Introduction: Methane is one of the most widely used gases in industries with a high flammability potential. This study aimed to evaluate the efficiency of ventilation systems installed on methane valve pits based on hazardous areas classification. Material and Methods: This study was implemented in a steel industry in Qom Province in 2019. The tools used in this study were a DELTA OHM pitot t...

Decentralization facilitates more efficient use of local information but also can lead to agency problems and commitment failures. This paper develops simple models of a twotier hierarchy (the center vs. the local) to study the optimal division of lending authority between central and local bank managers. Using a unique data set collected by the authors from a survey of rural financial institut...

members of Congress have had questions about the unique functions of AHRQ today. As an example, comparative effectiveness research was first developed as an idea at AHRQ, but under the Affordable Care Act, comparative effectiveness researchmoved to the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, so some questioned if AHRQwas still needed. But of course, comparative effectiveness research is j...

Many new public sector collaborations exhibit the characteristics of Shared Service Organizations (SSO). Public Safety Networks (PSNs) are receiving more attention and priority in the United States as the country deals with ever increasing threats from terrorism and natural disasters. As a network of independent, collaborating, safety agencies, supported by an information and communications tec...

We report on an experiment that examined the inuence of anthropomorphism and perceived agency on presence, copresence, and social presence in a virtual environment. The experiment varied the level of anthropomorphism of the image of interactants: high anthropomorphism, low anthropomorphism, or no image. Perceived agency was manipulated by telling the participants that the image was either an a...

The authors explore the possible relationship between student satisfaction with online learning and the theory of psychological contracts. The study incorporates latent trait models using the image analysis procedure and computation of Anderson and Rubin factors scores with contrasts for students who are satisfied, ambivalent, or dissatisfied with their online learning experiences. The findings...

The concept of “agency” in games and other playable media (also referred to as “intention”) has been discussed as a player experience and a structural property of works. We shift focus, considering agency, instead, as a phenomenon involving both player and game, one that occurs when the actions players desire are among those they can take (and vice versa) as supported by an underlying computati...

I consider a repeated principal-agent setting in which the agent repeatedly chooses between hidden “long-term” and “short-term” actions. Relative to the long-term action, the short-term action boosts output today but hurts output tomorrow. The optimal contract inducing long-term actions provides a fresh perspective on upward sloping pay scales, severance pay and high-watermark contracts. The my...

Distributed Agency is the name of a conceptual framework for describing complex adaptive systems that this paper develops. To understand the complexity of the world in a holistic fashion, the field of Modeling and Simulation is currently lacking a common terminology in which different bodies of knowledge can communicate with each other in a general language. In this work, agency is proposed as ...