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, ...

abstract poor reading comprehension can result in failure in using references, benefiting from professional gatherings and resources, keeping up with the growing body of knowledge in the virtual world of the internet, and failing to achieve in efl programs. the purpose of the present quasi-experimental study was to explore the effects of background knowledge and previewing narrative and expos...

the present study sought to examine whether a task-based approach could have an impact on raising awareness of collocations. moreover, it sought to investigate the facilitative role of consciousness-raising tasks of collocations in the communicative instances of use. to this end, 68 intermediate learners of english were selected via a placement test. the participants were taught with classroom ...

today, persian poetry is of great importance to many scholars around the world. the interest and attention of various cultures toward such a fine literature has given quite a good motivation for a comparative study. the major concern of the study is to investigate how nature is depicted through the works of the great english poet, william wordsworth (1770-1850) and the outstanding contemporary ...

the west of esfahan province, iran, is one of the most important agricultural areas throughout the country due to the climate variability and life-giving water of zayanderood river. rice is one of the major and economic crops in this area. the most important climatic elements in agricultural activities which should be considered include temperature, relative humidity, precipitation and wind. so...

abstract pragmatics is the study of communicative action in its sociocultural context. communicative action includes not only using speech acts (such as apologizing, complaining, complimenting, and requesting), but also engaging in different types of discourse and participating in speech events of varying length and complexity. the present study aimed to investigate the assessment of pragm...

abstract previous studies on willingness to communicate (wtc) have shown the influence of many individual or situational factors on students’ tendency to engage in classroom communication, in which wtc has been viewed either at the trait-level or situational level. however, due to the complexity of the notion of willingness to communicate, the present study suggests that these two strands are ...

the present paper deals with criminal issues. for example, legal injunction on the necessity of returning a deposit has a legal nature and legal injunction on the punishment of those who breach the trust has a criminal nature. existing social issues are the basis of classification of some instances into the issue, some of which are based on variation and others on quality. therefore, the motiva...

asymmetric polyethersulfone (pes) microfiltration flat sheet membranes were composed by the phase inversion method (pim) and were used as supports. composite membranes were fabricated by coating silicone rubber as selective layer. effect of different concentrations of pes and pdms and different solvent such as nmp, dmf and dms effects as pes solvents and support thickness and different coagulat...

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...