The Intertwining of Religion and Nation: The Russian Administration’s Approach to Religious Life and National Identity

Excerpt: The relationship between religion and nation that is promoted by a state will have tremendous effects on religious minority groups. For religious minorities in Russia, the forms that are most utilized by the state are exclusion and strong internalism. The former leads the state to cherry-pick troublesome religious groups for exclusion, for failing to be ‘Russian’ enough, leading to serious impairment for religious groups that are singled out by the state as threats to the nation. With regards to the latter formulation, the Russian Orthodox Church is the basis for a strong internalist mechanism, determining who is in and who is out: those who are Russian are assumed to be Russian Orthodox (at least notionally); those who are Russian Orthodox are assumed to be Russian (or Russian kin and Russian controlled). It is the case, however, that this relationship will matter for other citizens, as well. Recall the Russian punk band Pussy Riot: while not typically paired with religious faithful in Russia, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Said Nursi, this band violates a central tenet of Russian life today—that Russian Orthodoxy is a critical identity for the nation, and those who ridicule this relationship will be quickly and decisively disciplined. For now, the Russian national identity is a tightly controlled identity, of chief importance to the current administration

Competition and Market Dynamics on the Russian Deposits Market

In the early transition era in Russia entry barriers for commercial banks were about absent. It resulted in the mushrooming of hundreds of small, poorly-endowed and inexperienced banks. In this paper we address the question whether the claimed benefits of low entry barriers - competition and market dynamics - have resulted. We use a sample of commercial saving banks for the 1994-97 period. We conclude that there were important mobility barriers and that the removal of entry barriers did not lead to intensified competition.market shares;banking;transition economies

Editorial

We hope you, our readers, find these reflections on the 30-year anniversary of the Great Transformation to be both edifying and fulfillin

networksis: A Package to Simulate Bipartite Graphs with Fixed Marginals Through Sequential Importance Sampling

The ability to simulate graphs with given properties is important for the analysis of social networks. Sequential importance sampling has been shown to be particularly effective in estimating the number of graphs adhering to fixed marginals and in estimating the null distribution of graph statistics. This paper describes the networksis package for R and how its simulate and simulate_sis functions can be used to address both of these tasks as well as generate initial graphs for Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations

Celebrating Maimonides in Cairo (1935):Jewish historiography, Islamic philosophy and the nahḍa

The year 1935 marked the 800th anniversary of the birth of the Jewish scholar Moses ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides. This article focuses on representations of Maimonides as a cultural hero during this anniversary year, taking as its central case the commemorations in Cairo. Specifically, the article examines Jewish historiography and discussions on the Jewish past in Egypt tied with debates on revival, commonly known as the nahḍa. It argues first of all that Egyptian Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals dominantly embraced Maimonides as a philosopher, to be studied in the context of Arabic and Islamic thought. Second, these intellectuals stressed the critical role that Jews and Islamic thought at large had played in the transmission of knowledge to the West. Third, for the Jewish historians who organised the celebrations, Maimonides symbolised the rich heritage of Jewish intellectual culture in the Islamic world, which they perceived to be in current decline and stagnation. Lastly, the celebrations were entangled with discussions on heritage and ownership, as will be shown by the case of Jews in Egypt debating ownership of the Cairo Genizah

Putting artificial intelligence into wearable human-machine interfaces – towards a generic, self-improving controller

The standard approach to creating a machine learning based controller is to provide users with a number of gestures that they need to make; record multiple instances of each gesture using specific sensors; extract the relevant sensor data and pass it through a supervised learning algorithm until the algorithm can successfully identify the gestures; map each gesture to a control signal that performs a desired outcome. This approach is both inflexible and time consuming. The primary contribution of this research was to investigate a new approach to putting artificial intelligence into wearable human-machine interfaces by creating a Generic, Self-Improving Controller. It was shown to learn two user-defined static gestures with an accuracy of 100% in less than 10 samples per gesture; three in less than 20 samples per gesture; and four in less than 35 samples per gesture. Pre-defined dynamic gestures were more difficult to learn. It learnt two with an accuracy of 90% in less than 6,000 samples per gesture; and four with an accuracy of 70% after 50,000 samples per gesture. The research has resulted in a number of additional contributions: • The creation of a source-independent hardware data capture, processing, fusion and storage tool for standardising the capture and storage of historical copies of data captured from multiple different sensors. • An improved Attitude and Heading Reference System (AHRS) algorithm for calculating orientation quaternions that is five orders of magnitude more precise. • The reformulation of the regularised TD learning algorithm; the reformulation of the TD learning algorithm applied the artificial neural network back-propagation algorithm; and the combination of the reformulations into a new, regularised TD learning algorithm applied to the artificial neural network back-propagation algorithm. • The creation of a Generic, Self-Improving Predictor that can use different learning algorithms and a Flexible Artificial Neural Network.Open Acces