Frederica interviews Fr. Martin Ritsi, executive director of the Orthodox Christian Mission Center.

On Forgiveness Sunday, Holy Ascension Orthodox Church was visited by missionary James Hargrave. James serves with the Orthodox Christian Mission Center in Tanzania. Fr. John Parker interviews James about his work there.

Fr. John Parker traveled to Romania and sat down with OCMC missionary Floyd Frantz who works with the Church to help people with addictions.

In this episode, we join Fr. John Parker at a fundraising dinner for the OCMC sponsored by the DC Metro Area Pan-Orthodox Missions Council. Fr. John's keynote address was entitled, "Here I Am, Send Me: How Every Christian can Answer the Great Commission."

Want to travel and serve the Church at the same time? Then consider joining one of the many OCMC Mission Teams this summer and serve in places like Alaska, Albania, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Kenya, Romania, South Africa, Tanzania, or Uganda.

Sunday, March 9, not only marks the beginning of Great Lent but it is also designated as Mission Sunday for 2008. Listen to our interview with Fr. Martin Ritsi and be encouraged by the missionary endeavors of the Orthodox Christian Mission Center.

A conversation with Kenneth Kidd from the Orthodox Christian Mission Center about the training OCMC provides on the mission field. You can support this work by going to the OCMC web site.

On a new Ancient Faith Presents, Bobby Maddex interviews Andy Lekos, the Mission Teams Director of the Orthodox Christian Mission Center (OCMC), about some exciting new missions opportunities. Will you answer the call?

Ancient Faith Radio presents Fr. Martin Ritsi speaking at the 2010 Orthodox Christian Mission Center benefit, sponsored by OCMC Mission Team Chicago. Fr. Martin is the Executive Director of the Orthodox Christian Mission Center and a commissioner on the World Council of Churches’ Commission on World Missions and Evangelism. The benefit was held on February 11, 2010, at St. John the Baptist Greek Orthodox Church in Des Plaines, Illinois.

Bobby Maddex checks in with Andy Lekos of the Orthodox Christian Mission Center about a recent OCMC mission trip to Kenya. The two also talk about other upcoming missions opportunities.

Ancient Faith Radio presents His Eminence Archbishop Makarios of Kenya speaking at the 2015 Orthodox Christian Mission Center benefit, sponsored by OCMC Mission Team Chicago. The benefit was held on February 19 at St. John the Baptist Greek Orthodox Church in Des Plaines, Illinois.

Bobby Maddex interviews Teresa Duro, an OCMC missionary to Albania who needs your support.

Ancient Faith Radio welcomes the Executive Director of the Orthodox Christian Missions Center, Fr. Martin Ritsi, to our studio. The phone number for OCMC was misstated in the interview. The actual number is 1-800-GO-FORTH.

The World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) is looking to hire a Postdoctoral Scientist as part of the Nippon Foundation – University of British Columbia Nereus Program (www.nereusprogram.org). In association with the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, this international collaboration is focused on the prediction of future global ocean fisheries, and will contribute to global sustainable fisheries and ocean management.

The role: The primary research focus of this position is to work in collaboration with UNEP-WCMC, Department of Geography, Cambridge University, and other partners on the Nippon Foundation – UBC Nereus Program to research the drivers of change in productivity in critical marine and coastal ecosystems and their impacts on fisheries-related ecosystem services.

Key responsibilities: The post holder will build upon the work of a previous post-doctoral scientist to simulate global patterns of marine ecosystem structure and function with an emphasis on fisheries production and food security. Specifically, they will improve the ecological realism of an existing dynamic ecosystem model recently published by WCMC and Microsoft Research (the Madingley model, www.madingleymodel.org) – extending the representation of climate and incorporating data on fishing pressure.

The candidate: The successful candidate will hold a PhD in marine or coastal ecology, or a related discipline with a strong emphasis on spatial analysis and modelling. They will have extensive knowledge of and experience in mathematical ecosystem modelling, programming and spatial statistics. They will also have carried out significant research at the global scale and will hold a proven record of academic performance. Furthermore, they will have an understanding of the essential characteristics of successful partnership-building and will be able to demonstrate the ability to work collaboratively and internationally.

Closing date: 2014-11-28

More information available in the ortiginal job offer: http://www.unep-wcmc.org/vacancies/postdoctoral-scientist-ad861

For the first time, a composite map of the world’s ecosystem assets has been produced, covering both marine and terrestrial realms. A report for the UNEP Division of Early Warning and Assessment by UNEP-WCMC presents global maps of assets such as biodiversity, freshwater resources and soil quality.

Natural capital is fundamental to human well-being. According to the Convention on Biological Diversity, at least 40 per cent of the world’s economy and 80 per cent of the needs of the poor are derived from biological resources. We are now facing a problem where natural capital has been harvested and degraded at a rate that threatens to undermine our well-being and future economic growth.

In their latest report UNEP-WCMC have combined information about key ecosystem assets into global maps covering terrestrial and marine realms. The assets included are freshwater resources, soil quality, organic carbon, terrestrial and marine biodiversity, and global fish catch (as a proxy for marine fish stocks). The report builds on a considerable body of work in the fields of natural capital accounting and the mapping of ecosystem services.

To read more and download the full report, please follow the link: http://www.unep-wcmc.org/news/towards-a-global-map-of-natural-capital

• Assistant Programme Officer – Marine Digital Products (AD 916) Deadline: 5^th February 2016
• Assistant Programme Officer (AD 922) Deadline: 5^th February 2016

(This post is by Charles) Art Owen (Stanford) read our paper on nesting Rhat to assess convergence in the many-short-chains regime of MCMC. He made a lot of great comments and asked some clarification questions. Notably: It wasn’t clear to me … Continue reading →

Luiz Ricardo Abreu Melo
Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 152 (), 5373-5380.
Abstract, references and article information

Longtime SOLIDWORKS and COSMOS customer reduces costs and time to market

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) has developed a robust CMC (Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls) Framework to enhance the likelihood of successful vaccine development. This Framework serves as a comprehensive guide, aiding developers in building effective strategies to overcome the challenges posed by the different phases of vaccine development, including the ones often referred to as the "valleys of death". The Framework lists stage-appropriate deliverables, categorized and refined, spanning five key areas: manufacturing process, formulation and stability, analytics, supply chain, and compliance. By emphasizing the critical aspects of CMC development, CEPI's objective is to expedite the progression of vaccine candidates from research to deployment, reducing delays, mitigating risks, and optimizing the overall development process, all while upholding uncompromising quality standards, ultimately increasing the probability of success.

IEEE / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Incorporated

Guanyang Wang.

Source: Electronic Journal of Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 1690--1706.

Abstract:
Uniform sampling of binary matrix with fixed margins is an important and difficult problem in statistics, computer science, ecology and so on. The well-known swap algorithm would be inefficient when the size of the matrix becomes large or when the matrix is too sparse/dense. Here we propose the Rectangle Loop algorithm, a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm to sample binary matrices with fixed margins uniformly. Theoretically the Rectangle Loop algorithm is better than the swap algorithm in Peskun’s order. Empirically studies also demonstrates the Rectangle Loop algorithm is remarkablely more efficient than the swap algorithm.

The horseshoe prior is frequently employed in Bayesian analysis of high-dimensional models, and has been shown to achieve minimax optimal risk properties when the truth is sparse. While optimization-based algorithms for the extremely popular Lasso and elastic net procedures can scale to dimension in the hundreds of thousands, algorithms for the horseshoe that use Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for computation are limited to problems an order of magnitude smaller. This is due to high computational cost per step and growth of the variance of time-averaging estimators as a function of dimension. We propose two new MCMC algorithms for computation in these models that have significantly improved performance compared to existing alternatives. One of the algorithms also approximates an expensive matrix product to give orders of magnitude speedup in high-dimensional applications. We prove guarantees for the accuracy of the approximate algorithm, and show that gradually decreasing the approximation error as the chain extends results in an exact algorithm. The scalability of the algorithm is illustrated in simulations with problem size as large as $N=5,000$ observations and $p=50,000$ predictors, and an application to a genome-wide association study with $N=2,267$ and $p=98,385$. The empirical results also show that the new algorithm yields estimates with lower mean squared error, intervals with better coverage, and elucidates features of the posterior that were often missed by previous algorithms in high dimensions, including bimodality of posterior marginals indicating uncertainty about which covariates belong in the model.

Kushal K. Dey, Sourabh Bhattacharya.

Source: Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics, Volume 33, Number 2, 222--266.

Abstract:
Transformation based Markov Chain Monte Carlo (TMCMC) was proposed by Dutta and Bhattacharya ( Statistical Methodology 16 (2014) 100–116) as an efficient alternative to the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm, especially in high dimensions. The main advantage of this algorithm is that it simultaneously updates all components of a high dimensional parameter using appropriate move types defined by deterministic transformation of a single random variable. This results in reduction in time complexity at each step of the chain and enhances the acceptance rate. In this paper, we first provide a brief review of the optimal scaling theory for various existing MCMC approaches, comparing and contrasting them with the corresponding TMCMC approaches.The optimal scaling of the simplest form of TMCMC, namely additive TMCMC , has been studied extensively for the Gaussian proposal density in Dey and Bhattacharya (2017a). Here, we discuss diffusion-based optimal scaling behavior of additive TMCMC for non-Gaussian proposal densities—in particular, uniform, Student’s $t$ and Cauchy proposals. Although we could not formally prove our diffusion result for the Cauchy proposal, simulation based results lead us to conjecture that at least the recipe for obtaining general optimal scaling and optimal acceptance rate holds for the Cauchy case as well. We also consider diffusion based optimal scaling of TMCMC when the target density is discontinuous. Such non-regular situations have been studied in the case of Random Walk Metropolis Hastings (RWMH) algorithm by Neal and Roberts ( Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability 13 (2011) 583–601) using expected squared jumping distance (ESJD), but the diffusion theory based scaling has not been considered. We compare our diffusion based optimally scaled TMCMC approach with the ESJD based optimally scaled RWM with simulation studies involving several target distributions and proposal distributions including the challenging Cauchy proposal case, showing that additive TMCMC outperforms RWMH in almost all cases considered.

The Rosenbrock function is an ubiquitous benchmark problem for numerical optimisation, and variants have been proposed to test the performance of Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms. In this work we discuss the two-dimensional Rosenbrock density, its current $n$-dimensional extensions, and their advantages and limitations. We then propose a new extension to arbitrary dimensions called the Hybrid Rosenbrock distribution, which is composed of conditional normal kernels arranged in such a way that preserves the key features of the original kernel. Moreover, due to its structure, the Hybrid Rosenbrock distribution is analytically tractable and possesses several desirable properties, which make it an excellent test model for computational algorithms.

PUNE: The anti-encroachment squad of the Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) on Monday demolished an unauthorized construction in Akurdi. Shirish Poreddy, spokesperson of the PCMC’s engineering department, said the razed construction had ground plus three floors and covered a total area of 4,500 sq ft. Executive engineer Ramdas Tambe supervised the drive. The PCMC has demolished a total of 27 unauthorized constructions within the municipal limits in the past one month. The other 26 razed constructions covered a total area of 18,000 sq ft. Out of that 19 structures were built in March 2012, while the remaining are older constructions. “The civic body has been conducting the demolition drive against […]

According to Deputy Minister of Construction Nguyen Viet Sinh, Vietnam will have at least 3 smart cities in 3 key economic regions: North, Central and South. Thus, by the next 6 years, Hanoi, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City will become smart cities.

The asking prices of apartments in both central and non-central districts of Hanoi are 20-40% lower than ones in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), according to data by Batdongsan.com.vn.

On October 15, Batdongsan.com.vn released Hanoi Real Estate Market Report for Q3/2019, reporting that the asking price and growth rate of Hanoi market are lower than that of Ho Chi Minh City.

According to Batdongsan.com.vn’s real estate market Q3-2019, Ho Chi Minh City’s District 1 saw the highest housing listing prices in the third quarter due to limited supply.

Asking price of apartments in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) rose by 11.8 percent on average in the third quarter (Q3) of 2019, while rents increased by only 5.4 percent.

In the third quarter (Q3) of this year, Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) saw no new supply of affordable housing entering the market. Low profit margin has made this segment unattractive to housing developers.

The low supply of traditional office space expanding in central districts of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) has lead to the growth of coworking spaces, or flexible office spaces there.