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, ...

now-a-days graphic design plays a major role in influencing culture, society, business, and customers, in such a way that one could look upon every individual as a potential customer. graphic designers seek to identify customers needs and find an intelligent solution for them. correct identification and understanding of those needs is the first step towards achieving ones goals. marketing knowh...

abstract translation has become a cultural act which plays a significant role in human life. with the emergence of functional translation theories, and skopos theory in particular, translation has been considered as a purposeful, interpersonal and intercultural activity which is produced for particular recipients and directed by a specific purpose. this purpose determines the translatio...

abstract: in this thesis, we focus to class of convex optimization problem whose objective function is given as a linear function and a convex function of a linear transformation of the decision variables and whose feasible region is a polytope. we show that there exists an optimal solution to this class of problems on a face of the constraint polytope of feasible region. based on this, we dev...

abstract recent studies suggest that prelistening activities play an important role in the development of listening comprehension (e.g. long 1990;chiang and dunkel 1992; schmidt-rinehart 1994; jensen and hansen 1995; robinson et al., 1995; buck, 1995; foster and skehan,1996; teng 1996; robinson, 2001; chang and read 2006). in line with previous studies and to shed light on a new aspect of sche...

the purpose of the present study was to see which one of the two instruction-processing instruction (pi) and meaningful output based instruction (mobi) accompanied with prompt and recast- is more effective on efl learners’ writing accuracy. in order to homogenize the participants in term of language proficiency a preliminary english test (pet) was administrated between 74 intermediate students ...

the ability to speak two languages in the world is a remarkable achievement. there is a good reason to believe that bilingualism is the norm for the majority of people in the world because 70% of the earth’s population are supposed to be bilingual or multilingual. various investigations have shown that the native language impacts foreign word recognition, and this influence is adapted by the de...

during the process of reading, sometimes learners use ineffective and inefficient strategies and some factors may influence their use of strategies. perhaps critical thinking is one of these factors. this study aims to identify those categories of reading strategies that are mostly used by iranian efl learners and to see if there is any significant relationship between the critical thinking abi...

the main objective in sampling is to select a sample from a population in order to estimate some unknown population parameter, usually a total or a mean of some interesting variable. a simple way to take a sample of size n is to let all the possible samples have the same probability of being selected. this is called simple random sampling and then all units have the same probability of being ch...

deployable scissor type structures are composed of the so-called scissor-like elements (sles), which are connected to each other at an intermediate point through a pivotal connection and allow them to be folded into a compact bundle for storage or transport. several sles are connected to each other in order to form units with regular polygonal plan views. the sides and radii of the polygons are...