

    International Day of Democracy was established by a resolution of the United Nations Secretary-General in 2007. The document called on governments around the world to strengthen national programs for the promotion and consolidation of democracy.

     

    More information about the International Day of Democracy on the UN website.

    The most famous snack from the Lublin region

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    The most famous snack from the Lublin region
    lubelski.pl

    Lublin’s most famous bakery product – round-shaped wheat flatbread, crunchy and topped with onions and poppy seeds called cebularz.

    Jewish bakers in Lublin’s Old Town were the first to bake cebularze, offering them to residents hurrying to work each morning. After the war, Lublin’s Jewish community disappeared, but local bakers returned to baking it and quickly popularized it in the region. 

     

    What is more, this golden, crunchy round-shaped wheat flatbread has its own Regional Museum in Lublin, presenting the history of the product – both the legendary and the real one.

     

    In the European Commission’s Regulation cebularz is described as a round-shaped wheat flatbread made from wheat pastry. On the surface, there is a layer of stuffing consisting of diced onions mixed with poppy seeds, salt, and vegetable oil. 

     

    The stuffing has a golden color and a taste and smell characteristic of roasted onions. Its aroma is that of freshly baked onions, thanks to the layer of stuffing on its surface. 

     

    Stay tuned! We are preparing recipe for cebularz ?

    One of the toughest matches is behind us. Poles win against Russia

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    One of the toughest matches is behind us. Poles win against Russia
    sport.tvp.pl/ screenshot

    Today’s match between the Poles and the Russians will surely pass into history. The win guaranteed Poland’s promotion to the semifinals of the European Volleyball Championship.  After a fierce battle, the Poles won 3:0 against the Russians.

    We sincerely congratulate the Poles, because their next semifinal match will be played in Katowice Spodek on Saturday.
     
    Poles played very confidently and evenly. From the very beginning, Poles were not letting go. The first set was won by the Poles by 25:14. The second set was a bit worse because the Polish team had to fight for two points advantage over their rival, which they did. 

    In the last set, both teams fought hard and the result could not be determined. With the 19th point, the Polish team began to gain an advantage and it was a missed play by the Russians that left the Poles unbeaten.
     
    We keep our fingers crossed for our national team and keep cheering.

    Millions of viewers watched the beatification Holy Mass of Primate Wyszyński and Mother Czacka

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    Millions of viewers watched the beatification Holy Mass of Primate Wyszyński and Mother Czacka
    beatyfikacja.info

    Over 2 million viewers followed the beatification Holy Mass on September 12 of Primate Stefan Wyszyński and mother Elżbieta Czacka broadcast live on the most important television stations, informed the press office of the Archdiocese of Warsaw.

    The announcement released on Monday indicated that “Sunday beatification ceremonies in Warsaw were broadcast by: Telewizja Polska, TVN24, Polsat News, Telewizja Trwam and Telewizja Republika as well as the international EWTN Global Catholic Network and radio stations, including Polskie Radio, Radio dla Ciebie, Radio Plus, Radio Fara, Radio Maryja, Katolicka Rozgłośnia Radiowa Fiat, Radio Jasna Góra, Radio Wnet, Radio Kraków; the report was also prepared by the Reuters Agency”.

    The office of the “Niepodległa” Program provided large screens, thanks to which the faithful in 16 locations all over Poland could watch the broadcast of the ceremony together, thus connecting with those gathered in the Temple of Divine Providence. The parishes also organized watching TV or Internet broadcasts in churches for the faithful.

    “The social media of the Archdiocese of Warsaw alone recorded: over 62 thousand plays of the beatification mass broadcast on YouTube and over 16 thousand views on Facebook. Both of these figures continue to rise,” we can read in the release.

    Celebrating the Year of Jan Kowalewski as the Historical Event 2020

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    Celebrating the Year of Jan Kowalewski as the Historical Event 2020
    youtube.com // Muzeum Historii Polski // screenshot

    The celebration of the Year of Jan Kowalewski, the exhibition “Łódź micro-stories. Human micro-stories” and the launch of the educational portal Polish Music Library won in the Plebiscite “Historical Event of the Year” for 2020.

    A gala was held on Tuesday at the Palace on the Isle in Royal Łazienki Park in Warsaw, during which the winners of the 14th edition of the “Historical Event of the Year” Plebiscite were announced. In a competition organized by the Museum of Polish History (MPH), the authors of the most interesting historical projects are selected in the following categories: Event, Exhibition, and Education. This year, the Special Award of the Polish History Museum was also handed for the first time.

    The winning project in the Event category is the Jan Kowalewski Year Celebration organized by the Museum of Independence Traditions in Łódź and the City Hall of Łódź.

    “The appointment by the Senate of the Republic of Poland the Year of Jan Kowalewski became an impulse for the realization of a series of occasional events in the hometown of the eminent cryptologist: educational films were made, the radio drama Jan K. Riddle, the exhibition , the Room of Riddles was opened. The culmination of the celebrations was the unveiling of a mural dedicated to a man who was famous for breaking Soviet codes,” reported MPH.

    Will there be a national holiday for the heroes of the Wielkopolskie Uprising?

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    Will there be a national holiday for the heroes of the Wielkopolskie Uprising?
    Unknown author

    President Andrzej Duda submitted to the Sejm a bill on establishing the National Day for the Victory of the Wielkopolskie Uprising. The draft amendment aims to make December 27 a public holiday to commemorate the 1918-1919 uprising, announced the Chancellery of the President on Tuesday.

    In the justification of the draft, it was stated that the president’s legislative initiative was a response to a speech by community representatives and local authorities from the Wielkopolska region.

    The project assumes that December 27 will be a public holiday: the National Day of the Victorious Wielkopolskie Uprising – to commemorate the uprising of 1918-1919 and pay tribute to its heroic participants.

    It was stated that “the importance of the Wielkopolskie Uprising for the restoration of our homeland on the political map of Europe was difficult to overestimate.” “It can be said that the Second Polish Republic would not exist in the shape we know, and perhaps it would not have survived, if not for the uprising of the Wielkopolska region,” it was noted.

    The document noted that the Wielkopolskie Uprising “was the most emphatic willingness expression to belong to the reborn Republic of Poland by the community +of the Poznań district+”.

    Hundreds of scams every day

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    Hundreds of scams every day
    Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

    There is no surprise that criminals break into other people’s accounts and steal the funds deposited there. Cyber security experts, as well as bankers, have long been alarmed about the problem. The scale of the practice is nevertheless shocking. Only in the first quarter, the National Bank of Poland recorded 60 thousand unauthorized payment transactions, and this number is expected to grow. Therefore, it is necessary not only to caution electronic banking users but to educate them periodically.

    During the recently concluded Economic Forum in Karpacz, one of the panels was devoted to this topic. At that time, the Financial Ombudsman pointed out that the scale of unauthorized payment transactions is growing exponentially. 

     

    The National Bank of Poland recorded 60,000 such operations in the first quarter alone, i.e., for only three months, which means that there may be as many as a quarter of a million operations annually. Filary Biznesu website pointed out that meant about seven hundred every day

     

    “In the first half of the year, we received about 700 complaints, and by the end of the year, we expect about 1.5 thousand such complaints. Last year there were 1.2 thousand,” stressed the Financial Ombudsman.

     

    However, it is worth knowing that there is a steady increase in security awareness among average e-banking users, also in Poland. The results of the Appdome study, which involved more than 10,000 everyday consumers living in different parts of the world, were recently published.

     

    “The results help dispel some myths about the safety of smartphone and tablet users. In addition, they help to draw a clear picture of consumers’ expectations and awareness of cybersecurity,” explains Mariusz Politowicz, from Marken, a solutions’ distributor of Bitdefender in Poland.

    Why are such authorities as John Paul II and Stefan Wyszynski no longer present in the Church? Przeciszewski replies

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    Why are such authorities as John Paul II and Stefan Wyszynski no longer present in the Church? Przeciszewski replies
    Wikipedia.org

    Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński and Pope John Paul II are legendary figures who have left an incredible mark on the fate of Poland. In the Church today, however, it is difficult to find individuals who could be compared to them in terms of the format. – The Church was repressed, persecuted by the communists, so naturally, everyone gathered around this central figure […] The number of believers that we have in Poland is the result of the last two centuries of history,’ assessed Marcin Przeciszewski in an interview for Niezalezna.pl.

    Marcin Przeciszewski, the head of the Catholic Information Agency, was asked why there are no such strong figures in the Polish church anymore. “Both Cardinal Wyszyński and John Paul II are figured unsurpassed in their spiritual, intellectual and pastoral dimensions,” he assessed.

     

    “They are great personalities that were created by those conditions. As far as the authority of Cardinal Wyszynski is concerned, for example, he owed it to many functions in the Church that he held and thanks to which he could be a real leader of the Church in Poland. At the same time, he was the Primate, the Chairman of the Episcopate, he was also a papal legate because there was no Apostolic Nuncio then, and he had additional special powers granted by the Pope concerning the Western territories and the care for Catholics in the Soviet Union,” – he said.

     

    “It can be said that no successive episcopal leader after Wyszynski had such possibilities of exercising power. They are simply one of many bishops. The function of the chairman of the episcopate is simply coordinating the work of the structure we call the Polish Episcopal Conference, while the function of the primate separated chairman is a purely titular function.  Nowadays it is not so easy to build a similar authority,” – the interlocutor added. 

     

    Marcin Przeciszewski emphasized that the specificity of those times had a great influence on the authority of these figures. 

     

    “The Church was repressed, persecuted by the communist regime, so naturally, everyone gathered around the central figure of Cardinal Wyszyński, the Primate of Poland. Whereas at the moment, in times of freedom, the Church is very pluralistic, although it is of course uniform in the doctrinal sense. There is no need for such unity in every action as there was then,” he said.

     

    The head of KAI (Catholic Information Agency – editor’s note) assessed that currently there is no need to have one such strong figure. 

     

    “The number of believers we have in Poland is the result of two centuries of recent history.  Both in the 19th century, when, as they say, “the Church was the fatherland”, and in the 20th century, when the Church stood up for every citizen. It is only thanks to these two hundred years of the Church’s role that the number of believers is so high. This great grace of faith don’t have to depend on one particular strong authority or lack thereof,” he concluded.

    A mob of Romanian mushroom pickers besieged the Podkarpacie region. Even the foresters are afraid

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    A mob of Romanian mushroom pickers besieged the Podkarpacie region. Even the foresters are afraid
    Valeria Boltneva/ Pexels

    After three years, when mushroom pickers from Romania first appeared in the Podkarpacie region, the practice is increasingly flourishing. Although, as EU citizens, they have the right to harvest in publicly accessible forests, representatives of the State Forests alert that mushrooms are being exported in special coolers on a mass scale to western Europe. The prosecutor’s office refuses to institute proceedings, and foresters admit that they are afraid to go out into the field when they might come into contact with a group of several dozen young foreigners.

    “Over the past few years, the mushrooming visits of Romanians have become more civilized,” says the head forester of the Dukla Forestry Commission in the Podkarpacie region, quoted by “Gazeta Wyborcza”. The GW describes that three years ago, collectors drove their cars into the forest and were surprised that in our country, unlike Romania, this is forbidden.

     

    Recently they had already camped at the forest parking lot in Stasiana, and now they were staying at one of the guesthouses. Zbigniew Żywiec, the forest inspector, points out that the problem is the number of mushrooms they collect, which are exported from Poland every day. 

     

    “I know those mushrooms were going to Germany, to France. For industrial harvesting of mushrooms, you need to sign a contract with the State Forests. No such agreement has been signed here” – explains the “GW” interlocutor. 

     

    The Romanians are also worrying the locals – and it’s no longer just about the surrounding forests being cleared of mushrooms. There is also a growing concern about safety issues.

     

    When last year the case was reported to the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Krosno, it refused to initiate proceedings due to the lack of legal grounds. Gatherers, as long as they don’t break the law, can use the forests. 

     

    Foresters admit they have concerns about going out on their rounds, where they might encounter a group of dozens of young men. They have also announced that they will strengthen patrols in the forests, with police officers also supporting them.

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