SHVOT AND ISHVUT: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ARMENIAN LOWER MYTHOLOGICAL CHARACTERS

-This study was conducted to determine the comparative effects of synchronous and asynchronous instructional approach on College of Education students’ achievement and interest in Electrical Technology. Quasi-experimental research design was adopted. Two research questions and two hypotheses tested at .05 level of significance guided the study. The population of the study comprised of all the 190 final year students offering Electrical technology as a major course in Colleges of Education under study. The instruments used for data collection were Electrical Technology Cognitive Achievement Test (ETCAT) and Electrical Technology Interest Inventory (ETII). Similarly, lesson plans were developed and subjected to face validity by three experts. The reliability of the instrument was determined using the Pearson Product Moment Correlational Coefficient and was found to be 0.85. The research questions were answered using Mean and Standard Deviation, the Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was employed to test the hypotheses. The study revealed that asynchronous instructional approach was more effective in improving students’ achievement and stimulating their interest in learning than the synchronous instructional approach. The study also found out that there was a significant difference in the cognitive achievement of students taught electrical technology with asynchronous instructional approach than those taught with the synchronous instructional approach. However, there was no significant difference between the mean interest scores of students taught electrical technology with asynchronous instructional approach and those taught with the synchronous instructional approach. On the basis of these findings, the study recommends among others that the National Commission for Colleges of Education should develop appropriate framework necessary for encouraging the adoption of innovative e-learning platform such as that of synchronous and asynchronous instruction while the management of the Colleges of Education under study should institutionalize and encourage lecturers to use asynchronous instruction in teaching. Finally, the Lecturers should adopt asynchronous instructional approach in teaching and learning electrical technology in the Colleges of Education under study.

Implementation of communicating reactive processes

In folk traditions and beliefs, money has various properties in addition to its main function- the amount of value. In Armenian folk beliefs, coins protect against evil forces –they are apotropaic charms; besides, they bring abundance, happiness, health, growth, etc. Thus, they play an important role in popular feasts and rituals. The supernatural features of coins are related to the power attributed to metals. Coins save from terrible dreams, help to overcome fear, heal the diseases, protect from the evil eye, ect. According to the foundation ritual when building a house, money is placed in the basement- in the corner, under the threshold, in walls so that the building be strong: the devils are afraid of the coins so they do not approach and destroy the house. Besides, the coins bring abundance, wealth, fortune, and many children. The practice of consecrating foundation offerings originated as early as the art of building. On the occasion of engagement ceremonies and wedding rituals both jewellery and money were presented to the newlyweds. In agricultural rites, the coins help to ensure the fertility of the soil: when plowing the land, money is thrown into the first furrow and when planting a tree, money is put into the pit for auspicious growth and abundant harvest. Money is a means of divination. The most powerful coin is the one got out of the New Year's bread called “tari hats” (literally: year bread). The person who finds it is “the owner of the year and the luckiest one”. He keeps it in his purse so that it be full of money all year round or takes it to the church, buys a candle and lights it, praying before the saints. Money is a charm by itself or a component part of various charms. The magical power of money comes from the moon (besides the metals). As the symbol of the adorable moon, the coin bears its miraculous features. Especially the growing new moon brings happiness, health, and fullness. In order “to turn the coin into a new moon”, the coin was cut (circular on the bottom) by special people: 1. the priest during the liturgy, 2. the witch, praying on the new moon, 3. the blacksmith, 4. the member of the family that has received this gift from above. Jewellery and patterns symbolizing the moon have always been of special value and popular in Armenia. It is noteworthy that pendants of different decorations symbolizing the new moon (called "new") made in various jewellery techniques were often replaced by coins in 18th – 20th centuries. Most of the ornaments have their counterparts in coins, such as forehead ornaments, bracelets, breast ornaments, belts and the like. But more common were the countless types of jewellery and amulets mixed with coins (Russian, Ottoman, Persian and European) and various types of jewellery. The money, which is not made of metal, and was of great importance in Armenia was the cowrie shell. Besides their monetary value, they were used as magical multi-functional amulets and adornments. These shells were obtained from the Indian, Pacific Oceans, Mediterranean and other seas and were brought to Armenia since ancient times as evidenced by archaeological excavations in different regions of Armenia.

Purpose:This study focuses on an online Arabic learning through synchronous and asynchronous approaches. Meanwhile, the aims of this study are; 1) describing implementation of synchronous and asynchronous online Arabic learning in higher education, 2) investigating its advantages and disadvantages, 3) offering solutions in learning Arabic through e-learning.
 Design/methodology/approach:This is a descriptive qualitative research that applies an observation method, interview, and documentation to collect the data. Afterwards, identity method is used to investigate the data. Then, triangulation is applied for validity check
 Findings/result:The result shows that synchronous e-learning is the most widely applied in learning Arabic for IPIREL UMY (75 %) and IPIEF UMY (62%). On the contrary, Arabic learning (IBA) at UINSA tends to apply asynchronous e-learning (75%).
 Originality/value:It is important for lecturer to prepare the best method and media for distance learning. By understanding what students need, lecturer may determine how important for students to learn Arabic through synchronous or asynchronous approach.
 Paper type:Research paper

St. Hovhannes (St. John) Church under study is located in the centre of Togh, Hadrut region, the Republic of Artsakh, about 50 meters southwest of the palace of Melik Yegan, on a sloping site. The church is quite well preserved. It repeats the three-nave basilica type common in Syunik and some regions of Armenia in the Late Middle Ages. The exact date of construction of the church is unknown. According to the inscription on the pedestal of the cross, the roof was restored by Melik Yegan in 1736 by the order of the Catholicos of Aghuank (Caucasian Albania) Petros. Next to the church on the south side is a walled courtyard measuring 17.0 x 22.0 meters. Historical sources contain information that there was a chapel in the courtyard next to the church, which served as a tomb for the Melik-Yeganyans of Dizak. In 2017, excavations were carried out in the northern and southern courtyards of the church in order to verify this information, as well as to study the surroundings of the church. This report presents the main results of the 2017 archaeological survey of the church. As a result of excavations and cleaning of the area, the remains of two buildings, as well as more than 80 tombstones from the northern and southern graveyards, some of which with relief carvings and inscriptions, were recorded. The latter are introduced into scientific use for the first time.

Nowadays, the most widely used variable speed wind turbine type for unites above 1MW is doubly fed induction generator (DFIG). Because of the relative small rating of the power converters, wind turbines based on the DFIG are very sensitive to grid disturbances, especially to voltage dips during grid faults. In this paper, two control strategies of the stator flux, including a synchronous approach with an open-loop flux control and an asynchronous approach with a closed-loop flux control, are proposed and compared in order to show their influence on the dynamic behavior of the wind turbine system against voltage dips.

<em>Program Sekolah Penggerak (PSP) is one of the effort made by the government to realize the vision on Indonesian education to become advanced, sovereign, independent, have a personality and create a profile of Pancasila students. Through the driving school program, several activities were carried out, one of which was an online Learning Committee Training (PKP) which was attended by principals and teachers for 10 days using a moodle with an asynchronous synchronous approach. In this study, it will be emphasized whether using a synchronous asynchronous approach is effective in understanding the implementation of an independent curriculum as indicated by the results of the pre-test and post-test. The research subjects used were 18 people consisting of 6 principals and 12 elemetary school teacher from 6 different schools. The result obtained, it was found that the training using the asynchronous synchronous approach was effective in increasing understanding about the implementation of the independent curriculum in elementary schools.</em>

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), idle listening is one of the most significant sources of energy consumption. In order to limit this problem many synchronous and asynchronous approaches have been proposed. Synchronous approaches reduce the idle listening by sharing schedule information. Exchange of schedule information again results in extra overhead on energy consumption. Asynchronous approach (RI-MAC) uses receiver initiated beacon to do same. In this paper, we analyze and evaluate the performance of S-MAC and RI-MAC protocol for WSNs in two different scenarios namely Contending Flow and Data Gathering. Evaluation of these MAC protocols will be in terms of certain performance parameters, while considering energy consumption in overall period as well as in idle listening period as the major performance parameter.

Iterative graph algorithms often compute intermediate values and update them as computation progresses. Updated output values are used as inputs for computations in current or subsequent iterations; hence the number of iterations required for values to converge can potentially reduce if the newest values are asynchronously made available to other updates computed in the same iteration. In a multi-threaded shared memory system, the immediate propagation of updated values can cause memory contention that may offset the benefit of propagating updates sooner. In some cases, the benefit of a smaller number of iterations may be diminished by each iteration taking longer. Our key idea is to combine the low memory contention that synchronous approaches have with the faster information sharing of asynchronous approaches. Our hybrid approach buffers updates from threads locally before committing them to the global store to control how often threads may cause conflicts for others while still sharing data within one iteration and hence speeding convergence. On a 112-thread CPU system, our hybrid approach attains up to 4.5% - 19.4% speedup over an asynchronous approach for Pagerank and up to 1.9% - 17% speedup over asynchronous Bellman Ford SSSP. Further, our hybrid approach attains 2.56x better performance than the synchronous approach. Finally, we provide insights as to why delaying updates is not helpful on certain graphs where connectivity is clustered on the main diagonal of the adjacency matrix.

The Edee architecture provides a mechanism for explicitly and uniformly capturing business occurrences, and provisions of contracts, policies, and law. Edee is able to reason about the interactions of intra-, inter-, and extra-organizational policy, and execute business procedures informed by the combined legal effects of these diverse rules. We show through an example how Edee's asynchronous approach, namely to initiate actions only after consulting the database to determine active obligations, differs from the traditional synchronous approach in which procedural side-effects are initiated when clauses of rules are evaluated. The example show-cases both conflict detection and resolution in Edee. Edee's novel mechanism for business process automation is based on assessment of legal status and directives, and can be contrasted to the conventional task-dependency and process-synchronization approach employed in other workflow systems.

The sudden transition to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) during the COVID-19 crisis hindered small group student learning, including Supported Problem-based Learning (SPBL), in the undergraduate medical curriculum at the University of Cape Town. Consequently, a socially just and equitable online Remote SPBL model was needed to promote learning, social cohesion, track student progress, and render emotional containment to students experiencing crisis-related anxiety and social isolation. Remote SPBL was conducted asynchronously using the “Forums” tool within the Learning Management System, namely VULA, to accommodate students with limited internet access. Some SPBL steps were excluded to accommodate the decreased available learning time which may have compromised the SPBL process. SPBL facilitators trained in online facilitation, served as a bridge between students and course convenors ensuring the early detection of academic and non-academic barriers to learning, and enabling timely support. Thus, Remote SPBL offered students’ academic and social support at a time of great change, while maintaining the core elements of the curriculum and enabling the integration of disciplinary knowledge. However, the asynchronous approach and non-academic obstacles to accessing online learning limited effective group interaction and collaborative learning. Based on the experiences of the model, course convenors will consider integrating SPBL into a blended model in future and will include all the SPBL steps to enhance student learning using both synchronous and asynchronous approaches. This model, that draws on simple web-based learning platforms, could easily be adopted, and effectively utilized in low-resourced educational and healthcare settings due to its easy and cost-effective approach.

The city of Homs, formerly known as Emesa, strategically located in the central region of Syria, has been long linked to a folk belief that portrays its inhabitants as mad and fool. Historical and traditional sources also link the alleged madness and foolishness of the Homsians to the day of Wednesday, the so-called “Day of the Fool” or “Homsians’ Feast”, which is considered a special day. The legend regarding the “Day of the Fool” and its celebration during Wednesdays has been passed down orally in the local culture and its origins likely trace back to ancient times when the city was still called Emesa. Therefore, this article attempts at reconstructing history and origins about this folk belief, and exploring the reasons behind the supposed madness and foolishness of the inhabitants of Homs and their connections to Wednesdays by comparing three studies published after 2000s in Arabic by Homsian intellectuals, namely Al-Aḥmad, Samʽān, and Kadr.

Compared to conventional artificial neural networks, spiking neural networks (SNNs) are more biologically plausible and require less computation due to their event-driven nature of spiking neurons. However, the default asynchronous execution of SNNs also poses great challenges to accelerate their performance on FPGAs. In this work, we present a novel synchronous approach for rate-encoding-based SNNs, which is more hardware friendly than conventional asynchronous approaches. We first quantitatively evaluate and mathematically prove that the proposed synchronous approach and asynchronous implementation alternatives of rate-encoding-based SNNs are similar in terms of inference accuracy, and we highlight the computational performance advantage of using SyncNN over an asynchronous approach. We also design and implement the SyncNN framework to accelerate SNNs on Xilinx ARM-FPGA SoCs in a synchronous fashion. To improve the computation and memory access efficiency, we first quantize the network weights to 16-bit, 8-bit, and 4-bit fixed-point values with the SNN-friendly quantization techniques. Moreover, we encode only the activated neurons by recording their positions and corresponding number of spikes to fully utilize the event-driven characteristics of SNNs, instead of using the common binary encoding (i.e., 1 for a spike and 0 for no spike). For the encoded neurons that have dynamic and irregular access patterns, we design parameterized compute engines to accelerate their performance on the FPGA, where we explore various parallelization strategies and memory access optimizations. Our experimental results on multiple Xilinx ARM-FPGA SoC boards demonstrate that our SyncNN is scalable to run multiple networks, such as LeNet, Network in Network, and VGG, on various datasets such as MNIST, SVHN, and CIFAR-10. SyncNN not only achieves competitive accuracy (99.6%) but also achieves state-of-the-art performance (13,086 frames per second) for the MNIST dataset. Finally, we compare the performance of SyncNN with conventional CNNs using the Vitis AI and find that SyncNN can achieve similar accuracy and better performance compared to Vitis AI for image classification using small networks.

Pullpipelining, a pipeline technique where data is pulled from successor stages from predecessor stages is proposed. Control circuits using a synchronous, a semisynchronous and an asynchronous approach are given. Simulation examples for a DLX generic RISC datapath show that common control pipeline circuit overhead is avoided using the proposal. Applications to linear systolic arrays in cases when computation is finished at early stages in the array are foreseen. This would allow run-time data-driven digital frequency modulation of synchronous pipelined designs. This has applications to implement algorithms exhibiting average-case processing time using a synchronous approach.

Scheduling of a multi-robot assembly cell