This paper proposes improvements and revisions to a recent approach in a voting system, and provides an effective approach with a stronger discriminate power. For this purpose, the advantage of a linear transformation is utilized to redene a previously used concept of virtual worst candidate, by incorporating the existing weight restrictions. Then, the best score of this virtual candidate is us...

At the core of Model-Based Design, computational models have caused an autocatalytic trend to use computation in design by unlocking the potential of model transformations. Precisely specifying a computational transformation requires well-defined semantics of the source and target representations. In this regard, continuous-time behavior is an essential aspect of time-based block diagrams that ...

The project management discipline is expanding within many engineering activities. This discipline can facilitate strivings toward successful accomplishment of an engineering project. Therefore, many academic institutes teach the “project management” program. This study presents a novel approach that educates engineering students to become successful project managers based on contextual learnin...

Ambivalence, the presence of positive and negative reactions toward an object, typically involves the subjective experience of conflict. We investigate the role that the perceived validity of each side of an ambivalent attitude plays in producing subjective ambivalence (SA). Consistent with the metacognitive model of attitudes, we demonstrated that SA is reduced when people doubt either the pos...

The functional perspective on attitudes suggests that individuals will be more persuaded by advertisements that match their individual needs or attitude functions. Although previous research provided correlational support for this functional approach, the current study aimed to provide a stronger, experimental test. A pilot study validated situational manipulations of the value-expressive and k...