St. John Chrysostom and St. Thomas Aquinas on Private Property

The theological reflection on private property by two great theologians in Church history St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and his great predecessor St. John Chrysostom (347-407) are quite different because of not only long chronological periods, but also because of different epochs and their pastoral and cultural experience as well. The divergence of their exegesis and spiritual reflection is very noticeable. Besides this, we can also see the contrast in their interior interpretation of verses of Holy Scripture which concern with social issues, because of two different Church traditions – Eastern and Western. The doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas on private property, contained in his Summa Theologica, is a consequence of Aristotelean mentality and non-idealistic Patristic scholar system. On the contrary, St. John Chrysostom is mostly representive of the Stoic philosophical school and Apologetic theologian style of discussion. He is a supporter of the idea of the communion of all property and all possessions. Nevertheless, the theological arguments of both theologians are prominent and their biblical exegesis on social issues was in high demand. The reflection on private property based on the teachings of St. John Chrysostom and St. Thomas Aquinas and the comparative analysis is strongly needed in our modern society, which has social challenges very close to those in the ancient world: wealth and poverty which confronts us with the obligation of the righteous division of goods on earth. The problem of private property should lead us to the Christian practical answer in our global world.-Św. Jan Chryzostom i św. Tomasz z Akwinu o własności prywatnejRefleksja teologiczna na temat własności prywatnej w pismach dwóch wielkich teologów w historii Kościoła, św. Tomasza z Akwinu (1225–1274) i jego wielkiego poprzednika św. Jana Chryzostoma (347–407) pomaga nam zrozumieć na nowo dwa rodzaje chrześcijańskich społeczeństw, w których żyli ci dwaj święci. Ludzkość zawsze szukała właściwej odpowiedzi na pytania natury społeczno-kulturowej, która bezpośrednio dotyczy życia ludzkiego. Tak więc refleksja nad bogactwem i ubóstwem, sprawiedliwością społeczną i znaczeniem zasobów materialnych oraz innych kwestii filozoficznych i religijnych daje możliwość stworzenia nowego rodzaju społeczeństwa i nadania priorytetu jego wartościom. Stąd reprezentanci dwóch różnych okresów, dwóch tradycji filozoficznych i egzegetycznych tworzą swoje refleksje na rożne sposoby: Jan Chryzostom jako wybitny kaznodzieja i przywódca duchowy, który był bardzo bliski problemom wiernych i Tomasz z Akwinu jako znakomity uczony, dominikanin, doktor Kościoła katolickiego, którego teologia przez wiele lat wpływała na rozwój społeczeństwa. Ich poglądy na temat własności prywatnej są rożne, ale razem mogą stworzyć wielką mozaikę, opartą na nauczaniu Chrystusa w Biblii. Ich spojrzenie na własność prywatną powinno prowadzić nas nie tylko do głębokiej refleksji teoretycznej, ale także do jasnej chrześcijańskiej odpowiedzi na kwestie społeczne i duchowe

On a finite state representation of GL(n,Z)GL(n,\mathbb{Z})

It is examined finite state automorphisms of regular rooted trees constructed to represent groups $GL(n,\mathbb{Z})$. The number of states of automorphisms that correspond to elementary matrices is computed. Using the representation of $GL(2,\mathbb{Z})$ over an alphabet of size $4$ a finite state representation of the free group of rank $2$ over binary alphabet is constructed

Semitransitive and transitive subsemigroups of the inverse symmetric semigroups

We classify minimal transitive subsemigroups of the finitary inverse symmetric semigroup modulo the classification of minimal transitive subgroups of finite symmetric groups; and semitransitive subsemigroups of the finite inverse symmetric semigroup of the minimal cardinality modulo the classification of transitive subgroups of the minimal cardinality of finite symmetric groups.Comment: 16 page

Superlinear Summation of Information in Premotor Neuron Pairs

Whether premotor/motor neurons encode information in terms of spiking frequency or by their relative time of firing, which may display synchronization, is still undetermined. To address this issue, we used an information theory approach to analyze neuronal responses recorded in the premotor (area F5) and primary motor (area F1) cortices of macaque monkeys under four different conditions of visual feedback during hand grasping. To evaluate the sensitivity of spike timing correlation between single neurons, we investigated the stimulus dependent synchronization in our population of pairs. We first investigated the degree of correlation of trial-to-trial fluctuations in response strength between neighboring neurons for each condition, and second estimated the stimulus dependent synchronization by means of an information theoretical approach. We compared the information conveyed by pairs of simultaneously recorded neurons with the sum of information provided by the respective individual cells. The information transmission across pairs of cells in the primary motor cortex seems largely independent, whereas information transmission across pairs of premotor neurons is summed superlinearly. The brain could take advantage of both the accuracy provided by the independency of F1 and the synergy allowed by the superlinear information population coding in F5, distinguishing thus the generalizing role of F5Instituto de Física de Líquidos y Sistemas Biológico

Efficient Oblivious Transfer Protocols based on White-Box Cryptography

Oblivious transfer protocol is an important cryptographic primitive having numerous applications and particularly playing an essential role in secure multiparty computation protocols. On the other hand existing oblivious transfer protocols are based on computationally expensive public-key operations which remains the main obstacle for employing such protocols in practical applications. In this paper a novel approach for designing oblivious transfer protocols is introduced based on the idea of replacing public-key operations by white-box cryptography techniques. As a result oblivious transfer protocols based on white-box cryptography run several times faster and require less communication bandwidth compared with the existing protocols

Automatic online spike sorting with singular value decomposition and fuzzy C-mean clustering

Background: Understanding how neurons contribute to perception, motor functions and cognition requires the reliable detection of spiking activity of individual neurons during a number of different experimental conditions. An important problem in computational neuroscience is thus to develop algorithms to automatically detect and sort the spiking activity of individual neurons from extracellular recordings. While many algorithms for spike sorting exist, the problem of accurate and fast online sorting still remains a challenging issue.Results: Here we present a novel software tool, called FSPS (Fuzzy SPike Sorting), which is designed to optimize: (i) fast and accurate detection, (ii) offline sorting and (iii) online classification of neuronal spikes with very limited or null human intervention. The method is based on a combination of Singular Value Decomposition for fast and highly accurate pre-processing of spike shapes, unsupervised Fuzzy C-mean, high-resolution alignment of extracted spike waveforms, optimal selection of the number of features to retain, automatic identification the number of clusters, and quantitative quality assessment of resulting clusters independent on their size. After being trained on a short testing data stream, the method can reliably perform supervised online classification and monitoring of single neuron activity. The generalized procedure has been implemented in our FSPS spike sorting software (available free for non-commercial academic applications at the address: http://www.spikesorting.com) using LabVIEW (National Instruments, USA). We evaluated the performance of our algorithm both on benchmark simulated datasets with different levels of background noise and on real extracellular recordings from premotor cortex of Macaque monkeys. The results of these tests showed an excellent accuracy in discriminating low-amplitude and overlapping spikes under strong background noise. The performance of our method is competitive with respect to other robust spike sorting algorithms.Conclusions: This new software provides neuroscience laboratories with a new tool for fast and robust online classification of single neuron activity. This feature could become crucial in situations when online spike detection from multiple electrodes is paramount, such as in human clinical recordings or in brain-computer interfaces.Instituto de Física La Plat

Володимир Васильович Кириченко

The paper is dedicated to the memory of an outstanding ukrainian mathematician and teacher, one of the founders of Kyiv school of representation theory and ring theory, professor of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv Volodymyr Vasylovych Kyrychenko. Volodymyr Vasylovych was born in 1942 in Penza. He graduated Kyiv University with honors in 1964. He defended his PhD thesis “Representations of hereditary, completely decomposable and Bass orders” under the supervision of D.K. Faddeev. He defended his habilitation “Modules and structural theory of rings” in 1986. He started to work at Kyiv University as an assistant of the Algebra and Mathematical Logic Department in 1967. Since then he served as an Associate Professor and Professor of the Algebra and Mathematical Logic Department. He was the head of the Geometry Department from 1988 till 2016. His main scientific results lay in the field of structural ring theory. In particular, he introduced the notion of the quiver for some special casses of rings and developed the structural theory of hereditary semiserial semidistributive rings. He is the author of about 250 scientific papers and 5 fundamental monographies. In his monographies the theory of semiperfect rings is presented by means of correspond- ing quivers. The monography “Finite dimensional algebras” written jointly with professor Y. Drozd is regarded one of the classical works in algebra and translated from Russian to Chineese, English and Spanish. He was an outstanding teacher and 36 PhD thesis were defended under his supervision. His lectures on analytical geometry and ring theory were always top ranked among students. Professor Kyrychenko was one of the founders of the journal “Algebra and Discrete Mathematics”. He was an editor of a couple of mathematical journals. In 1997 he was one of the founders of the series of international algebraic conferences in Ukraine that were conducted every two years. Since that he was one of the main organizers of each of them.Статтю присвячено пам’ятi видатного українського математика i педагога, одного iз засновникiв київської школи теорiї зображень i теорiї кiлець, професора Київського нацiонального унiверситету iменi Тараса Шевченка Володимира Васильовича Кириченка

Duszpasterstwo w służbie Królestwa Bożego – bł. ks. Emilian Kowcz (1884–1944)

Artykuł ukazuje działalność duszpasterską błogosławionego męczennika obozu koncentracyjnego „Majdanek” Emiliana Kowcza (1884–1944), kapłana Ukraińskiej Cerkwi Grecko-Katolickiej, uwzględniając cztery płaszczyzny pastoralnego zaangażowania Kościoła na rzecz budowania Królestwa Bożego: martyrii, liturgii, diakonii oraz koinonii. Działalność „proboszcza Majdanka” obejmuje jego długoletnie zaangażowanie jako duszpasterza w różnych parafi ach (1911–1942) oraz posługę pasterską w warunkach więziennych w latach 1942–1944: najpierw we lwowskim więzieniu, a później jako więźnia obozu koncentracyjnego „Majdanek” koło Lublina. W tekście została przedstawiona sylwetka ks. Kowcza jako utalentowanego kaznodziei, który dbał o wzrost wiary oraz wysoki poziom moralności swojej trzody, odważnie głosząc prawdę Chrystusową i potwierdzając ją swoim przykładem. Poprzez słowo pocieszał, pokrzepiał oraz umacniał swoich wiernych w trudnych czasach. Czynności liturgiczne sprawował wiernie i gorliwie. Jego postawa była heroiczna, o czym świadczą liczne przypadki udzielenia przez niego chrztu wielu Żydom w czasie ich prześladowania przez niemieckich nazistów, wskutek czego poniósł śmierć męczeńską. Posługa charytatywna wymagała od ks. Emiliana wielkiego zaangażowania ze względu na konieczność udzielania wsparcia materialnego ubogim i potrzebującym: uchodźcom, sierotom, wdowom oraz więźniom. Bł. Emilian Kowcz starał się również o budowanie i wzrost wspólnoty wierzących w Chrystusa w duchu koinonii, kształtując w nich postawy nacechowane solidarnością, braterstwem oraz miłością do Boga i bliźniego

The Liturgical Inspiration as a Source for the Preaching in Orthodox Church

W tradycji prawosławnej głoszenie słowa Bożego jest powiązane z czynnościami liturgicznymi, a w związku z tym z przestrzenią sakralną. Homilia, która jest głoszona podczas sprawowania Boskiej Liturgii, jest w pełni aktem sakramentalnym. Jego celem jest dokonanie przemiany w życiu człowieka dzięki doświadczeniu sacrum. W artykule zostało omówione zagadnienie symbiozy liturgii i homilii w tradycji prawosławnej. W zaprezentowanej refleksji teologicznopastoralnej wskazano ich wzajemne wpływy. Nadrzędnym celem artykułu jest odpowiedź na pytanie: jak kontekst liturgiczno-sakralny może stać się dla kaznodziei źródłem odnowy treści głoszonego słowa.The process of preaching the word of God in the Orthodox Church tradition is linked with the liturgy and sacred space. The preaching of homily during the Divine Liturgy is a sacramental act. Due to sacred space, which could be an inspiration for a preaching, homily can cause converting the congregation. The author considers in the paper about the right place for the preaching in the Orthodox church liturgy. The author pointed also out the mutual influence between homily, sacred space and liturgy. The quoted conclusions can renewal preaching in the Orthodox church tradition