Publications

The article discusses the social philosophy of vegans. Vegans charge moral vegetarians with inconsistency: if eating animals is a participation in a wrong practice, consuming eggs and dairy products is likewise wrong because it is a cooperation with systematic exploitation. Vegans say that even the more humane parts of the contemporary dairy and egg industry rely on immoral practices, and that therefore moral vegetarianism is too small a step in the right direction. According to vegans, moral vegetarians have conceded that animals are not means; that human pleasure cannot override animal suffering and death; that some industries ought to be banned; and that all this carries practical implications as to their own actions. Yet they stop short of a full realization of what speciesist culture involves and what living a moral life in such an environment requires. Moral vegans distinguish themselves from moral vegetarians in accepting the practical prescriptions of altogether avoiding benefiting from animal exploitation, not just of avoiding benefiting from the killing. Vegans take the killing to be merely one aspect of the systematic exploitation of animals. The moral logic of veganism appears sound. The viability of moral vegetarianism depends on the ability to establish a meaningful difference between animal-derived products which they boycott, and those that they consume. Moral vegetarians agree that the egg and dairy industry has to be radically reformed.

The auxiliary-field Monte Carlo (AFMC) is a method for computing ground-state and excited-state energies and other properties of electrons in molecules. For a given basis set, AFMC is an approximation to full-configuration interaction and the accuracy is determined predominantly by an inverse temperature "\beta" parameter. A considerable amount of the dynamical correlation energy is recovered even at small values of \beta. Yet, nondynamical correlation energy is inefficiently treated by AFMC. This is because the statistical error grows with \beta, warranting increasing amount of Monte Carlo sampling. A recently introduced multideterminant variant of AFMC is studied, and the method can be tuned by balancing the sizes of the determinantal space and the \beta parameter with respect to a predefined target accuracy. The well tempered AFMC is considerably more efficient than a naive AFMC. We demonstrate the principles on dissociating hydrogen molecule and torsion of ethylene where we calculate the (unoptimized) torsional barrier and the vertical singlet-triplet

From "Traitor" to "Saint":  Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović in Serbian Public Memory. Jerusalem, SICSA

We examined the orthographic and phonological computation of words and nonwords focusing on the pseudohomophone test in masked presentations. The priming manipulation consisted of gradually increasing or decreasing the orthographic and phonological similarity between the primes and the targets. We employed a psychophysical approach, presenting subjects with a large number of trials, while varying the parameters of exposure duration and luminance. The results suggest that phonological priming effects for brief exposure durations are robust, not fragile, and can be demonstrated for words as well as for nonwords. Moreover, the effects are not restricted to a narrow window of energy, but are revealed across a wide range of SOAs and luminance conditions. However, since the computed phonological code is initially coarse-grained, substantial phonological contrasts are required to obtain phonological effects under masked presentation.