For more than three decades healthcare decentralization has been promoted in developing countries as a way of improving the financing and delivery of public healthcare. Decision autonomy under healthcare decentralization would determine the role and scope of responsibility of local authorities. Jalal Mohammed, Nicola North, and Toni Ashton analyze decision autonomy within decentralized services...

In order to be autonomous, teachers should enjoy teaching and be satisfied with their teaching. Teacher autonomy, therefore, may be related to teacher burnout and job satisfaction. The present study investigated the relationship between job satisfaction, teacher burnout, and teacher autonomy. Two hundred and seven language teachers at language institutes in Karaj and Tehran were given three que...

This study investigates the relation between EFL (English as a foreign language) learners’ autonomy, their identity styles, and their writing ability and it aims to show which independent variables have higher predicting power on variances in writing. To this end, 60 Iranian university EFL students at the language center of the researchers’ institution were selected to participate in this study...

Learner autonomy has become the area of interest by many researchers of foreign language learning in the recent years. However, few studies have been done concerning the case of Kurdish learners` autonomy in learning languages. For this reason, the current study addresses this gap. It intends to investigate to what extent Kurdish learners are autonomous in learning English language. The study i...

This paper describes a new approach to programming autonomic systems. Autonomic functions are integrated into element objects at design time using a special language called JSpoon. JSpoon extends element classes with management attributes representing configuration, performance, status and fault information. The JSpoon compiler generates respective code and interfaces to instrument the data in ...

This paper provides a very useful and promising analysis and comparison of current architectures of autonomous intelligent systems acting in real time and specific contexts, with all their constraints. The chosen issue of Cognitive Architectures and Autonomy is really a challenge for AI current projects and future research. I appreciate and endorse not only that challenge but many specific choi...

Robots are becoming increasingly autonomous. Yet, there are no commonly accepted terms and measures of how “autonomous” a robot is. An ad hoc working group has been formed to address these deficiencies, focusing on the unmanned vehicles domain. This group is defining terminology relevant to unmanned systems and is devising metrics for autonomy levels of these systems. Autonomy definitions and m...

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between Iranian EFL learners’ use of vocabulary learning strategies and their autonomy with a focus on the gender. To meet this objective, 82(39 males and 43 females) sophomore and junior students majoring in English Language Teaching who had passed at least 45 credits at Tabriz Azad University, in Iran were asked to take part...