Critical Pedagogy in Architectural Design Course (case study: postgraduate design course (1) of Islamic Azad university of Gorgan)

Background and Objective:Creating a learning environment rich in social relationships in which peer interaction and collective learning can be developed is the core of the studio-based education for teaching architectural design. The social dimensions of the studio and the opportunities it provides for collaboration and participation serve as a stimulus for learning, and it is the culture of the studio that means sustainability to students. One of the interactive teaching methods that seems to be in line with the multiplicity of today's world and the different nature of architecture and the workshop education system is the critical pedagogy method invented by the Brazilian thinker Paolo Freire. Freire considers the main purpose of education to be the development of creative and critical human beings who look critically at all the thoughts, ideas and values ​​in society, as well as the actions of individuals and the way they deal with various events and happenings to find their roots. Freire's model in critical education mostly includes critical dialogue in which students (whole class) present their views and review evaluations and critiques. Participate in evaluating the thoughts of others and together with them, by combining views and examining arguments, take a more accurate and comprehensive approach to the issue and discover effective solutions. Therefore, it can be inferred that the critical education methodwith its special characteristics has the potential to improve the quality of architectural design classes. The aim of this study is to illustrate the procedure of applying critical pedagogy in Iran higher education context –architecture discipline- to identify challenges and improve the method in the selected environment. Methods:The qualitative method (interpretation) was selected as research method and content analysis was performed on the collected data. 24 postgraduate architecture students were selected as the sample, and by using a bipartite subject, comparison between two methods (traditional and critical) become possible. To verify and extend the model, the experiment was repeated next year with 22 different students. Findings: The results indicated that the effects of critical pedagogy have been perceived by students in eight categories: (1) improving intrinsic motivation (2) improving social skills, oral skills and self-confidence, (3) improving the speed and quality of development process of architectural ideas, (4) creating diversity and cheerfulness, (5) reducing stress and anxiety, (6) waste of time and vain discussions, (7) educational marginalization, and (8) self-censorship. The first 5 categories are positive feedbacks and the other three are negative feedbacks considered as challenges of applying critical pedagogy. At the end, some strategies are purposed to overcome these challenges and improve the quality of the classes. Conclusion:Some solutions to overcome the challenges are suggested including: students choosing an external reality topic, phasing group corrections, continuing the method to institutionalize it, changing students' view of the teacher as the source of information or the professor as a superior and miraculous person and change the view and reduce students' distrust of themselves. Characteristics for the critical teacher are also mentioned, such as humility, humor, high capacity of the teacher against laughter and jokes, great patience of the teacher in the face of useless discussions, and familiarity of the critical teacher with theories of psychology and psychoanalysis.   ===================================================================================== COPYRIGHTS  ©2019 The author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, as long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers.  ====================================================================================

Touch\'e: Towards Ideal and Efficient Cache Compression By Mitigating Tag Area Overheads

Compression is seen as a simple technique to increase the effective cache capacity. Unfortunately, compression techniques either incur tag area overheads or restrict data placement to only include neighboring compressed cache blocks to mitigate tag area overheads. Ideally, we should be able to place arbitrary compressed cache blocks without any placement restrictions and tag area overheads. This paper proposes Touch\'e, a framework that enables storing multiple arbitrary compressed cache blocks within a physical cacheline without any tag area overheads. The Touch\'e framework consists of three components. The first component, called the ``Signature'' (SIGN) engine, creates shortened signatures from the tag addresses of compressed blocks. Due to this, the SIGN engine can store multiple signatures in each tag entry. On a cache access, the physical cacheline is accessed only if there is a signature match (which has a negligible probability of false positive). The second component, called the ``Tag Appended Data'' (TADA) mechanism, stores the full tag addresses with data. TADA enables Touch\'e to detect false positive signature matches by ensuring that the actual tag address is available for comparison. The third component, called the ``Superblock Marker'' (SMARK) mechanism, uses a unique marker in the tag entry to indicate the occurrence of compressed cache blocks from neighboring physical addresses in the same cacheline. Touch\'e is completely hardware-based and achieves an average speedup of 12\% (ideal 13\%) when compared to an uncompressed baseline.Comment: Keywords: Compression, Caches, Tag Array, Data Array, Hashin

A path integral methodology for obtaining thermodynamic properties of nonadiabatic systems using Gaussian mixture distributions

This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing. The following article appeared in Raymond, N., Iouchtchenko, D., Roy, P.-N., & Nooijen, M. (2018). A path integral methodology for obtaining thermodynamic properties of nonadiabatic systems using Gaussian mixture distributions. The Journal of Chemical Physics, 148(19), 194110 and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5025058We introduce a new path integral Monte Carlo method for investigating nonadiabatic systems in thermal equilibrium and demonstrate an approach to reducing stochastic error. We derive a general path integral expression for the partition function in a product basis of continuous nuclear and discrete electronic degrees of freedom without the use of any mapping schemes. We separate our Hamiltonian into a harmonic portion and a coupling portion; the partition function can then be calculated as the product of a Monte Carlo estimator (of the coupling contribution to the partition function) and a normalization factor (that is evaluated analytically). A Gaussian mixture model is used to evaluate the Monte Carlo estimator in a computationally efficient manner. Using two model systems, we demonstrate our approach to reduce the stochastic error associated with the Monte Carlo estimator. We show that the selection of the harmonic oscillators comprising the sampling distribution directly affects the efficiency of the method. Our results demonstrate that our path integral Monte Carlo method’s deviation from exact Trotter calculations is dominated by the choice of the sampling distribution. By improving the sampling distribution, we can drastically reduce the stochastic error leading to lower computational cost.Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation (MRI) Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) Canada Research Chair progra

Early stages of oxide growth in H-terminated silicon nanowires: determination of kinetic behavior and activation energy

Silicon nanowires (Si NWs) terminated with hydrogen atoms exhibit higher activation energy under ambient conditions than equivalent planar Si(100). The kinetics of sub-oxide formation in hydrogen-terminated Si NWs derived from the complementary XPS surface analysis attribute this difference to the Si-Si backbond and Si-H bond propagation which controls the process at lower temperatures (T = 200 degrees C), the activation energy was similar due to self-retarded oxidation. This finding offers the understanding of early-stage oxide growth that affects the conductance of the near-gap channels leading towards more efficient Si NW electronic devices

Oxide-free hybrid silicon nanowires: From fundamentals to applied nanotechnology

The ability to control physical properties of silicon nanowires (Si NWs) by designing their surface bonds is important for their applicability in devices in the areas of nano-electronics, nano-photonics, including photovoltaics and sensing. In principle a wealth of different molecules can be attached to the bare Si NW surface atoms to create e.g. Si-O, Si-C, Si-N, etc. to mention just the most prominent ones. Si-O bond formation, i.e. oxidation usually takes place automatically as soon as Si NWs are exposed to ambient conditions and this is undesired is since a defective oxide layer (i.e. native silicon dioxide - SiO2) can cause uncontrolled trap states in the band gap of silicon. Surface functionalization of Si NW surfaces with the aim to avoid oxidation can be carried out by permitting e.g. Si-C bond formation when alkyl chains are covalently attached to the Si NW surfaces by employing a versatile two-step chlorination/alkylation process that does not affect the original length and diameter of the NWs. Termination of Si NWs with alkyl molecules through covalent Si-C bonds can provide long term stability against oxidation of the Si NW surfaces. The alkyl chain length determines the molecular coverage of Si NW surfaces and thus the surface energy and next to simple Si-C bonds even bond types such as C=C and C=C can be realized. When integrating differently functionalized Si NWs in functional devices such as field effect transistors (FETs) and solar cells, the physical properties of the resultant devices vary. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Antiretroviral drug resistance mutations among HIV treatment failure patients in Tehran, Iran

Background: This study aimed to determine drug resistance mutations in patients with virological failure and find correlation between HIV drug resistance test and viral load. Methods: Blood sample was collected from 51 patients who suspicious treatment failure in the center of Imam Khomeini Hospital, Tehran, Iran in 2015. Viral voluntary counseling and testing load test was done and the patients with viral load above 1000 copies choose for detection of drug resistance mutations by genotyping method (29 patients). Results: The majority of patients (82.75) harbored the HIV subtype CRF 35 A-D. The 86.2 patients compromised at least one resistance mutation. The analysis of reverse transcriptase showed M184V (68.9), T215YISF (44.8), K103N (27.6) and the analysis results of protease revealed G73SC (13.8) and I47VA (6.9). Eventually, the significant correlation between viral load and drug resistance was found. Conclusion: The result of our research stress the significance of recognizing drug resistant on time that prohibits the accumulation of drug resistance mutation and circulates the resistance strain of HIV-1 virus and the importance of national study according to the reliable findings for treatment guidelines. © 2017, Iranian Journal of Public Health. All rights reserved