the present study aimed at investigating whether vocabulary-learning strategies had any impact on the vocabulary learning of iranian efl learners. the participants of the study were 67 male and female undergraduate university students, majoring in english translation and english literature at islamic azad university, north tehran branch, who were taking “reading comprehension ii” course. in ord...

in order to confirm the effectiveness of language learning strategies in theiranian context in junior high schools, this study was designed to examine thepatterns of strategy use, the effects of strategy instruction on the students’ strategyuse, and the relationship between the participants’ strategy use and their englishachievement. to achieve this objective, 57 junior high school participants...

Evolution Strategies (ES) have recently been demonstrated to be a viable alternative to reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms on a set of challenging deep RL problems, including Atari games and MuJoCo humanoid locomotion benchmarks. While the ES algorithms in that work belonged to the specialized class of natural evolution strategies (which resemble approximate gradient RL algorithms, such as ...

A new topology of unified power quality conditioner (UPQC) is proposed for different power quality (PQ) improvement in a three-phase four-wire (3P-4W) distribution system. For neutral current mitigation, a star-hexagon transformer is connected in shunt near the load along with three-leg voltage source inverters (VSIs) based UPQC. For the mitigation of source neutral current, the uses of passive...

Fair pricing of embedded options in life insurance contracts is usually conducted by using risk-neutral valuation. This pricing framework assumes a perfect hedging strategy, which insurance companies can hardly pursue in practice. In this paper, we extend the risk-neutral valuation concept with a risk measurement approach. We accomplish this by first calibrating contract parameters that lead to...

Kahneman and Chajczyk (1983) found that naming a colored bar was slowed when a color word was nearby but that this decrement was reduced when a neutral word was also present. This has been referred to as the dilution effect. They accounted for their results with an attention-capture hypothesis. Response time distributions to stimuli that contained a color word and a neutral word within individu...

We performed an economic analysis of an intervention to decrease ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) prevalence in pediatric intensive care units (PICUs) at two Nicaraguan hospitals to determine the cost of the intervention and how effective it needs to be in order to be cost-neutral. A matched cohort study determined differences in costs and outcomes among ventilated patients. VAP cases were...

The mechanism of the chromophore maturation in members of the green fluorescent protein (GFP) family such as DsRed and other red fluorescent and chromoproteins was analyzed. The analysis indicates that the red chromophore results from a chemical transformation of the protonated form of the GFP-like chromophore, not from the anionic form, which appears to be a dead-end product. The data suggest ...