The Painted Chapel of the Archangel Michael, Vizakia, Cyprus (pl. 13-16)

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The Greek Current Account Deficit:Is it Sustainable after all?

The large Greek current account deficit figures reported during the past few years have become the source of increasing concern regarding its sustainability. Bearing in mind the variety of techniques employed and the views expressed as regards the analysis and the assessment of the size of the current account deficit, this paper resorts to using neural network architectures to demonstrate that, despite its size, the current account deficit of Greece can be considered sustainable. This conclusion, however, is not meant to neglect the structural weaknesses that lead to such a deficit. In fact, even in the absence of any financing requirements these high deficit figures point to serious competitiveness losses with everything that these may entail for the future performance of the Greek economy.Neural Networks; Current Account Deficit Sustainability

LEARN-BY-DOING VIRTUALLY; A GAMIFIED AND METAVERSE DESIGN FOR GROUP PROJECTS AIMING AT ENHANCING CONSTRUCTIVIST AND COLLABORATIVE LEARNING

Probably the most challenging part of delivering a course is to engage the students in the learning process; to capture their interest to the extent that they will want to contribute to the on-going delivery of the course. Academics, try to achieve this in every possible way. Among other practices, educators plan their courses to include a variety of activities, utilize Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), reward the students for their contribution, show interest and offer prompt and honest support and feedback, act their role or use other appropriate means to make learning fun

PROMOTING INTERACTIVITY AND CREATIVITY IN A SCIENCE COURSE

Young people entering the working force are nowadays required to compete not only on skills and education but also on creative thinking. This is because creativity and innovation are a must for businesses and nations which, today more than ever, are required to compete on the creative use of the scarce resources and the identification of new ones. Thus, promoting creative thinking among students, individually and collectively, is an educator’s challenge. This paper presents the efforts made to promote creative thinking in a Human Computer Interaction course and the students’ evaluation of these efforts

A Tool For Teaching Spline Methods In A Computer Graphics Course

The specialized mathematics knowledge covered in a computer graphics course is usually presented to students in an abstract way. Albeit, computer graphics is an application of this (abstract) mathematics, students may find it hard to link them together. In particular one of the most difficult topics to present in a pedagogical manner to junior students in a computer graphics course is spline methods (mathematical method for data smoothing) used for curve/surface modelling. This topic involves mainly the mathematics of parametric functions, piecewise functions, derivatives, matrices, and parametric/geometric continuities. Usually a student has a vague picture of the actual output of the application of this mathematics. Many educators have experienced that students may fully understand splines application, if and when they are assigned a software project to implement splines, and this understanding could still remain vague until the very last stages of the implementation. As an alternative, static pictures may be presented in class to provide an intuitive understanding of splines. This approach is, in effect, similar to viewing a picture in a textbook. A better alternative is for the educator to demonstrate real-time spline generation, since a picture is worth ten thousand words but a moving picture (animation) is worth ten thousand static ones. This paper presents an interactive software program which is used as a tool to introduce important concepts and algorithms of spline methods to computer science and computer engineering students. The software is specially developed for educational purposes, and generates spline curves

Photocatalytic Hydrogen Generation from a Visible-Light-Responsive Metal–Organic Framework System: Stability versus Activity of Molybdenum Sulfide Cocatalysts

We report the use of two earth abundant molybdenum sulfide-based cocatalysts, Mo(3)S(13)(2-)clusters and 1T-MoS2 nanoparticles (NPs), in combination with the visible-light active metal-organic framework (MOF) MIL-125-NH2 for the photocatalytic generation of hydrogen (H-2) from water splitting. Upon irradiation (lambda >= 420 nm), the best-performing mixtures of Mo3S132-/MIL-125-NH2 and 1T-MoS2/MIL-125-NH2 exhibit high catalytic activity, producing H-2 with evolution rates of 2094 and 1454 mu mol h(-1) g(MOF)(-1) and apparent quantum yields of 11.0 and 5.8% at 450 nm, respectively, which are among the highest values reported to date for visible-light-driven photocatalysis with MOFs. The high performance of Mo3S132- can be attributed to the good contact between these clusters and the MOF and the large number of catalytically active sites, while the high activity of 1T-MoS2 NPs is due to their high electrical conductivity leading to fast electron transfer processes. Recycling experiments revealed that although the Mo3S132-/MIL-125-NH2 slowly loses its activity, the 1T-MoS2/MIL-125-NH2 retains its activity for at least 72 h. This work indicates that earth-abundant compounds can be stable and highly catalytically active for photocatalytic water splitting, and should be considered as promising cocatalysts with new MOFs besides the traditional noble metal NPs