Development of optical fiber technology in Poland 2015
The paper is a digest of works presented during the XVIth National Symposium on Optical Fibres and Their Applications. The Symposium is organized since 1976. OFTA 2015 was organized by Optical Fibre Laboratory of the Faculty of Chemistry at University of Maria Curie Skłodowska, and Institute of Electronics and Information Technology of Lublin University of Technology, in Nałęczów on 22-25 September 2015. The meeting has gathered around 120 participants who presented 85 research and technical papers. The Symposium organized every 18 months is a good portrait of optical fibre technology development in Poland at university laboratories, governmental institutes, company R&D laboratories, etc. Topical tracks of the Symposium were: optical and photonic materials, technology of classical, tailored and structural photonic optical fibres, light propagation physics in optical fibres, passive and active optical fibre components, optical fibre sensors, passive and active optical fibre networks, optical fibre amplifiers and lasers, optical fibre network issues: modulation, architectures, economy, etc.
International Linear Collider Global and Local Implications
ILC machine – International Liner Collider, is one of  two accelerators e + e - just under design and advanced consideration to be built with final energy of colliding electron and positron beams over 1 TeV. An alternative project to ILC is CLIC in CERN The ILC machine is an important complementary addition for the research potential of the LHC accelerator complex. The required length of ILC is minimally 30 km, but some versions of the TDR estimates mention nearly 50km. Superconducting RF linacs will be built using well established 1,3 GHz TESLA technology using ultrapure niobium or Nb 3 Sn resonant microwave cavities of RRR class, of ultimate finesse, working with gradients over 35MV/m, while some versions of the design mention ultimate confinement as high as 50MV/m. Several teams from Poland (Krakow. Warszawa, Wroclaw – IFJ-PAN, AGH, UJ, NCBJ, UW, PW, PWr, INT-PAN) participate in the global design effort for this machine – including detectors, cryogenics, and SRF systems. Now it seems that the ILC machine will be built in Japan, during the period of 2016-2026. If true, Japan will turn to a world super-power in accelerator technology no.3 after CERN and USA. The paper summarizes the state-of-the-art of technical and administration activities around the immense ILC and CLIC machines, with emphasis on potential participation of Polish teams in the global effort of newly established LCC – The Linear Collider Consortium.
Pedagogy of the “Not”: Negation, Exodus, and Postdigital Temporal Regimes
Postdigital capitalist time is an incessant acceleration that acts to homogenize time and wed us to the present, to which we have to constantly catch up. While the impulse of this is no doubt economic (the realization of value), it is crucially undergirded by a pedagogical logic wherein we have to perpetually learn and re-learn the latest apps, social media configurations, operating systems, and so on. Political strategies of resistance thus need to be bolstered by an alternative mode of educational life, and I propose a pedagogy of the “not” as one possibility. Such a pedagogy is an act of suspension that sustains a detachment from the present, clearing out oppositions and thereby exposing us to a radical indeterminacy and potentiality that is always untimely. Suspension is the praxis of negation, which means that negation operates by keeping sense indeterminate to meaning and signification. Rather than suppressing, disavowing, or annihilating the stated content, negation retains even that which is negated. While this would appear as a form of exopedagogy, which withdraws from the dialectic of the private/public, I instead argue that it redefines the terms of any dialectic, redefining the very categories exopedagogy withdraws from. Before concluding, I spend some time with Sandy Grande’s important critiques of Eurocentrism and progress in Western critical education, demonstrating how negation as suspension circumvents these errors through its accommodation of—or, better, insistence on—variegated temporalities and forms of life.