In 2015 Supreme Audit Office published the report concerned the quality of doctoral studies in Poland. Result of the conducted audit is alarming: “there are serious doubts both about quality and effectiveness of mass doctoral education” (SAO 2015). The text presents an overview of university regulations concerned the evaluation of annual achievements of PhD students (in the area of social sciences) and indicates its potentially negative consequences for the quality of their academic activity. The article refers to two terms – “running for points” and “parametric game”– introduced by Emanuel Kulczycki to describe consequences of economization of research evaluation system, i.e. measuring academic activities and turning them into points-based rewards.
An important operational task for thermal turbines during run-up and run-down is to keep the stresses in the structural elements at a right level. This applies not only to their instantaneous values, but also to the impact of them on the engine lifetime. The turbine shaft is a particularly important element. The distribution of stresses depends on geometric characteristics of the shaft and its specific locations. This means a groove manufactured for fixing the rotor blades. The extreme stresses in this place occur during the start-up and the shaft heating to normal operating temperature. The process needs optimisation. Optimization tasks are multidisciplinary issues and can be carried out using different methods. In recent years, particular attention in optimisation has been paid to the use of artificial intelligence methods. Among them, a special role is assigned to genetic algorithms. The paper presents a genetic algorithm method to optimise the steam turbine shaft heating process during its start-up phase. The presented optimization task of this algorithm is to carry out the process of the shaft heating as soon as possible at the conditions of not exceeding the stresses at critical locations at any heating phase.