Development is one of the basic and key issues of the social sciences that due to its importance and the particular status that it has in the transformations of human society, it has attracted the serious attention of many scholars. Given the fact that people’s attitudes usually influences their actions and behaviors, and also because attitudes are among the important factors that have an impac...

Social Security is in trouble. With declining population growth and rising life expectancy, the cost of Social Security benefits is rising relative to payroll tax revenues. As a result, the Social Security retirement fund is expected to run out around 2030.1 Recently, the 1994–1996 Advisory Council on Social Security (1997) proposed three different plans to address the problem. Interestingly, a...

After the Second World War, Japan and its economy were crippled. The industrial power it once had was reduced to rubble, with millions of people left live in precarious conditions. However, just a matter years, Japanese began re-emerge; local companies became multi-national corporations, hundreds high-quality ‘Made Japan’ products flocking Western markets. To surprise economists, researchers, p...

to provide the validated and standardized form of the persian version of the ages and stages questionnaires as an appropriate developmental screening tool for evaluation of iranian children's development.this was a cross-sectional study. translation and back-translation, content validity determination, cultural and lingual modifications, pilot study on 100 parents and inter-rater reliability de...

The quantity and quality of social relationships, as captured by social network analysis, can have major fitness consequences. Various studies have shown that individual differences in social behaviour can be due to variation in exposure to developmental stress. However, whether these developmental differences translate to consistent differences in social network position is not known. We exper...

Social transmission and host developmental stage are thought to profoundly affect the structure of bacterial communities associated with honey bees and bumble bees, but these ideas have not been explored in other bee species. The halictid bees Megalopta centralis and M. genalis exhibit intrapopulation social polymorphism, which we exploit to test whether bacterial communities differ by host soc...

The effective implementation of Massively Open Online Courses poses fascinating challenges. We address two such challenges using an agent based approach, employing formal specifications to articulate an agent design which can later be used for software development. The challenges addressed are: 1) How can a learner be provided with a personalised learning experience? 2) How can a learner make b...