Sharif Digital Repository

In this paper, a framework for effective factors on the occurrence of economic corruption is presented. Corruption issues as an existing challenge need to be addressed comprehensively and accurately. Various factors affect this issue, and the lack of precise and comprehensive identification of these factors can create a constraint, in which the main causes of corruption may not be addressed and efforts may focus on less important issues. The existence of a framework of factors helps by examining the level of these factors and makes it possible to identify the strengths and weaknesses of context and personal factors to design and implement corrective solutions and eliminating weaknesses, so... 

Trust is needed to facilitate cooperation and delegation among agents in a multi-agent system. This paper proposes a trust model based on Capra cognitive framework. This framework explains social phenomena from the four perspectives of structure (agent), pattern (network), process, and meaning. We assume trust as "meaning" in the proposed model. Every agent has properties such as personality, responsibility, and specialty. Interaction among agents is based on friendship network. OODA, as a general process for decision making, is used for updating the trust in the simulation run  

This paper is an endeavour to give an alternative definition for sustainable development (SD). It reviews the previous works in this area, and finds common grounds of these works, namely dynamism and quantification of the system. The paper then discusses dynamic stability and relates it to the concept of sustainability. It constructs an analogy between sustainability objectives and dynamic stability. The discussion continues to introduce chaos as one inherent characteristic of socio-economic systems because of their nonlinear behaviour. A new definition of SD is then proposed. It is applied to the dynamic models that describe the inter-relationships of environmental, economic and social... 

The main concern for most organizations in this age, which has been called the age of knowledge-based economy, is their success and superiority in competitive markets. Reviewing the parameters that might have been effective on the success of operationalizing a knowledge management project leads us to a potential factor as knowledge architecture. With regard to the significant effect of knowledge management in the efficiency of organizations and the inclination of current organizations toward large-scale, we try to come up with a suitable architectural framework in such organizations. The initial structure of the framework was established based on the information architectural framework of... 

The advent of agile methodologies, though contributing much to software development processes, had a more profound impact on project management processes. Through supporting adaptability in their process frameworks, agile methodologies deviated from conventional project management approaches. This novel attitude has resulted in the emergence of an agile framework for project management. The Agile Project Management Framework (APMF) consists of fine-grained project management practices applied in agile methodologies, and is fast emerging as an alternative to the conventional project management framework. However, there are deficiencies in both frameworks that prevent developers from enhancing... 

In the present work, adsorption of hydrogen molecules over a metal organic framework (MOF-5) has been investigated by using first principles density functional theory (DFT). Different strategies have been applied for improving hydrogen storage, i.e. metal doping, boron substitution and functionalization. The metal atoms used for enhancing hydrogen adsorption include Li, Ca and Sc. It is found that the binding energy between these metal atoms and MOF is not enough to prevent clustering. Therefore a number of carbon atoms are substituted by boron atoms and it is indicated that boron substitution enhances the binding energies, significantly. Also the results reveal that boron substituted MOF... 

The pseudocapacitance and morphology of electrodeposited transition metal oxides depend significantly on the morphology of the substrate. The nanoporous nickel substrate, derived from selective electro-dissolution of antimony from an electro-deposited Ni-Sb alloy, effectively promotes the electrochemical utilization of manganese oxide deposited on this structure. The large electronic and ionic conduction within the nanostructured deposit improve the energy storage performance of Mn oxide as compared to that on flat Ni substrate. In this work, the MnO2 specific capacitances of around 612 F g-1 were obtained, which was five times higher than Mn oxide deposited on a flat Ni-ribbon. A highly... 

In high-integrity systems, certain quality requirements have gained utmost significance in such a way that failing to satisfy them at a particular level may result in the loss of the entire system, endangerment of human life, peril to the organization's existence, or serious damage to the environment. High-integrity computer systems should incorporate top-quality software in order to adequately address their stringent quality requirements. The methodologies used for developing high-integrity software must possess special characteristics in order to ensure successful realization of the requirements. Software Process patterns represent empirically proven methods of software development that... 

Silver-based nanomaterials have attracted considerable attention due to their antimicrobial activities. In this work, a silver (Ag)-based metal organic framework (Ag-MOF) is embellished with graphene-oxide (GO), leading to the fabrication of a novel Ag-based nanocomposite (GO-Ag-MOF) whose biocidal activity is higher than those of Ag-MOF and GO nanomaterials. The nanocomposite is characterized using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, scanning electron microscope, Fourier transform infrared spectra, ultraviolet−visible absorption spectra, X-ray powder diffraction, dynamic light scattering, and nitrogen gas adsorption/desorption. The characterization shows that... 

The fluoride ion is usually added to drinking water because of its prominent role in treating osteoporosis and improving dental health. However, fluoride contents over the optimal level (>1.5 ppm) in water resources has been found to have harmful effects on human health such as bone and dental fluorosis, Alzheimer's syndrome, DNA damage, infertility, kidney failure, acute gastric problems, thyroid disorder, brain damage, and even cancer. Therefore, sensitive and selective detection of fluoride ions and their removal from drinking water are of great significance. The unique features of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), such as chemical activities, a broad range of functionalities, high... 

The fluoride ion is usually added to drinking water because of its prominent role in treating osteoporosis and improving dental health. However, fluoride contents over the optimal level (>1.5 ppm) in water resources has been found to have harmful effects on human health such as bone and dental fluorosis, Alzheimer's syndrome, DNA damage, infertility, kidney failure, acute gastric problems, thyroid disorder, brain damage, and even cancer. Therefore, sensitive and selective detection of fluoride ions and their removal from drinking water are of great significance. The unique features of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), such as chemical activities, a broad range of functionalities, high... 

A new magnetic composite was synthesized by integration of ZnFe2O4 and MIL-53(Fe) micro-rods by a solvothermal method. This composite served as a heterogeneous catalyst to overcome the high electron-hole recombination rates of ZnFe2O4 and to enhance the degradation of Direct Red 23 under visible light irradiation. Different analytical techniques, including XRD, FTIR, SEM, DRS, VSM, and PL, were employed to characterize the synthesized heterojunction nanocomposite and to evaluate its photocatalytic activity. The ZnFe2O4/MIL-53(Fe)/Vis-light system resulted in significantly higher dye degradation as compared with pristine ZnFe2O4 and MIL-53(Fe) semiconductors at the optimum pH of 3.1 and... 

Object-oriented frameworks are widely used to develop new applications. They provide reusable concepts that are instantiated in application code through potentially complex implementation steps such as subclassing, implementing interfaces, and calling framework operations. Unfortunately, many modern frameworks are difficult to use because of their large and complex APIs and frequently incomplete user documentation. To cope with these problems, developers often use existing framework applications as a guide. However, locating concept implementations in those sample applications is typically challenging due to code tangling and scattering. To address this challenge, we introduce the notion of... 

Object-oriented application frameworks, such as Java Swing, provide reusable code and design for implementing domain-specific concepts, such as Context Menu, in software applications. Hence, use of such frameworks not only can decrease the time and the cost of developing new software applications, but also can increase their maintainability. However, the main problems of using object-oriented application frameworks are their large and complex APIs, and often incomplete user manuals. To mitigate these problems, developers often try to learn how to implement their desired concepts from available sample applications. Nonetheless, this introduces another hard and time-consuming challenge which... 

Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) have received enormous attention in catalysis field due to their special structures and various promising applications. One of the intriguing applications of MOFs is utilization of them as precursors for synthesis of metal oxide nanomaterials. Base on this strategy, in this work, we have applied Cu-MOF to prepare a series of noble metal nanoparticles (Ag and Au) decorated CuO (M/CuO) as efficient catalyst. As-prepared nanocomposites were characterized by various analytical techniques and their catalytic performances appraised by using of the catalytic reduction of p-nitrophenol to p-aminophenol as a reliable model reaction. Experimental results suggest that... 

Business process reengineering (BPR) assists organisations in improving their internal functions to better achieve their business objectives. Various methodologies have been developed for applying BPR, through which organisational processes are identified, analysed, and improved. However, the need still remains for custom methodologies which are tailored to fit the specific characteristics of organisations and BPR projects. Process patterns are abstract representations of common and effective processes that can be reused as method parts for building custom methodologies; an approach that is commonly referred to as situational method engineering (SME). This study aims to use SME in the... 

In this paper, the problem of multimodal soft coupling under the Bayesian framework when variance of probabilistic model is unknown is investigated. Similarity of shared factors resulted from Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) of multimodal data sets is controlled in a soft manner by using a probabilistic model. In previous works, it is supposed that the probabilistic model and its parameters are known. However, this assumption does not always hold. In this paper it is supposed that the probabilistic model is already known but its variance is unknown. So the proposed algorithm estimates the variance of the probabilistic model along with the other parameters during the factorization...