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...

introduction: diabetes mellitus is an growing national and international public health concern. the number of people affected by diabetes in world by 2030 will be 69% in developing countries. regular physical activity plays a key role in the management of type 2 diabetes melitus, particularly glycemic control. it has been recommended that peoples with type 2 diabetes participate in moderate-int...

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, ...

a professional is someone whose work involves performing a certain function with some degree of expertise. but a narrower definition limits the term to apply to people such as teachers and doctors, whose expertise involves not only skill and knowledge but also the exercise of highly sophisticated judgment, and whose accreditation necessitates extensive study, often university-based as well as p...

there are two major theories of measurement in psychometrics: classical test theory (ctt) and item-response theory (irt). despite its widespread and long use, ctt has a number of shortcomings, which make it problematic to be used for practical and theoretical purposes. irt tries to solve these shortcomings, and provide better and more dependable answers. one of the applications of irt is the as...

heuristics are often used to provide solutions for flow shop scheduling problems.the performance of a heuristic is usually judged by comparing solutions and run times on test cases.this investigation proposes an analytical alternative ,called asymptotic convergence ,which tests the convergence of the heuristic to a lower bound as problem size grows. the test is a stronger variation of worst cas...

this study considers the level of increase in customer satisfaction by supplying the variant customer requirements with respect to organizational restrictions. in this regard, anp, qfd and bgp techniques are used in a fuzzy set and a model is proposed in order to help the organization optimize the multi-objective decision-making process. the prioritization of technical attributes is the result ...

recent studies in scientific education as well as foreign and second language instruction suggest that thinking has rarely been an integral part of education and training in classroom. some scholars decried the lack of emphasis on thinking in the institutes and schools. they noted that memorization and drills were rewarded,while inquiry, reflection, and consideration of alternatives were frowne...

this study investigates the problem of translating religious allusions in persian literature, namely the ones borrowed from quranic verses and hadiths. the purpose of this study is to shed light on how different translators dealt with such a task and also to provide guidelines for translators in coping with religious allusions.

in this thesis, a structured hierarchical methodology based on petri nets is used to introduce a task model for a soccer goalkeeper robot. in real or robot soccer, goalkeeper is an important element which has a key role and challenging features in the game. goalkeeper aims at defending goal from scoring goals by opponent team, actually to prevent the goal from the opponent player’s attacks. thi...