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, ...

as polysemy is encountered frequently in english as foreign language. fl learners’ ability to disambiguate polysemous verbs becomes critical to their comprehension in the target language. this thesis, accordingly, investigated how iranian efl learners achieved comprehension of english polysemous verbs by using three different types of cues: (1) elaborated context, (2) semantic frames, and (...

most specialists in the field of foreign language teachingconsiderreading skill as an interactive process between the reader’s prior knowledge and the text.accordingly, the activation of prior knowledge for an effective comprehension is very important. it is generally agreed that the pre-reading phase is the stage where this type of interaction and activation may be enhanced throughcertain stra...

abstract: the present study was undertaken to investigate whether 1) there is any significant correlation between iranian efl/eap learners’ l2 writing proficiency and their willingness to communicate, 2) there is any significant difference between efl and eap learners in terms of willingness to communicate, 3) there is any significant difference in wtc of iranian efl/eap learners with 1- nati...

nowadays, air pollution is a global problem that has had significant growth by technology development, population growth andindustrial development. industrial development brought natural resources deterioration, more manufacturing products, and more environmental pollutants. if pollutant won’t be controlled, human-being and wildlife will face the critical risks. significant release and critical...

the study reflected in this thesis aims at finding out relationships between critical thinking (ct), and the reading sections of tofel and ielts tests. the study tries to find any relationships between the ct ability of students and their performance on reading tests of tofel and academic ielts. however, no research has ever been conducted to investigate the relationship between ct and the read...

testing plays a vital role in any language teaching program. it allows teachers and stakeholders, including program administrators, parents, admissions officers and prospective employers to be assured that the learners are progressing according to an accepted standard (douglas, 2010). the problems currently facing language testers have both practical and theoretical implications but the first i...

a problem of computer vision applications is to detect regions of interest under dif- ferent imaging conditions. the state-of-the-art maximally stable extremal regions (mser) detects affine covariant regions by applying all possible thresholds on the input image, and through three main steps including: 1) making a component tree of extremal regions’ evolution (enumeration), 2) obtaining region ...

cement is an essential ingredient in the concrete buildings. for production of cement considerable amount of fossil fuel and electrical energy is consumed. on the other hand for generating one tone of portland cement, nearly one ton of carbon dioxide is released. it shows that 7 percent of the total released carbon dioxide in the world relates to the cement industry. considering ecological issu...

abstract nowadays, industries cannot play a crucial role in national and international competitions. the tourism industry is no exception. tourism industry development as the most important economic sector and income generation is one of the key challenges of economic development in the world. therefore, countries were successful that take advantage of the capabilities of tourism sector using ...