Representation of Non-Religious and Atheistic Identities in a Highly Religious Society - Croatian Case

Since the beginning of the nineties and the collapse of communism, non-religiosity and atheism in Croatia became socially non-desirable and non-conformist positions. In sociological terms, however, these phenomena have been largely overlooked, since scholars have focused mainly on trends in religiosity and public role of religion. The aim of this paper is to get the first scientific insight into the representation of individual non-religious and atheistic identities among the members of the organizations that gather non-religious people and atheists. The paper seeks to answer specific research questions: How are non-religious and atheistic identities presented at the level of everyday life in Croatian society? Do non-religious people and atheists perceive stigma? Which management techniques (if any) are employed in this process? The paper is based on data collected from semi-structured interviews with 22 people. The findings indicate that the interviewed members of non-religious and atheistic organizations perceive their position as stigmatized and that they use various management techniques (passing, covering, selective and voluntarily disclosure) in order to navigate through their day-to-day life. The feeling of stigmatization and discrimination arises from the ubiquity of religion in the public space and from the politicization of issues of (non-)religiosity. Furthermore, interviewees tend to disregard and mitigate occasional situations in which the examples of discriminatory behavior are more pronounced

Balancing noise and plasticity in eukaryotic gene expression

Coupling the control of expression stochasticity (noise) to the ability of expression change (plasticity) can alter gene function and influence adaptation. A number of factors, such as transcription re-initiation, strong chromatin regulation or genome neighboring organization, underlie this coupling. However, these factors do not necessarily combine in equivalent ways and strengths in all genes. Can we identify then alternative architectures that modulate in distinct ways the linkage of noise and plasticity? Here we first show that strong chromatin regulation, commonly viewed as a source of coupling, can lead to plasticity without noise. The nature of this regulation is relevant too, with plastic but noiseless genes being subjected to general activators whereas plastic and noisy genes experience more specific repression. Contrarily, in genes exhibiting poor transcriptional control, it is translational efficiency what separates noise from plasticity, a pattern related to transcript length. This additionally implies that genome neighboring organization -as modifier- appears only effective in highly plastic genes. In this class, we confirm bidirectional promoters (bipromoters) as a configuration capable to reduce coupling by abating noise but also reveal an important trade-off, since bipromoters also decrease plasticity. This presents ultimately a paradox between intergenic distances and modulation, with short intergenic distances both associated and disassociated to noise at different plasticity levels. Balancing the coupling among different types of expression variability appears as a potential shaping force of genome regulation and organization. This is reflected in the use of different control strategies at genes with different sets of functional constraints

APPLICATION OF A SPECTRAL ANGULAR MAPPER ON THE MULTISPECTRAL DAEDALUS IMAGES IMPROVED CLASSIFICATION QUALITY OF THE INDICATORS OF THE MINEFIELDS

In a frame of the project »Space and airborne Mined Area Reduction Tools – SMART” (European Commission, IST-2000-25044), was used set of multispectral images acquired by scanner Daedalus (DLR, Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany). These images were classified with different methods at the pixel level (RMA, ULB – Brussels, Belgium) and at the region level (ULB – Brussels, Belgium). The representative set of the training and validation patches containing the ground truth data was provided and used. The relevant classes in the project are related to the likelihood of the landmine presence (indicators of mine presence – IMP) and to the likelihood of the landmine absence (the indicators of mine absence IMA), and are not ordinary land cover and land use classes. These classes were defined by iterative research that finished by approved list of IMP and IMA, that depend on the context. The detection of several important IMP and IMA was not possible without use of the multi-band polarymetric synthetic aperture radar data (E-SAR, DLR). The goal of the current work was to improve classification quality of IMA if only multispectral (Daedalus) images are available. In the paper we report about improvement of the IMA detection by supervised classification methods (Mahalanobis, Maximum likelyhood, Minimum distance to mean) if the information obtained by the Spectral Angular Mapping (SAM) method and a priori knowledge about dimensions and shapes of ther fields were fuzed. The most important omission errors of IMA were significantly reduced, and the application of SAM method was approved as useful for the considered problem

Metaverse: A Young Gamer's Perspective

When developing technologies for the Metaverse, it is important to understand the needs and requirements of end users. Relatively little is known about the specific perspectives on the use of the Metaverse by the youngest audience: children ten and under. This paper explores the Metaverse from the perspective of a young gamer. It examines their understanding of the Metaverse in relation to the physical world and other technologies they may be familiar with, looks at some of their expectations of the Metaverse, and then relates these to the specific multimedia signal processing (MMSP) research challenges. The perspectives presented in the paper may be useful for planning more detailed subjective experiments involving young gamers, as well as informing the research on MMSP technologies targeted at these users.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, IEEE MMSP 202

The World of the Bible: Indispensable Context in the Study of the Old Testament

The Bible was not originally written for the modern reader, but the testimony of the Church is that it continues to speak God’s word to readers/hearers today. However, many modern Bible readers come across texts that need further explanation because the biblical authors did not offer clarification of their writings. They assumed the readers of their time were familiar with the background and could understand the reported events without further explanation. To achieve a “legit” interpretation of Old Testament texts, we first need to understand Scripture correctly, meaning that the biblical text must be read in its narrower and broader context. Only within a context does it become clear what the author meant to say. The main argument of this article is to exhibit that the Bible can only be fully understood against the backdrop of the Ancient Near East (ANE). The broader context consists of the knowledge of surrounding nations during Bible times (i.e., Hebrew Bible). By examining ANE texts and archeological findings we achieve a more complete and enriched comprehension of a given scriptural text or passage. This article exhibits through some concrete examples how archeological findings, inscriptions, and Ancient Near East texts can aid in understanding the broader context of the Old Testament world. In return, the wider context of the Bible world can enlighten or clarify a difficult, incomprehensible, or ambiguous biblical text and henceforth scriptural interpretation become more accurate and closer to the original message and meaning

The Living Word

The Bible, which is indisputable regarded as the inspired word of God, is written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Man, as an earthen vessel, was used by the Holy Spirit to pen the revelation of God’s truth in Jesus Christ. The Holy Scriptures are “God breathed” words to the Church and are key in interpreting and fulfilling God’s telos for creation. This write-up wishes to emphasize and survey the critical role of the Holy Spirit in the Scriptures. Due to the inspiring role of the Spirit, the word of God is not a dead letter, rather a life-giving word that spills new life into the believer and the Church. Precisely this connection of Spirit and letter marks the Holy Scripture as living and active and conveys the desired transformative dimension for the individual believer and the faith community

Advantage of use of activated flux-cored wire instead of solid wire with the mag welding process from the mechanical properties aspect

The objective of this paper is the analysis and evaluation of the quality of the new flux-cored wire designed for the MAG welding process that was developed and produced using special laboratory equipment. Experimental welding was performed with the new activated flux-cored wire and classic solid wire with changing of welding parameters and shielding gas composition (100 % CO2 and gas mixtures of Ar + CO2 + O2)

Authorship of the Pentateuch

This piece is a concise summary of the historical and contemporary development of Pentateuch studies in Old Testament Theology. This article aims to provide information on the possible confirmation of Mosaic authorship. The purpose is to examine how the Documentary Hypothesis, Fragment and Supplemental Hypotheses, Form and Traditio-Historical Criticism, Canonical and Literary Criticism have helped to reveal or identify the identity of the author of the Torah. To better understand the mentioned hypotheses, this article presents a brief description of the J, E, D, and P sources