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...

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...

reinsurance is widely recognized as an important instrument in the capital management of an insurance company as well as its risk management tool. this thesis is intended to determine premium rates for different types of reinsurance policies. also, given the fact that the reinsurance coverage of every company depends upon its reserves, so different types of reserves and the method of their calc...

the present study aimed to investigate representation of discourse markers and metadiscourse markers in conversations and readings of general elt coursebook series used in the language centers of iran. to this aim, four elt coursebooks popularly taught in language centers of this country were analyzed based on fung and carter’s (2007) framework regarding discourse markers and hyland’s (2005) fr...

heuristics are often used to provide solutions for flow shop scheduling problems.the performance of a heuristic is usually judged by comparing solutions and run times on test cases.this investigation proposes an analytical alternative ,called asymptotic convergence ,which tests the convergence of the heuristic to a lower bound as problem size grows. the test is a stronger variation of worst cas...

abstract ion selective electrodes (ises) are electrochemical sensors that respond selectivity to the activity of ionic species. an ion-selective electrode is an electrochemical device that uses a thin selective membrane or film as the recognition element, and is an electrochemical half-cell equivalent to other half-cells of the zeroth (inert metal in a redox electrolyte). in common methods o...

the images of muslims in media, literature and politics have been mostly black and white portrayals of a people alien to modernity, civilization, rationality and pluralism. since the end of the cold war and the onset of deadly terrorist attacks in different areas of the world, especially in the united states, these representations show a palpable difference: muslims are represented not only as ...

abstract this paper discusses several commonly used models for strategic marketing¹ including market environmental analysis methods (i.e. swot and pest analysis) and strategic marketing tools and techniques (i.e. boston matrix and shell directional policy matrix)and shows how these models may help a firm to achieve its strategic goals. at first, the main reason for doing this research is de...

this experimental study has been conducted to test the effect of oral presentation on the development of l2 learners grammar. but this oral presentation is not merely a deductive instruction of grammatical points, in this presentation two hypotheses of krashen (input and low filter hypotheses), stevicks viewpoints on grammar explanation and correction and widdowsons opinion on limited use of l1...

the rationale behind the present study is that particular learning strategies produce more effective results when applied together. the present study tried to investigate the efficiency of the semantic-context strategy alone with a technique called, keyword method. to clarify the point, the current study seeked to find answer to the following question: are the keyword and semantic-context metho...