extension of the building advance-sale contracts on the one hand, and inadequacy of the provisions of the civil code on protection of  building advance-buyers before making its completion, on the other, consequently causing many problems for people in the community (society), has forced the legislature to pass the building advance-sale code in 2010. the parties of these contracts are called adv...

Globally, aging populations are driving the demand for long-term care (LTC) services for a growing number of older people with disabilities or chronic illnesses. A key challenge for policy-makers in all countries is to find a comprehensive solution to financing LTC services to make them widely accessible, affordable, and equitable for all in need. In this commentary, we...

Programming of software agents is a difficult task. As a result, online learning techniques have been used in order to make software agents automatically learn to decide proper condition-action rules from their experiences. However, for complicated problems this approach requires a large amount of time and might not guarantee the optimality of rules. In this paper, we discuss our study to apply...

This paper demonstrates that there is a strategic reason why software firms have followed consumers’ desire to drop software protection. We analyze software protection policies in a price-setting duopoly software industry selling differentiated software packages, where consumers’ preference for particular software is affected by the number of other consumers who ( ) legally or illegally use the...

2 Principal contact: This year our primary goal was to improve on the performance of our TREC-8 system. In addition to improving the system directly, we worked on a number of tools to aid our development. We continued our work on a tool for automatic scoring of system responses, a “judge” program. We designed a tool for doing regression testing of question answering systems. W...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was developed to help compare the relative performance of decision-making units. It is a non-parametric method for performing frontier analysis. It uses linear programming to estimate the efficiency of multiple decision-making units and it is commonly used in production, management and economics [3]. DEA generates an efficiency score between 0 and 1 for each unit...

Green synthesis of nanoparticles, as fundamental building blocks of nanotechnology, has recently attracted considerable attention. Silver nanoparticles have unique physiochemical, biological and environmental properties which make them useful in a wide range of applications. In the present paper we report our research results on biosynthesis of silver nanoparticles from silver precursor usin...