Serbian Orthodoxy Between Two Worlds

Orthodoxy has, by the Providence of God, been placed between Western Christianity, and Sunni Islam. Church nationalism (phyletism) has always been present in political and linguistic nationalism in the former Yugoslavia. The relationship between Serbian Orthodoxy, with Islam and Western Christianity is not satisfactory. In order to become satisfactory, it would be important for the Orthodox Church to create a new theology which would, primarily, be a theological (Orthodox) response to the signs of the times. However, this has not become the reality as of yet

Dental Status of Victims from Batajnica’s Mass Graves

The aim of this paper is to present the post mortem dental evidence and dental health of the victims interred during 1999 in five grave pits at Batajnica near Belgrade. The investigated sample comprised 32 individuals with only maxillae preserved, 80 with mandible, and 260 individuals with both jaws. We have found high degree of enamel hypoplasia (25.89%), frequent signs of the severe forms of periodontal disease (18.55%), very high percent of antemortem tooth loss (31.48%), and evidence of edentate jaws in an early age of individuals. Amalgam was predominant material for tooth fillings; implants and non-metal ceramic crowns were not found, and three quaters of edentate individuals were found with full prostetic dentures. Despite the detailed postmortem dental analysis, antemortem dental charts were not collected. These individuals were identified by other forensic methods

God and immortality - second and third most important issue

Autor u ovom članku sagledava pitanje o Bogu i pitanje o čovjekovoj besmrtnosti kao čovjekovo drugo i treće najvažnije pitanje. Pitanje o čovjekovoj sreći smatra prvim i najvažnijim. Prema njegovu shvaćanju sva tri pitanja međusobno se prožimlju, ne isključujući se. Bez vjere u objavljenog Boga i vjerovanja u vlastitu besmrtnost čovjek neće moći doživjeti najdublju i najpotpuniju sreću. Stoga se ovo izlaganje isključivo tiče eshatološkog vremena i budućnosti. Posljedica činjenice, međutim, da čovjek postmoderne ne pridaje važnost navedenim pitanjima, jest da je on nesretno umjesto sretno biće. Osvrtom na Westergaardove karikature autor jasno pokazuje koliko su ova tri navedena pitanja, uz pitanje o Muhamedu, danas iznimno važna za islamskog čovjeka.In this article the author is dealing with the issue of God and the issue of human immortality as the man’s second and third most important issue. He finds that the issue of man’s happiness is the first and most important issue. As he sees it, all three issues mutually permeate, and do not mutually exclude. Without faith in God revealed and in his own immortality, man will not be able to experience the deepest and most complete happiness. Therefore, this paper is exclusively concerned with eschatological time and the future. However, the consequence of the fact that the post-modern man does not attach importance to the mentioned issues, is that instead he is happy, he is an unhappy being. Making reference to Westergaard’s cartoons, the author clearly shows how these three issues, including the issue of Mohammed, are extremely important today for the Islamic man

On judaism and jewishness

The author first discuss the interweaving of religious and national identity in Hebraism and then points out the specific quality of Jewish historical faith. Although there are, according to the author, great theological differences between Christianitv and rabbinical Judaism, the faith in one God is the fundamental community of both religions

Od jednog do drugog monoteizma

Polazeći od specifično kršćanskog zamišljanja Boga, autor u član- ku govori o dvjema vrstama monoteizma. Na jednoj se strani nalazi islamski (kuranski) i starozavetni monoteizam, a na drugoj se nalazi kršćanski trojstveni monoteizma. No i među kršćanima postoje razli- ke u gledanju na jednoga Boga. Tako, primjerice, u jednom od svojih čuvenih berlinskih predavanja, održanih pod naslovom “Bit kršćan- stva”, Adolf von Harnak kaže: “Ne Sin, nego samo Otac pripada Evan- đelju kako ga je naviještao Isus.” Polazeći od racionalnog razmišljanja prema kojem jedno nikad ne može biti troje, već uvijek ostaje jedno, trinitarno vjerovanje u Boga ne može se braniti racionalnim dokazima. Ono se dakle ne može opravdati pred našim umom. Budući da se Bog u Kuranu u samom sebi određuje drugačije negoli u hrišćanstvu, eto drugog razloga zbog čega islam ne prihvaća kršćansku vjeru u Boga

Od jednog do drugog monoteizma

Polazeći od specifično kršćanskog zamišljanja Boga, autor u član- ku govori o dvjema vrstama monoteizma. Na jednoj se strani nalazi islamski (kuranski) i starozavetni monoteizam, a na drugoj se nalazi kršćanski trojstveni monoteizma. No i među kršćanima postoje razli- ke u gledanju na jednoga Boga. Tako, primjerice, u jednom od svojih čuvenih berlinskih predavanja, održanih pod naslovom “Bit kršćan- stva”, Adolf von Harnak kaže: “Ne Sin, nego samo Otac pripada Evan- đelju kako ga je naviještao Isus.” Polazeći od racionalnog razmišljanja prema kojem jedno nikad ne može biti troje, već uvijek ostaje jedno, trinitarno vjerovanje u Boga ne može se braniti racionalnim dokazima. Ono se dakle ne može opravdati pred našim umom. Budući da se Bog u Kuranu u samom sebi određuje drugačije negoli u hrišćanstvu, eto drugog razloga zbog čega islam ne prihvaća kršćansku vjeru u Boga

Dynamic modeling of mean-reverting spreads for statistical arbitrage

Statistical arbitrage strategies, such as pairs trading and its generalizations, rely on the construction of mean-reverting spreads enjoying a certain degree of predictability. Gaussian linear state-space processes have recently been proposed as a model for such spreads under the assumption that the observed process is a noisy realization of some hidden states. Real-time estimation of the unobserved spread process can reveal temporary market inefficiencies which can then be exploited to generate excess returns. Building on previous work, we embrace the state-space framework for modeling spread processes and extend this methodology along three different directions. First, we introduce time-dependency in the model parameters, which allows for quick adaptation to changes in the data generating process. Second, we provide an on-line estimation algorithm that can be constantly run in real-time. Being computationally fast, the algorithm is particularly suitable for building aggressive trading strategies based on high-frequency data and may be used as a monitoring device for mean-reversion. Finally, our framework naturally provides informative uncertainty measures of all the estimated parameters. Experimental results based on Monte Carlo simulations and historical equity data are discussed, including a co-integration relationship involving two exchange-traded funds.Comment: 34 pages, 6 figures. Submitte

Diffractive Higgs Production by AdS Pomeron Fusion

The double diffractive Higgs production at central rapidity is formulated in terms of the fusion of two AdS gravitons/Pomerons first introduced by Brower, Polchinski, Strassler and Tan in elastic scattering. Here we propose a simple self-consistent holographic framework capable of providing phenomenologically compelling estimates of diffractive cross sections at the LHC. As in the traditional weak coupling approach, we anticipate that several phenomenological parameters must be tested and calibrated through factorization for a self-consistent description of other diffractive process such as total cross sections, deep inelastic scattering and heavy quark production in the central region.Comment: 53 pages, 8 figure

Robust regression for periodicity detection in non-uniformly sampled time-course gene expression data

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In practice many biological time series measurements, including gene microarrays, are conducted at time points that seem to be interesting in the biologist's opinion and not necessarily at fixed time intervals. In many circumstances we are interested in finding targets that are expressed periodically. To tackle the problems of uneven sampling and unknown type of noise in periodicity detection, we propose to use robust regression.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The aim of this paper is to develop a general framework for robust periodicity detection and review and rank different approaches by means of simulations. We also show the results for some real measurement data.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The simulation results clearly show that when the sampling of time series gets more and more uneven, the methods that assume even sampling become unusable. We find that M-estimation provides a good compromise between robustness and computational efficiency.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Since uneven sampling occurs often in biological measurements, the robust methods developed in this paper are expected to have many uses. The regression based formulation of the periodicity detection problem easily adapts to non-uniform sampling. Using robust regression helps to reject inconsistently behaving data points.</p> <p>Availability</p> <p>The implementations are currently available for Matlab and will be made available for the users of R as well. More information can be found in the web-supplement <abbrgrp><abbr bid="B1">1</abbr></abbrgrp>.</p

Analysis of a nonlinear importance sampling scheme for Bayesian parameter estimation in state-space models

The Bayesian estimation of the unknown parameters of state-space (dynamical) systems has received considerable attention over the past decade, with a handful of powerful algorithms being introduced. In this paper we tackle the theoretical analysis of the recently proposed nonlinear population Monte Carlo (NPMC). This is an iterative importance sampling scheme whose key features, compared to conventional importance samplers, are (i) the approximate computation of the importance weights (IWs) assigned to the Monte Carlo samples and (ii) the nonlinear transformation of these IWs in order to prevent the degeneracy problem that flaws the performance of conventional importance samplers. The contribution of the present paper is a rigorous proof of convergence of the nonlinear IS (NIS) scheme as the number of Monte Carlo samples, M, increases. Our analysis reveals that the NIS approximation errors converge to 0 almost surely and with the optimal Monte Carlo rate of M [superíndice - ­½]. Moreover, we prove that this is achieved even when the mean estimation error of the IWs remains constant, a property that has been termed exact approximation in the Markov chain Monte Carlo literature. We illustrate these theoretical results by means of a computer simulation example involving the estimation of the parameters of a state-space model typically used for target tracking.This research has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (projects TEC2015-69868-C2-1-R ADVENTURE and FIS2013-40653-P), the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (mobility award PRX15/00378) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Global (Grant Award no. N62909-15-1-2011)