OLENDER ETHNOGRAPHIC PARK IN WIELKA NIESZAWKA: ASSUMPTIONS AND IMPLEMENTATION

What has proven the most effective and durable form of the preservation of rural historic buildings in Poland is their translocation to open-air museums. A branch of the Maria Znamierowska-Prüffer Ethnographic Museum in Torun, the Olender Ethnographic Park in Wielka Nieszawka was opened to visitors in 2018, and it is the first open-air museum in Poland entirely dedicated to the colonization of the Olenders and Mennonites in the Lower Vistula Valley. Following the decision on the Park’s location in 2011, the construction works were conducted for several following years. They had been preceded by fieldwork allowing to identify six buildings for translocation: residential as well as farm and livestock structures. Constituting the most precious preserved examples of architecture related to the Olender settlement, they date back to the 18th and 19th centuries. Their deplorable technical condition found in the field was most commonly due to the lack of continuous care and to improper preservation of the buildings. Therefore the facilities’ translocation to the Park was the only chance of securing their effective preservation and survival. Owing to the varied structures, substantial alterations over the years and varied preservation state, the historic facilities transferred to the Park posed new conservation and ethnographic challenges. It goes without saying that any relocation of a building sets difficult conservation tasks, that it is a complex multi-stage process which requires contribution from representatives of various professions and trades, while its fulfillment goes well beyond any generally known ‘standards’, revealing new mysteries and problems which have to be solved in real time. What matters a lot in such projects is an appropriate attitude to a historic building, scientifically grounded, and supported with expertise, experience and reliable documentation. The methods and reconstruction means used in the translocation of the edifices to the Olender Ethnographic Park in Wielka Nieszawka described in the paper display the highest standards of open-air museology, owing to which the basic conservation rule, namely securing the historic monument’s authenticity, and thus its historical value, has been obeyed.

Theoretical Analysis of a Mathematical Relation between Driving Pressures in Membrane-Based Desalting Processes

Osmotic and hydraulic pressures are both indispensable for operating membrane-based desalting processes, such as forward osmosis (FO), pressure-retarded osmosis (PRO), and reverse osmosis (RO). However, a clear relation between these driving pressures has not thus far been identified; hence, the effect of change in driving pressures on systems has not yet been sufficiently analyzed. In this context, this study formulates an actual mathematical relation between the driving pressures of membrane-based desalting processes by taking into consideration the presence of energy loss in each driving pressure. To do so, this study defines the pseudo-driving pressures representing the water transport direction of a system and the similarity coefficients that quantify the energy conservation rule. Consequently, this study finds three other theoretical constraints that are required to operate membrane-based desalting processes. Furthermore, along with the features of the similarity coefficients, this study diagnoses the commercial advantage of RO over FO/PRO and suggests desirable optimization sequences applicable to each process. Since this study provides researchers with guidelines regarding optimization sequences between membrane parameters and operational parameters for membrane-based desalting processes, it is expected that detailed optimization strategies for the processes could be established.

Relative Attributing Propagation: Interpreting the Comparative Contributions of Individual Units in Deep Neural Networks

As Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated superhuman performance in a variety of fields, there is an increasing interest in understanding the complex internal mechanisms of DNNs. In this paper, we propose Relative Attributing Propagation (RAP), which decomposes the output predictions of DNNs with a new perspective of separating the relevant (positive) and irrelevant (negative) attributions according to the relative influence between the layers. The relevance of each neuron is identified with respect to its degree of contribution, separated into positive and negative, while preserving the conservation rule. Considering the relevance assigned to neurons in terms of relative priority, RAP allows each neuron to be assigned with a bi-polar importance score concerning the output: from highly relevant to highly irrelevant. Therefore, our method makes it possible to interpret DNNs with much clearer and attentive visualizations of the separated attributions than the conventional explaining methods. To verify that the attributions propagated by RAP correctly account for each meaning, we utilize the evaluation metrics: (i) Outside-inside relevance ratio, (ii) Segmentation mIOU and (iii) Region perturbation. In all experiments and metrics, we present a sizable gap in comparison to the existing literature.

ETHICS AND BASIC PRINCIPLES OF RESTORING HISTORICAL STONE MONUMENTS

The paper discusses ethical guidelines in relation to the conservation of historical monuments made of stone. The presented rules consider the building stone specificity and its susceptibility to various corrosion factors and the character of deteriorated areas in that kind of historic monuments. The basic conservation rule sounding Primum non nocere is deconvoluted to more particular principles like: (i) to preserve authentic historical matter as a carrier of artistic, scientific and historical value of the object, (ii) to provide minimal scale of intervention, (iii) to provide the reversibility of the methods and particularly materials used from conservation or reconstruction works, (iv) to provide distinguishability of reconstructions parts and (v) to provide the integrity of the work of art. The adaptability of these particular rules to the of conservation of stone artistic artefacts is also presented.