charles dickens was a voracious reader even in his childhood. his early reading of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century picaresque fiction greatly influenced his writing style. his first novel, the pickwick papers, is a tale of rogues and swindlers, adventures and quests, satire and comedy, and innocence and experience. oliver twist, dickens’ second novel, is a young boy’s progress through a cor...

there are two major theories of measurement in psychometrics: classical test theory (ctt) and item-response theory (irt). despite its widespread and long use, ctt has a number of shortcomings, which make it problematic to be used for practical and theoretical purposes. irt tries to solve these shortcomings, and provide better and more dependable answers. one of the applications of irt is the as...

armenias geopolitics and its historical experience have had a determining impact on the character of its foreign policy .present-day armenia is a small, landlocked country with _11,620 square miles area armenias landlocked nature makes it dependent on the benevolence of its neighbors for access to the outside world a fact that gives it a sense of isolation and vulnerability. as it was indic...

nitric oxide (no) is a small molecule synthesized by most of mammalian cells with diverse biological activities including vasodilatation, host defense and wound healing. impaired wound healing is a common occurrence among diabetics and patients receiving glucocorticoid therapy. on the other hand the application of laser in biomedical area have been increased. thus, the current studies were desi...

abstract there is not much sources about ancient carnival and ceremonies , but some information can be gain from documents . as a matter of fact the ceremonies were a part of zarartiyan principles which zartosht had taken them to his religion . it should be mentioned that the oldest ceremonies are about poster and agriculture principles this seasonal ceremonies were very important for agri...

monumental changes occurring on a daily basis have altered the world into a global village of expanding technology and shrinking geography in which preparing language learners for intercultural communication seems to be a sine qua non for modern language education. employing a cross-sectional design in its first phase, this study investigated the intercultural sensitivity and language proficien...

abstract this mixed method study examines whether there is any relationship among the variables of the study (job satisfaction, social capital and motivation). the researcher considered job satisfaction and social capital as independent variables; motivation is the dependent variable of the study. the researcher applied a questionnaire to assess each variable. to measure efl teachers’ job sati...

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...

the aim of this study is to examine the difference between the introverts and extroverts in preferred advice-giving style. furthermore, it explores the difference between l1 (persian) and l2 (english) regarding the giving of advice for the extroverts and introverts separately. it investigates whether an extrovert or introvert gives advice in the same manner in his l1 (persian) and l2 (english) ...

in this thesis, first the notion of weak mutual associativity (w.m.a.) and the necessary and sufficient condition for a $(l,gamma)$-associated hypersemigroup $(h, ast)$ derived from some family of $lesssim$-preordered semigroups to be a hypergroup, are given. second, by proving the fact that the concrete categories, semihypergroups and hypergroups have not free objects we will introduce t...