Background Students who are the first in their families to attend college an integral part of undergraduate engineering programs. Growing bodies research argue that educators could better support these students if they understood unique backgrounds, experiences, and knowledge bring with them higher education. Purpose/Hypothesis The purpose this article is twofold. First, we identify salient fun...

In this paper we present an application for the construction of mutual fund portfolios. It is based on a combination of Intelligent Methods, namely an argumentation based decision making framework and a forecasting algorithm combining Genetic Algorithms (GA), MultiModel Partitioning (MMP) theory and Extended Kalman Filters (EKF). The argumentation framework is employed in order to develop mutua...

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009) promised strict accounting of all funds spent and the publication of that information to the public in relative real-time. The federal requirements for reporting Recovery Act funds relied heavily on the ability of recipients, primarily state governments, to capture, manage, and deliver the data required. This paper presents the experience of one...

The internet is increasingly used as a source for information and knowledge. Even in the field of healthcare, information is widely available in the internet. In the context of healthcare management, two general questions are of interest: which information or content is provided and how is provided by whom? As sickness funds play a highly relevant role in the German healthcare system, we conduc...

recently, financing knowledge-based companies as a strategic issue in iranian economy has been considered by many domestic bankers. in this regard, the establishment of venture funds and the allocation of credit lines may be considered as major activities of the banking system. however, there are many challenges on the road to achieve effective financing of knowledge-based companies, namely the...

Sustainable tourism and ecotourism have now been researched in depth for some years. This paper highlights that researchers still have only a limited understanding of what tourist behaviour can be considered as sustainable, and little consensus about who environment-friendly tourists (EFTs) actually are. This study reviews theoretical and empirical studies by tourism researchers, and explores w...

In this paper, we test the hypothesis that access to electronic payments may reduce crime. Our results suggest that there is a negative and significant statistical relationship between access to electronic payments and the incidence of economic crimes such as robbery and burglary, while electronic transactions do little to reduce the incidence of non-economic crimes such as homicide and rape. T...

one of the main functionalities of capital market is to improve liquidityin the market which provides security for the investors. mutual funds aremodern financial institutions which are designed with the aim of collectingfunds from investors and devote them to buy a variety of securities inorder to mitigate investment risks, exploit the economies of scale andfinally create a reasonable return f...