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Whilst a decisive role of the particle-matrix interphase on the mechanical properties of nanoparticle-filled polymers has been demonstrated in the last years, the arbitrary design of this interphase remains a very challenging goal. In principle, this could be realized via an appropriate surface modification of the nanofiller prior to its incorporation in the polymer. For most systems, such as for boehmite nanofillers, however, the interaction of organic modifiers with the particle surface has not been studied in detail, and only single studies are known rather than systematic investigations on the effects of different chemical functions anchored on the particle surface. In this chapter, we present an extensive study on the binding of APTES, a common silane surface modifier, with boehmite, and show that thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) coupled with mass spectrometry (MS) is a convenient and highly suitable method to elucidate the ligand binding in detail. Furthermore, a two-step coupling strategy is presented, demonstrating that based on APTES anchored to the particle surface, the condensation of various carboxylic acids can be utilized to enable highly diverse chemical properties of the nanofillers, which leads to very different particle-matrix interactions in the nanocomposites.

Microplastics found in coastal environments can be transported to and accumulate in different coastal environmental media by diverse driving factors and pathways. Increasing numbers of studies indicate that microplastics accumulate in coastal areas with highly intensive human activities. However, there are few discussions on the occurrence of microplastics in coastal sediments and coastal wetlands according to different land utilization patterns. In this chapter we investigate the distribution of shape, size, and abundance of microplastics in northern coastal beach sediments. We found that pellets, foams, fragments, flakes, films, fibers, and sponges occurred in beach sediments with different land utilization patterns. The abundances of microplastics were 344 particles kg−1 in tourist beaches, 1,226 particles kg−1 in beaches adjacent to mariculture areas, 98 particles kg−1 in beaches near fishing ports, and 1,302 particles kg−1 in undeveloped beaches. Foams were dominant in tourist beaches and beaches near fishing ports, while flakes dominated in beaches adjacent to mariculture areas and in undeveloped beaches. The differences are likely due to different anthropogenic influences in coastal zones. We then illustrate the characteristics and spatial distribution of microplastics in different mangrove sediments covering the main mangrove forest growing areas of south China. The abundance of microplastics was 1,302 particles kg−1, and foams and fibers were the dominant shapes in mangrove sediments. The differences in distribution of microplastics in mangrove sediments are related to anthropocentric influences such as mariculture and fisheries and to the density of vegetation. Moreover, different potential sources of microplastic are contributors of microplastic pollution in coastal zones and need to be evaluated. They include land sources and offshore marine sources together with coastal atmospheric deposition. The results contribute to our understanding of microplastic pollution in coastal sediments with different coastal land utilization patterns, and they provide a reference for the management and control of microplastic pollution in coastal environments.

In light of recent technological leaps in satellite navigation, processing power, sensory technology and connectivity, almost every company in the automotive industry is pouring unprecedented resources into the development of automated self-driving systems. This poses a variety of challenges not only from a technological viewpoint as far as classification and standardization is concerned, but also from a legal standpoint. This written version of a presentation focuses on the technology currently employed in automated self-driving systems, its classification and approval for road use in different countries as well as legal implications in the fields of liability and data protection.

This paper reports on selected results of a large-scale questionnaire study conducted among Polish students of English. Continuing the tradition of pronunciation attitude surveys in Poland, the present study concentrates on a possible relationship between what students perceive as correct pronunciation and a Polish accent in English in correspondence to the level of studies (BA vs. MA) and gender. Supporting the results reported in earlier studies, the study shows that a vast majority of respondents want their pronunciation to be correct and would want to speak like native speakers, even if it required a lot of their time and effort; moreover, even though students may have doubts about success, they would prefer their pronunciation not to be Polish-accented. The decomposition of the data shows an effect of education level and gender on the results, with females less likely to claim that their pronunciation does not have Polish accent features, and MA students less concerned with Polish features in their English pronunciation than the BA students. This may suggest that a strongly negative attitude towards ‘Polglish’ depends on the education level and experience on the one hand, and a gender-specific approach to self-assessed accent features on the other.

The acquisition of English word stress by speakers of other languages has received considerable attention over the years, with researchers claiming that although it may be learnable (e.g., Archibald, 1993), it seems to be largely unteachable (Jenkins, 2000). Certain controversies over the chance of success in English word stress teaching notwithstanding, second language phonology research demonstrates the existence of paths which the learning of word stress may follow, with such factors as word frequency, source of errors and the amount of explicit instruction found to affect the process. The present study attempts to explore the effect of the above-mentioned factors on the recognition of English word stress as correct versus incorrect by advanced Polish learners. The results support the expected paths of development of advanced learners, with overgeneralization causing more difficulty than L1 transfer; the effects of extended explicit instruction and word-frequency prove to be more varied, with the former most clearly seen in an increased recognition of incorrect forms and the latter additionally related to learner-specific input.

We present a novel system for vision based anomaly detection in real-time environments. Our system uses an event-based vision sensor consisting of asynchronously operating pixels that is inspired by the human retina. Each pixel reports events of illumination changes, are processed in a purely event-based tracker that pursues edges of events in the input stream. The tracker estimates are used to determine whether the input events originate from anomalous or regular data. We distinguish between the two cases with a Growing Neural Gas (GNG), which is modified to suite our event-based processing pipeline. While learning of the GNG is supervised and performed offline, the detection is carried out online. We evaluate our system by inspection of fast-spinning cog-wheels. Our system achieves faster than real-time speed on commodity hardware and generalizes well to other cases. The results of this paper can be applied both to technical implementations where high speed but little processing power is required, and for further investigations into event-based algorithms.

The SpiNNaker neural computing project has created a hardware architecture capable of scaling up to a system with more than a million embedded cores, in order to simulate more than one billion spiking neurons in biological real time. The heart of this system is the SpiNNaker chip, a multi-processor System-on-Chip with a high level of interconnectivity between its processing units. Here we present a Dynamically Extendable SpiNNaker Chip Computing Module that allows a SpiNNaker machine to be deployed on small mobile robots. A non-neural application, the simulation of the movement of a flock of birds, was developed to demonstrate the general purpose capabilities of this new platform. The developed SpiNNaker machine allows the simulation of up to one million spiking neurons in real time with a single SpiNNaker chip and is scalable up to 256 computing nodes in its current state.

This paper aims to overview the main findings from a European-wide on-line survey of English pronunciation teaching practices (English Pronunciation Teaching in Europe Survey—EPTiES) for Polish and European respondents. The European context provided by the EPTiES is used as the background for the discussion of pronunciation teaching priorities and practices in Poland as seen through the teachers’ eyes. The data from Polish respondents are summarised for major characteristics and compared to the answers from other respondents from around Europe and the results reported in earlier studies conducted in Poland. The focus is on teachers, their views and practices in pronunciation teaching, the training they received, their attitudes towards pronunciation teaching and, finally, their beliefs concerning their learners’ aims and preferences in pronunciation learning. The aim is to explore the specificity of the Polish context for English pronunciation teaching in Europe, with similarities and differences highlighted and discussed in the course of the quantitative and qualitative data analysis. The ultimate goal is to show that only by investigating the attitudes and practices of language teachers can we hope to improve the quality of pronunciation teaching; as it is all in teachers’ hands, their training, attitudes and beliefs are crucial. And it is the training that requires most attention, as Polish teachers of English are well educated in their own pronunciation, but not in pronunciation teaching, which is virtually absent from teacher training they received.