Stefan Żeromski’s historical novel Popioły [Ashes] (1904) is usually interpreted as a narrative about the Napoleonic wars, particularly about Napoleon’s campaign in Spain. The paper argues that the fast-moving war plot conceals the philosophical question to which Żeromski tried to provide an answer: did the Austrian empire represent a superior way of organizing human society, or was the liberty of the Polish “Sarmatian” republic a more appropriate answer to the question of how to live? The issue is indirectly contested by virtually all characters. It comes to a head in the relationship between two seemingly secondary characters, the Austrian tax collector Hibl and the Polish landowner Nardzewski. The former resembles William Faulkner’s Flem Snopes; the latter, the noble families of the Sartorises defeated in the Civil War. Like in Faulkner’s novels, there is an unmistakable suggestion of gloria victis in Żeromski’s opus. Unlike Faulkner, Żeromski brings to bear the issue of white-on-white colonialism in Europe, and the paper’s author suggests that the eighteenth-century seizure of parts of Poland by Europe’s three continental empires was an instance of European colonialism that delayed the development of non-Germanic Central Europe and eventually brought about twentieth-century European wars.
The positivity and absolute stability of a class of nonlinear continuous-time and discretetime systems are addressed. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the positivity of this class of nonlinear systems are established. Sufficient conditions for the absolute stability of this class of nonlinear systems are also given.
In this article, the imperial idea and civilising missions in the Habsburg Monarchy, mainly of the nineteenth century, are refracted through the prism of the legacy of enlightened absolutism. The article tries to dispel mythologies about its demise around 1800, and about those who could subscribe to its programme throughout the nineteenth century. It questions templates of national history writing which too unanimously connect the Enlightenment to the origins of the various national revivals of the early nineteenth century, and discusses concrete examples of enlightened absolutism’s civilising impulses, among them law, Roman imperial patriotism, and the Catholic religion.
The ethics of ‘theistic absolute morality’ (TAM), as any other ethical theory, must offer a definition of good, describe the connection between good and duty, and provide an effective guidance to human conduct. In the ethics of TAM we find, in my rendering of its claims, an irremediably unsuccessful definition of good, permanently loose connection between moral value and moral duty, and irreparably limited practical efficacy. It is not surprising that it has to be so, as it is a common condition of all ethical systems. The TAM ethics suffers, however, additionally from a unique conceptual trouble, but that is a story I have told elsewhere.
Establishing the proper values of controller parameters is the most important thing to design in active queue management (AQM) for achieving excellent performance in handling network congestion. For example, the first well known AQM, the random early detection (RED) method, has a lack of proper parameter values to perform under most the network conditions. This paper applies a Nelder-Mead simplex method based on the integral of time-weighted absolute error (ITAE) for a proportional integral (PI) controller using active queue management (AQM). A TCP flow and PI AQM system were analyzed with a control theory approach. A numerical optimization algorithm based on the ITAE index was run with Matlab/Simulink tools to find the controller parameters with PI tuned by Hollot (PI) as initial parameter input. Compared with PI and PI tuned by Ustebay (PIU) via experimental simulation in Network Simulator Version 2 (NS2) in five scenario network conditions, our proposed method was more robust. It provided stable performance to handle congestion in a dynamic network.
Bogusław Wolniewicz’s book Things and facts, although it is essentially devoted to the interpretation of the Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, also has a substantive layer in which Wolniewicz raises very important problems in the fields of methodology, semiotics and metaphysics, such as: (a) the problem of clarity of philosophical texts and its relation to simplicity and brevity, as well as to thoroughness and suggestiveness; (b) the problem of semantic correlation types; (c) the problem of analysis, interpretation and definition; (d) the problems of modality, negative facts, absolute monism and coherentionism; (e) the problem of abstraction and moral-praxeological antinomy. The author of the paper reconstructs Wolniewicz’s views on these matters.