The protection of Polish architectural heritage in the former eastern borderlands, accomplished through the conservation and technical securing of historical structures, constitutes one of the main programmes that are implemented by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Currently, many Polish historical buildings in the former eastern borderlands are in a very bad technical condition. The load-bearing systems of these elements, as well as elements of their finish, require immediate emergency securing work. The basic steps that precede conservation work are emergency structural works, which guarantee the durability and stability of the entire historical substance. The specifics and complexity of the problem of the failure of historical buildings often demands an in-depth analysis of a series of factors that are difficult to measure and which are responsible for the cause and effect relationship during the early stage of the technical evaluation of a structure. The analyses of failures of numerous historical structures, for instance that were carried out by the authors, have become the inspiration for the search for effective methods of analysis that would allow for an in-depth analysis of the causes and effects of the failures in question. The DEMATEL method (Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) that has been presented in this work, and its fuzzy extension, has lately become one of the more popular methods used in the cause-and-effect analysis of various phenomena. The authors demonstrated how this method works on the example of the evaluation and securing of the load-bearing system of the XVII Collegiate church of the Holy Trinity in the town of Olykha in the Volhynskiy Oblast, Ukraine.
Planning a construction project, the investor frequently faces the choice of the option of the planned investment. Assessment of options is difficult due to the complex nature of construction projects. Various methods of multicriteria evaluation are successfully applied in the assessment and analysis of options. For those methods to work, a handful of information must be prepared beforehand. Among others, it is necessary to establish the assessment criteria and determine their weight for specific cases. This stage is implemented in cooperation with experts. The results of evaluations, obtained on the basis of the experts' opinions, must be processed and prepared. The paper will discuss one possible option for assessing the experts' opinion.
Electronic reverse auctions (e-RAs) are considered to be an effective tool for negotiating tender prices and achieving cost savings. Furthermore, if multicritera evaluation is used, it can be expected that e-RAs will also contribute to achieving benefits in other areas, e.g. helping to minimize life-cycle costs. This study aims to analyse the mutual relationships between selected e-RA variables. More specifically, correlation analysis is applied to explore real e-RA data representing public tenders for construction work. This study’s findings reveal that the correlations examined are generally weak or very weak. Furthermore, it has been found that the value of correlation coefficients varies depending on the type of structure, and that public tenders are usually evaluated solely on the basis of the criterion of the lowest bid price. Recommendations for public authorities in using e-RAs in the role of the buyer are also provided at the end of this paper.
In recent years we have interviewed members of the audience after musical performances and asked them to evaluate the acoustics of the concert halls. A group of ‘music lovers’ (with a high level of musical training and experience) and ‘acousticians’ (with a wide knowledge of the physical characteristics of sound transmission) also attended each performance and answered the same questions as the general public. This group thereby served as a control group when evaluating surveys of the general public. In this paper, the results obtained when analyzing these control group surveys are presented. This analysis shows that a common vocabulary exists between music lovers and acousticians when rating a hall, although the grouping of the questions for each factor depends on the training of the respondents.
Evaluation apprehension is the anxiety arising from a concern that one’s knowledge or expertise may be evaluated unfavorably by an audience. In this regard, the educational field comprising students’ discussions, lectures, presentations, and interactions is not an exception. Plethora of studies on student apprehension demonstrated that the construct is under the influence of different factors and can create various consequences. The aim of the present review is to complement and encapsulate previous research on student apprehension by providing an updated review on the concept in different disciplines. Data from 30 studies published in Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and System were coded based on a coding scheme. The studies were broadly classified into four categories in the realm of education in terms of students’ disciplines; namely, Second/Foreign Language Learning (9 studies), Accounting and Finance (4 studies), Medicine, Nursing, and Pharmacy (6 studies), and miscellaneous disciplines (11 studies). The focus of this review pivoted around antecedents and consequences of student apprehension in each field. The analysis demonstrated the multidimensional nature of the construct caused by a host of variables and resulting in a multitude of ramifications. Based on these findings, some implications and strategies for mitigating student evaluation apprehension are presented.
This paper is aimed at presentation and analysis of different approaches to the phenomenon of "feeling for language". The purpose is to demonstrate that this term, although controversial, is of great importance in language acquisition and in the evaluation of language expressions. The topic is discussed in the article with the help of definitions from Kainz, Knobloch, Lewandowski, Juhász, Olt/Disselkamp, and Trad. In the definitions, various facets of language feeling are taken up, such as its relation to intuition, reference to mother tongue and foreign language and individual or collective implications.
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.
The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, I present the scholarly book publications patterns of Polish scholars. Secondly, I show how scholarly book publications are assessed in various European research evaluation systems. Moreover, I argue that the diversity of evaluation models depends on the scientific policy aims in a given country. This presentation of European models allows me to discuss a new Polish science policy instrument, that is the list of publishers prepared for the upcoming evaluation exercise in 2021. In 2018, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Poland implemented a new model of scholarly book publication assessment based on the list of publishers. On the one hand, such a science policy instrument might be a way to appreciate the best quality scholarly books and give them more points than articles in the evaluation exercise. On the other hand, it is a so far unknown instrument which differentiates publications that have been treated the same up to date. Additionally, this paper aims to shed some light on how the new Polish model was prepared.
Many business offices around the world are organized as open plan offices. Therefore, studies about the acoustic comfort of the people who work in them have become increasingly important. The focus of this work is the acoustic evaluation of an open plan office combining several architectural characteristics and levels of ambient noise. This evaluation was performed through a computational model calibrated from a real office. The rate of spatial decay of sound pressure levels per distance doubling (DL2) and the speech transmission index (STI) were simulated for the acoustic evaluation of the office, allowing for the determination of the radius of distraction (rD). These parameters were simulated for 6 situations using different floor and ceiling covering materials and inserting or withdrawing screens between workstations. In addition, STI and rD were simulated under two conditions of ambient noise. The results indicated that the DL2 and rD are adequate acoustic parameters for the acoustic evaluation and improvement of an open plan office. The DL2 was strongly influenced by the presence or absence of screens between workstations and by the ceiling covering material. The rD was more sensitive to changes in ambient noise.