insurers have in the past few decades faced longevity risks - the risk that annuitants survive more than expected - and therefore need a new approach to manage this new risk. in this dissertation we survey methods that hedge longevity risks. these methods use securitization to manage risk, so using modern financial and insurance pricing models, especially wang transform and actuarial concepts, ...

during the process of reading, sometimes learners use ineffective and inefficient strategies and some factors may influence their use of strategies. perhaps critical thinking is one of these factors. this study aims to identify those categories of reading strategies that are mostly used by iranian efl learners and to see if there is any significant relationship between the critical thinking abi...

from its emergence till present time marxist principles has undergone great changes since their promulgation by marx. many theorists and thinkers set at rectifying marxist tenets and introducing those of their own while others advocated its main concepts and attempted at improving them. among marxist philosophers who had an intensive study of marxs ideology, is louis althusser whose reflections...

this study intends to investigate samuel beckett’s waiting for godot and endgame under the lacanian psychoanalysis. it begins by explaining the most important concepts of lacanian psychoanalysis. the beckettian characters are studied regarding their state of unconscious, and not the state of consciousness as is common in most beckett studies. according to lacan, language plays the sole role in ...

abstract the present thesis seeks to critically read george orwell’s nineteen eighty-four and animal farm in the light of louis althusser’s thought and theory. the present thesis proceeds to examine and demonstrate althusser’s major concepts including ideological state apparatuses (isas), repressive state apparatuses (rsas), the structure, the subject, and ideological interpellation which r...

there are two major theories of measurement in psychometrics: classical test theory (ctt) and item-response theory (irt). despite its widespread and long use, ctt has a number of shortcomings, which make it problematic to be used for practical and theoretical purposes. irt tries to solve these shortcomings, and provide better and more dependable answers. one of the applications of irt is the as...

the main objective in sampling is to select a sample from a population in order to estimate some unknown population parameter, usually a total or a mean of some interesting variable. a simple way to take a sample of size n is to let all the possible samples have the same probability of being selected. this is called simple random sampling and then all units have the same probability of being ch...

this study investigated the effects of planning on second-language written production with regard to task type. the participants were 75 iranian learners of english as a foreign language attending a private foreign language institution. they were asked to complete two different types of writing tasks (expository writing task and argumentative writing task) in different planned conditions (indiv...

abstract:assume that y is a banach space such that r(y ) ? 2, where r(.) is garc?a-falset’s coefficient. and x is a banach space which can be continuously embedded in y . we prove that x can be renormed to satisfy the weak fixed point property (w-fpp). on the other hand, assume that k is a scattered compact topological space such that k(!) = ? ; and c(k) is the space of all real continuous ...

the current study examined iranian undergraduate efl students’ willingness to communicate with regard to their vocabulary knowledge. in general, participants were somewhat willing to communicate in english. the total mean score of 730 university students’ perception of willing to communicate was 83.53 out of 135. results, regarding four parts of willingness to communicate, revealed that part...