Orthodoxy and political myths in Balkan national identities

This article analyses the relationship between Balkan national identities and the region's dominant religion: Eastern Orthodox Christianity. After examining the concept of ‘symphonia’ between Orthodoxy and politics that developed during the Byzantine Empire, this article argues that the political myths that have emerged from Orthodoxy are the most potent in the Balkan mythical imaginary. Political myths have a direct impact on contemporary politics developing a threefold structure: the sacralisation of politics; the perception of the nation as a divine manifestation; and, the construction of a divine realm on earth.     

欧盟安全治理的挑战

关于欧盟是否是一个有效的安全行为体,可以通过安全的三个职能:冲突预防、强制执行和平／维持和平、缔造和平,以及和平治理的三个核心组成部分:协调、管理、调节来评估。安全治理是一个有用的分析框架,它可以用来研究各种不同行为体之间的互动关系,而且对于概念化的欧盟安全政策制定也具有重要意义。     

Management of nature-based goods and services provisioning from the urban common: a pan-European perspective

The role of the urban common (i.e. shared space and resources) in sustainable provisioning of goods and services to city dwellers is discussed in this paper. Focusing on tree-based green infrastructure, the study scope includes three categories of provisioning (woody biomass, food/fibre, and non-timber forest products, i.e. NTFPs), alongside three categories of supporting services (fresh water replenishment, soil nutrient restoration, building preservation). As a first step, prospects of utilizing the urban common as facilitator of nature-based solution to the earmarked provisioning services are evaluated through dedicated literature survey and expert elicitation on perceived impact of environmental change triggers and management interventions (planning and/or governance). This is followed by a structured review of the state of affairs in four European cities (London, Amsterdam, Sofia, Ljubljana), representing different macro-geographical regions with distinct socio-economic drivers in managing these provisioning services. The pan-European expert elicitation exercise noted active management of the urban common as positively impacting on the performance of the majority of provisioning services, while environmental change impacts were found to be overriding and adversely influencing the provisioning of material resources (mainly NTFPs and woody biomass). The four-city case study highlighted some regional peculiarities in connecting the city dwellers to the urban common and identified the need to overcome socio-cultural barriers for enhancing pan-European best practice sharing in the management of goods and services provisioning. This is deemed essential to pave way for an emerging perspective on sustainable utilization of the urban common as an enabler for nature-based solution, making it fit for purpose in meeting the astronomical demands of future urban living.

     

Parallel sequential Monte Carlo for stochastic gradient-free nonconvex optimization

Statistics and Computing - We introduce and analyze a parallel sequential Monte Carlo methodology for the numerical solution of optimization problems that involve the minimization of a cost...     

Using restricted CCA for cross-language information retrieval

Canonical correlation analysis is a method of correlating linear relationship between two sets of variables. When not any linear combination of variables is allowed, restricted canonical correlation analysis is appropriate. The method was implemented with alternating least-squares and applied to the cross-language information retrieval on a dataset with officially translated and aligned documents in eight European languages.     

Physician behavior and conditional altruism: the effects of payment system and uncertain health benefit

This paper experimentally investigates the altruistic behavior of physicians and whether this behavior is affected by payment system and uncertainty in health outcome. Subjects in the experiment take on the role of physicians and decide on the provision of medical care for different types of patients, who are identical in all respects other than the degree to which a given level of medical treatment affects their health. We investigate physician altruism from the perspective of ethical principles, by categorizing physicians according to how well their treatment decisions align with different principles for priority setting. The experiment shows that many physicians are altruistic toward their patients but also that the degree of altruism varies across patients with different medical needs. We find a strong effect of payment system that is overall unaffected by the introduction of risk and ambiguity in patients’ health outcomes. There is, however, substantial heterogeneity across individuals, in particular under the capitation payment system where physicians’ responses to the introduction of uncertainty in patient health are modulated by their own generic risk and ambiguity preferences.

     

Paradoxes and Improvements in Interval Estimation

Cases where confidence sets are empty or include every possible parameter value are an embarrassment to standard theory and difficult to explain to students. To alleviate this problem, and as a convenient way of showing how each parameter value is ranked in view of the data, we propose to plot the confidence set for each possible level, called a confidence curve. Different confidence procedures then lead to different confidence curves. In standard situations involving distributions with a monotone likelihood ratio, we suggest using the confidence curve based on Spjøtvoll's acceptability function. For discrete distributions, this leads to an improvement over usual “exact” confidence intervals.     

On the convergence of two sequential Monte Carlo methods for maximum a posteriori sequence estimation and stochastic global optimization

This paper addresses the problem of maximum a posteriori (MAP) sequence estimation in general state-space models. We consider two algorithms based on the sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methodology (also known as particle filtering). We prove that they produce approximations of the MAP estimator and that they converge almost surely. We also derive a lower bound for the number of particles that are needed to achieve a given approximation accuracy. In the last part of the paper, we investigate the application of particle filtering and MAP estimation to the global optimization of a class of (possibly non-convex and possibly non-differentiable) cost functions. In particular, we show how to convert the cost-minimization problem into one of MAP sequence estimation for a state-space model that is “matched” to the cost of interest. We provide examples that illustrate the application of the methodology as well as numerical results.