The present study examined email communication practices of two groups of students in Iran and the United States to uncover the probable differences between Iranian and American email communication norms. The study also aimed at investigating how power distance in academic centers influences students’ choices of communication strategies in email writing. The use of two politeness strategies nam...

data envelopment analysis (dea) is a method for measuring the efficiency of peer decision making units (dmus) which uses a set of inputs to produce a set of outputs. in some cases, dmus have a two-stage structure, in which the first stage utilizes inputs to produce outputs used as the inputs of the second stage to produce final outputs. one important issue in two-stage dea is the sensitivity of...

introduction: to run a hospital effectively, managers need to have proper decision-making strategies. the managers' decision-making strategies and the staff's job satisfaction are two major factors that allow the manager to achieve the planned objectives. therefore, in this paper, these two factors were studied. methods and materials: it was a descriptive study in which the population of the st...

in this paper a new problem of three stage disassembly-assembly scheduling is introduced and reviewed. this problem, which was arisen from the aviation industry characteristics, is a generalization of the two stage assembly scheduling problem. products (helicopters) in the aviation industry return to assembler for annual overhaul repair services. in the first stage helicopters are disassembled ...

Merge-and-shrink abstraction is a general approach to heuristic design whose key advantage is its capability to make very fine-grained choices in defining abstractions. The Mergeand-shrink planner uses two different strategies for making these choices, both based on the well-known notion of bisimulation. The resulting heuristics are used in two sequential runs of A∗ search.