This essay deals with, or rather attempts to explore, the problem of irony and humour (sensu largo) in the Bible. On the whole Polish theology, homiletics and academic biblical studies have hardly anything to say about it, and when they do mention it, it is done in a rather perfunctory and unsatisfactory manner. This article asks what may be reasons for this ‘exegetical retouch’ (tabooing?), i.e. why has the question of biblical irony, which is a staple of international scholarship, received so little attention in Poland? Why do contemporary Polish biblical and homiletic studies cultivate a staid and solemn tone, and steer clear of a direct and plain exposition laced with subtle irony and a touch of asteism, a sure sign of a wise sense of humour that characterizes ancient Judaism? For Gary Webster, Terri Bednarz and Yehuda Radday the recognition level of biblical humour, sophisticated wordplay or irony depends on the reader’s competence, his linguistic and cultural sensitivity, his ability to detect cognitive presuppositions, and his knowledge of relevant contexts. Yet even a thorough understanding of the biblical text and its cultural conditioning cannot rule out doubts, moot points and interpretative dilemmas that bedevil the work of every translator and hermeneutic analyst and stoke up unending debates.
This paper discusses the question of how the old Kazakh custom of the ban on uttering the name of a husband and his male relatives by his wife is still observed in modern Kazakhstan. To do this, material from five main regions of Kazakhstan (North, South, Central, East and West) was collected and analysed. The study aims to do a sociolinguistic analysis of the result of the questionnaire. Although this old tradition is well known and described a long time ago by such researchers as Nikolaj Ilminskii, Nikolaj Grodekov, Ybyraı Altynsarın, Grigorij Potanin, Aleksandr Samoilovich and others, no modern fieldwork was done to check whether this tradition is still alive and how it changes. As is known, present-day Kazakhstan had changed significantly since the 19th century, when Ilminskii first studied the Kazakh language and traditions, Wilhelm Radloff and the researchers mentioned earlier, who were linguists and explorers. However, many cultures are still observed. As Grodekov noted, the avoiding of the pronunciation of a husband’s name and his male relatives by his wife is familiar to the Kazakhs and Kirghiz. Somoilovich, basing on Mustafa Shoqaı’s materials, devoted a paper to this question. Perhaps the best story was related by Altynsarın, who has registered an anecdote how a woman who went to bring water and saw a wolf killing an ewe rushed back to her house and shouted for help, transforming the words ‘lake’, ‘reed’, ‘wolf’, ‘sheep’ and ‘knife’, since her husband and his male relatives bore names composed of these words.
In this paper, a parallel multi-path variant of the well-known TSAB algorithm for the job shop scheduling problem is proposed. Coarse-grained parallelization method is employed, which allows for great scalability of the algorithm with accordance to Gustafon’s law. The resulting P-TSAB algorithm is tested using 162 well-known literature benchmarks. Results indicate that P-TSAB algorithm with a running time of one minute on a modern PC provides solutions comparable to the ones provided by the newest literature approaches to the job shop scheduling problem. Moreover, on average P-TSAB achieves two times smaller percentage relative deviation from the best known solutions than the standard variant of TSAB. The use of parallelization also relieves the user from having to fine-tune the algorithm. The P-TSAB algorithm can thus be used as module in real-life production planning systems or as a local search procedure in other algorithms. It can also provide the upper bound of minimal cycle time for certain problems of cyclic scheduling.
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