according to cheng (1999), in recent esl/efl literature, asian (especially east asian) learners of english as a foreign/second language have been arguably reported as reticent and passive learners. the most common allegations are that these students are reluctant to participate in classroom discourse; they are unwilling to give responses; they do not ask questions; and they are passive and over...

abstract type-ii fuzzy logic has shown its superiority over traditional fuzzy logic when dealing with uncertainty. type-ii fuzzy logic controllers are however newer and more promising approaches that have been recently applied to various fields due to their significant contribution especially when the noise (as an important instance of uncertainty) emerges. during the design of type- i fuz...

food safety is considered as an important world concern. the detection of pathogen and toxic materials in food has an important role in public health care. in recent years, the applications of microbial biosensor have been developed as a new approach for toxicity control. luminescent microbial biosensor is an appropriate biological tool for protection of natural environment. this type of biosen...

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...

abstract: about 60% of total premium of insurance industry is pertained?to life policies in the world; while the life insurance total premium in iran is less than 6% of total premium in insurance industry in 2008 (sigma, no 3/2009). among the reasons that discourage the life insurance industry is the problem of adverse selection. adverse selection theory describes a situation where the inf...

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...

the quest for power has formed much of the world history especially in 20th and 21st centuries. oil (energy) particularly after industrial revolution has been a tool for conquest and power and has been transformed to a geopolitical issue. from a geopolitical point of view this has been the case for the last two centuries in central asia and caucasus. central asia and caucasus has always been...

this study aimed to investigate the effects of listening strategy training on iranian efl learners listening comprehension and use of such strategies. this work, employing an experimental methodology, was conducted among 60 adult efl learners from a language institute in isfahan, iran, as participants. the participants, who were selected based on the results of a placement test, were assigned t...

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...

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...