The Polish Naval Academy (PNA) "Heroes of Westerplatte" is a naval university supervised by the Ministry of National Defence of the Republic of Poland, with the history, uninterrupted by World War II, dating back to 1922. At present the PNA provides education for officer-cadets, commissioned officers and civilian students at first and second cycles of study (undergraduate and graduate), as well as doctoral studies. It also offers opportunities for professional development at specialized courses and postgraduate programs. In accordance with international agreements the PNA trains officers for naval forces of countries in Europe, North Africa, the Middle and Far East. International exchange significantly contributes to the rise in qualifications of the PNA staff. It also allows the students to attend lectures given by best specialists from leading scientific centers of the world.
The paper addresses the possibility of non-military threats occurring in sea areas and assessing their trend. The paper unequivocally indicates that in peaceful conditions of maritime operations, the risk of crisis situation occurrence is highly probable and may even increase in the future. Therefore, a brief review of events and the current safety situation in sea areas was first carried out. Based on already defined phenomena, a trend, and a catalog of predicted risks of a non-military character in the sea regions were developed. The final effect of the paper will be to indicate the trend of current non-military threats, define a catalog of anticipated risks in the sea areas, and indicate areas of particular sensitivity, i.e., what to put the most significant emphasis on to prepare for the occurrence of a given risk and what are the possibilities of reducing it to an acceptable level or even reversing the trend of increasing threats.
This article challenges deficit-oriented narratives that portray adolescents’ engagement with digital media as risk or decline. Drawing on a two-year ethnographic study in Polish upper-secondary schools, it analyses how young people negotiate visibility in postdigital educational environments. Integrating perspectives from Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rancière and Shoshana Zuboff, the article conceptualises adolescent agency at the intersection of action, recognition, affect and algorithmic governance. Rather than off-task behaviour, students’ digital practices appear as attempts to become subjects of knowledge. The findings suggest that the so-called “e-generation crisis” reflects a misalignment between educational frameworks and postdigital conditions of learning. The study is based on two upper-secondary school classes and does not claim systemic representativeness; its aim is to identify and interpret recurring mechanisms and tensions rather than to generalise across the educational system.
Cooperative bathymetric navigation requires distinguishing the correct map position from distant locations that produce similar depth measurements. A second single-beam echo sounder adds a spatially separated observation, but sensor offsets and chart errors can still make the joint history support an incorrect position. This paper presents GQ–Bathy, a deterministic estimator of the common position and heading of two cooperating surface vehicles relative to a known bathymetric map. A graph built from both measurement trajectories represents constant sensor offsets and selected smooth depth discrepancies. Orthogonal projection removes these components from the measured and map-predicted histories before normalized matching over a bounded position and heading region. The method processes the complete available history without using the particle-filter estimate or the true simulated position. Evaluation combines real National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration BlueTopo seabed geometry with simulated motion and sensing. Development and evaluation use separate chart source groups, and all estimators receive identical trajectories and measurements. Comparisons with particle filters and deterministic matching methods show improved aggregate terminal localization, while parameter sensitivity and regional analyses identify conditions in which ambiguity remains. The findings support complete-history graph-quotient matching as a complementary source of global position information for cooperative navigation. They also identify the search limits and terrain dependence that must be addressed before integration into a continuous navigation system.
Energy security after 2022 increasingly depends on maintaining services despite offshore infrastructure disruption. This integrative review examines policy documents, technical studies and four Baltic disruption episodes involving three systems: Nord Stream, Balticconnector and EstLink 2. The observation window is September 2022–December 2025; the two EstLink 2 episodes are within-asset observations, not independent replications. Asset unavailability means loss of a component’s intended function; service interruption means a break in the specified energy service; service failure means the inability of the assessed system to maintain the required service despite available substitutes. The comparison separates reported evidence, interpretations and untested propositions. Operating baselines, substitute supply and confirmed restoration explain why physical damage need not produce system-level service failure. An episode-level matrix links documented disruptions to institutional concern and protective responses without assigning hostile intent to every event. Public records document disruption and recovery sequences and the protection of EstLink 1 after the damage to EstLink 2. They do not establish resulting insurance premiums, financing losses or transition delays. Governance instruments and monitoring capabilities have distinct scopes and evidential limits. The contribution is a two-path framework with differentiated documentary support, not a statistically validated causal model or a representative inventory of Baltic infrastructure failures.
The issue discussed in this article concerns navigation support, including that for autonomous underwater vehicles, which are subject to a systematic increase in positioning error when using dead-reckoning methods in GNSS-denied coastal areas. In such situations, the ability to capture images of the vehicle’s surface surroundings and use information about objects within the field of view of the optical system becomes useful. The proposed method uses a monocular camera and image segmentation to estimate distances to selected coastal reference objects. Determining the number of pixels occupied in the vertical plane by an object of known height enables the distance to be calculated using well-known mathematical formulas. The method was evaluated as a semi-automatic feasibility study using images acquired from a motorboat under maritime conditions. Forest regions of interest and the sea–land reference line used for building measurements were selected manually. The resulting estimates were evaluated against adopted reference distances derived from camera GPS coordinates and manually selected mapped reference locations. The reported differences describe agreement with these references, whose uncertainty was not independently quantified, and do not establish metrologically traceable absolute measurement accuracy. Image quality and segmentation errors affect the resulting distance estimates. The results indicate the potential of the method to provide auxiliary distance observations; however, deployment on an AUV and integration with its navigation system were not experimentally validated. This article describes the method and presents the results.
