This paper examines the transformation of the Iranian economy through the Twentieth Century within a global context. At the start of that century, the Iranian economy had long remained stagnant, poor, and largely agrarian, with a marginal role in the world economy. By the turn of 21 century, Iran had transformed into a complex and relatively large economy with important consequences for the eco...

The Web as related to commerce suffers from a fundamental asymmetry. While there is a great number of commercial offers available, consumer needs are rarely represented explicitly. Thus, the most widely applied process of connecting the prospective consumer of a resource with its supplier is Web search. In Web search, the user needs are implicit, driving the interaction, and therefore only the ...

The online virtual world, Second Life, has been described by its developers, Linden Lab, as a ‘free’ online Virtual reality application with which residents (users) can imagine and create their respective virtual worlds. The degree of ‘freedom’ of use of Second Life by residents as described by the developers comes into question as it would rather imply that it is a charity-based online applica...

Potential applications of online virtual worlds are attracting the interest of many researchers around the world. One and perhaps the most famous example of such systems is Linden Lab’s Second Life. Last year, sources for its client application have been released under the GPL license, allowing anyone to extend it building a modified client. This work presents an effort to explore the possibili...