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...

since the 1960s the age effects on learning both first and second language have been explored by many linguists and applied linguists (e.g lennerberg, 1967; schachter, 1996; long, 1990) and the existence of critical period for language acquisition was found to be a common ground of all these studies. in spite of some common findings, some issues about the impacts of age on acquiring a second or...

abstract: the potato tuberworm, phthorimaea operculella (zeller), is an important insect pest of potato (solanum tuberosum l.) in the storage and field in most parts of the world especially in tropical and subtropical regions due to its close relationship with the host, high reproductive potential and high economic losses. information on host preference, life table parameters and digestive en...

power transformers are important equipments in power systems. thus there is a large number of researches devoted of power transformers. however, there is still a demand for future investigations, especially in the field of diagnosis of transformer failures. in order to fulfill the demand, the first part reports a study case in which four main types of failures on the active part are investigate...

objective: the objective of this study was to investigate the invitro fluoride release of four new self-adhesive resin cements; set (sdi, australia), breeze (pentron, usa), embrace wetbond (pulpdent, usa), g-cem (gc, japan) and to assess the bonding performance of these self-adhesive resin cements for bonding of orthodontic brackets. materials and methods: for fluoride release experiment, six ...

the major purpose of this study was to develop the translation teacher competency test (ttct) and examine its construct and predictive validity. the present study was conducted in two phases: a qualitative phase as well as a quantitative phase. in the first phase of the study, the author attempted to find out the major areas of competency required for an academic translation teacher. the second...

acknowledgements i wish to express my gratitude to all those who have helped me in preparing this thesis. i would like to express my deep gratitude to my respected advisor dr. kourosh akef, whose advice and comments helped me in the early stages of the research and throughout the writing process. i would also like to express my gratitude to dr. hajar khanmohammad whose invaluable guidance he...

among the low–dimensional allotropes of carbon, nanotubes and graphene have attracted very much attention from nano–science and nanotechnology specialists. they have been proposed as building blocks in nanometer device engineering. however, these structures are not defect–free. in this thesis, we focused on defective carbon nanotubes and graphene, and studied the effect of couple of very common...

abstract poor reading comprehension can result in failure in using references, benefiting from professional gatherings and resources, keeping up with the growing body of knowledge in the virtual world of the internet, and failing to achieve in efl programs. the purpose of the present quasi-experimental study was to explore the effects of background knowledge and previewing narrative and expos...