insurers have in the past few decades faced longevity risks - the risk that annuitants survive more than expected - and therefore need a new approach to manage this new risk. in this dissertation we survey methods that hedge longevity risks. these methods use securitization to manage risk, so using modern financial and insurance pricing models, especially wang transform and actuarial concepts, ...

the current study examined iranian undergraduate efl students’ willingness to communicate with regard to their vocabulary knowledge. in general, participants were somewhat willing to communicate in english. the total mean score of 730 university students’ perception of willing to communicate was 83.53 out of 135. results, regarding four parts of willingness to communicate, revealed that part...

data envelopment analysis (dea) is a powerful tool for measuring relative efficiency of organizational units referred to as decision making units (dmus). in most cases dmus have network structures with internal linking activities. traditional dea models, however, consider dmus as black boxes with no regard to their linking activities and therefore do not provide decision makers with the reasons...

this study focuses on jane austens representation of her heroines in two of her novels: pride and prejudice, and mansfield park. i have concentrated only on a single idea: how jane austen takes her heroines through a course of psychogical reformation to which almost everything else in her novel is subsidiary. although i have discussed only pride and prejudice, we can trace austens carefully pla...

to discuss my point, i have collected quite a number of articles, anthologies, and books about "wuthering heights" applying various ideas and theories to this fantastic story. hence, i have come to believe that gadamer and jauss are rightful when they claim that "the individaul human mind is the center and origin of all meaning," 3 that reading literature is a reader-oriented activity, that it ...

the aim of this study has been to find answers for the following questions: 1. what is the effect of immediate correction on students pronunciation errors? 2. what would be the effect of teaching the more rgular patterns of english pronunciation? 3. is there any significant difference between the two methods of dealing with pronuciation errore, i. e., correction and the teaching of the regular ...

the present study has tried to accomplish an analysis of margaret atwood’s novels oryx and crake, and the year of the flood in the light of posthuman and cyborg theories. considering posthumanism as a critical reading of some notions of humanism focus of which in this thesis has been identity, new definitions for humanity and human identity are formed. haraway’s cyborg, as one possible new figu...

fuzzy logic has been developed over the past three decades into a widely applied techinque in classification and control engineering. today fuzzy logic control is one of the most important applications of fuzzy set theory and specially fuzzy logic. there are two general approachs for using of fuzzy control, software and hardware. integrated circuits as a solution for hardware realization are us...