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...

a major concern in the last few years has been the fact that the cultural centers are keeping distance with what they have been established for and instead of reproducing the hegemony, they have turned into a place for resistance and reproduction of resistance against hegemony. because the cultural centers, as urban public spaces in the last two decades, have been the subject of ideological dis...

previous studies have aimed at testing a hypothesis but the present study is data-first research in which researcher tries to form a theory from data rather than the use of data to test a hypothesis. this study aims at exploring teachers perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of the current syllabus for college preparatory course. eight experienced teachers were selected to collect data du...

abstract the third millennium has started, but the world is facing with serious challenges in achieving international security and peace. various human rights violations have lead the states to find means to protect human rights. also article 55 of the united nations charter introduces the respect to human rights and fundamental freedom as the most suitable ways to realize peace and security. ...

within the components of communicative competence, a special emphasis is put on the “rules of politeness,” specifically the politeness strategies (brown and levinson, 1978) that speakers deploy when performing the request speech act. this is because the degree of imposition that making a request places upon one’s interlocutor(s) has been seen to be influenced by several factors among which, as ...

plagiarism in esl/efl learning contexts has been established as a dynamic and multi-layered phenomenon and has become a topic engaging many researchers in a heated debate in recent years. comparisons of student-generated texts with their source texts have shown that students rely on source texts in their writings and copying is a major strategy used by both l1 and l2 writers. in our country a...

in this research the focus of the researcher is on the influence of american myths that have long been held and offered by the american culture and ideologies. sam shepard is conceived to be one of the greatest playwrights of the contemporary american theater. in his works he depicts broken characters who are struggling to keep up with the national expectations but are ceaselessly borne back to...

for any educational program to be successful, many factors work hand in hand. based on pervious efl studies, teachers and learners are the keys to gain achievement. granted the fact that explicit and implicit practice plays a key role in education, knowledge of it can help teachers facilitate students’ vocabulary learning. this study investigated to determine the contribution of explicit and i...

thermal barrier coatings (tbcs) are used to provide thermal insulation to the hot section components of gas turbines in order to enhance the operating temperature and turbine efficiency. hot corrosion and thermal shocks are the main destructive factors in tbcs which comes as a result of oxygen and molten salt diffusion into the coating. in this thesis atmospheric plasma spraying was used to dep...

a novel silver (ag) nanocomposite electrode was proposed that fabricated from metal nanostructures and ionic liquids. the combined application of unique properties of nanomaterials and ionic liquids in the design of this ag nanocomposite results in electrodes with interesting advantages compared to the conventional metal disk electrode. in the first part of this thesis, the elecrocatalytic eff...