Sharif Digital Repository

Drawing on a modified version of Delphi technique, the researchers in this study tried to develop a rubric comprising the main criteria to be considered in the evaluation of works of fiction. Review of the related literature, as well as the administration of a Likert scale questionnaire, and a series of unstructured interviews with experts in the fields of literature and creative writing, led to the identification of ten elements which were used in the construction of the first version of the rubric. To ensure its validity, a number of distinguished creative writing professors were asked to review this assessment tool and comment on its appropriateness for measuring the intended construct.... 

Drawing on a modified version of Delphi technique, the researchers in this study tried to develop a rubric comprising the main criteria to be considered in the evaluation of works of fiction. Review of the related literature, as well as the administration of a Likert scale questionnaire, and a series of unstructured interviews with experts in the fields of literature and creative writing, led to the identification of ten elements which were used in the construction of the first version of the rubric. To ensure its validity, a number of distinguished creative writing professors were asked to review this assessment tool and comment on its appropriateness for measuring the intended construct.... 

Numerous studies have been conducted on the effectiveness of reflective journal writing in (second language) teacher education. However, only a few studies have explored pre-service and in-service teachers' own perceptions in this regard, especially in the context of ELT (English Language Teaching). To address this gap, a focus group discussion was conducted among six in-service teachers on the advantages and challenges of the journal writing task in a BA Second Language Teaching Methodology course they had attended. Thematic analysis of the discussion showed that the participants believed writing journals had contributed to their self-awareness, understanding of issues related to ELT,... 

Write-through caches potentially have higher reliability than write-back caches. However, write-back caches are more energy efficient. This paper provides a comparison between the write-back and write-through policies based on the combination of reliability and energy consumption criteria. In the experiments, SIMPLESCALAR tool and CACTI model are used to evaluate the characteristics of the caches. The results show that a write-through cache with one parity bit per word is as reliable as a write-back cache with SEC-DED code per word. Furthermore, the results show that the energy saving of the write-through cache over the write-back cache increases if any of the following changes happens: i) a... 

This paper presents a Windows program providing statistics on word and non-word stimuli in Persian, including word frequency, orthographic and phonological length, orthographic and phonological neighbors, and transposed-letter neighbors. It also generates possible non-words that are orthographic neighbors of the target word. Persian is an under-represented Indo-European language that has historically been influenced by Arabic and adopted certain characteristics in its writing, e.g., the omission of short vowels. This tool aims to help researchers in psycholinguistics, specifically with regard to isolated word recognition in Persian. This downloadable program computes the aforementioned... 

In order to engage students in higher-level thinking, cognitive activation (CA) strategies have been advanced and utilized in mathematics. CA develops when learners are challenged, confronted with conflicts, asked to think and explain clearly on their learning, and realize connections between new and previous content. Extending the theme to English language teaching (ELT), this study investigated Iranian English language teachers‟ knowledge and practice of cognitive activation writing strategies (CAWS). In so doing, a model was proposed based on a questionnaire that was developed and validated in the present study. Through this scale, knowledge and practice of CAWS by 213 English as a... 

In order to engage students in higher-level thinking, cognitive activation (CA) strategies have been advanced and utilized in mathematics. CA develops when learners are challenged, confronted with conflicts, asked to think and explain clearly on their learning, and realize connections between new and previous content. Extending the theme to English language teaching (ELT), this study investigated Iranian English language teachers‟ knowledge and practice of cognitive activation writing strategies (CAWS). In so doing, a model was proposed based on a questionnaire that was developed and validated in the present study. Through this scale, knowledge and practice of CAWS by 213 English as a... 

Considering the prominence attached to written corrective feedback (WCF) within the domain of second/foreign language (L2) acquisition, automated writing evaluation (AWE) tools have steadily gained ground over the last two decades. The current study was an attempt to investigate the extent incorporating an AWE program, known as Criterion®, within a process writing framework would affect learners' writing quality in an English as a foreign language context. Moreover, we drew a comparison between the overall effects of computer- versus teacher-generated WCF. Participants consisted of 53 tertiary level students from two intact essay-writing classes. The within-group findings revealed that the... 

Nowadays, many second/foreign language (L2) academic writing instruction programs place a high premium on pre-writing strategies. The current study examined the effect of software-supported concept mapping on lexical diversity (LD) of English learners' argumentative essays within a process writing framework. Additionally, the relationship between the learners' LD and their overall writing quality was investigated. To this end, 53 university English as a foreign language (EFL) undergraduates were assigned to a computer-aided concept mapping (CACM) and a traditional outlining condition over a span of seven weeks. The CACM group was instructed through the graphic organizer software... 

Spin-Transfer Torque RAM (STT-RAM) is a promising alternative to SRAM for implementing on-chip L2 and L3 caches. One of the most critical challenges in STT-RAM is reliability due to limited write endurance, which results in insufficient lifetime, as well as various types of errors. Previous studies have focused on either presenting various cache architectures/management techniques to improve the lifetime of STT-RAM caches or utilizing different Error Correcting Codes (ECCs) to protect against the permanent and transient errors. However, there is no quantitative analysis in the literature to determine the impact of ECCs on the lifetime of the STT-RAM caches. This paper formulates this impact... 

Emerging non-volatile memories (NVMs) are known as promising alternatives to SRAMs in on-chip caches. However, their limited write endurance is a major challenge when NVMs are employed in these highly frequently written caches. Early wear-out of NVM cells makes the lifetime of the caches extremely insufficient for nowadays computational systems. Previous studies only addressed the lifetime of data part in the cache. This paper first demonstrates that the age bits field of the cache replacement algorithm is the most frequently written part of a cache block and its lifetime is shorter than that of data part by more than 27×. Second, it investigates the effect of age bits wear-out on the cache... 

The rapid growth of the world-wide web poses unprecedented scaling challenges for general-purpose crawlers and search engines. A focused crawler aims at selectively seek out pages that are relevant to a pre-defined set of topics. Besides specifying topics by some keywords, it is customary also to use some exemplary documents to compute the similarity of a given web document to the topic. In this paper we Introduce a new hybride focused crawler, which uses link structure of documents as well as similarity of pages to the topic to crawl the web © 2006 HEE  

Persian (Farsi) script is totally cursive and each character is written in several different forms depending on its former and later characters in the word. These complexities make automatic handwriting recognition of Persian a very hard problem and there are few contributions trying to work it out. This paper presents a novel practical approach to online recognition of Persian handwriting which is based on representation of inputs and patterns with very simple visual features and comparison of these simple terms. This recognition approach is tested over a set of Persian words and the results have been quite acceptable when the possible words where unknown and they were almost all correct in... 

This paper presents a robust and low-power single-ended robust 11T near-threshold SRAM cell in 10-nm FinFET technology. The proposed cell eliminates write disturbance and enhances write performance by disconnecting the path between cross-coupled inverters during the write operation. FinFETs suffer from width quantization, and SRAM performance is highly dependent to transistors sizing. The proposed structure with minimum sized tri-gate FinFETs operates without failure under major process variations. In addition, read disturbance is reduced by isolating the storage nodes during the read operations. To reduce power consumption this cell uses only one bit-line for both read and write operations.... 

This paper proposes a low power SRAM based on five transistor SRAM cell. Proposed SRAM uses novel word-line decoding such that, during a read/write operation, only selected cell is connected to bit-line when one row is selected whereas, in conventional SRAM (CV-SRAM), all cells in selected row connected to their bit-lines, which in turn develops differential voltages across all bit-lines, and this makes energy consumption on unselected bit-lines. Proposed SRAM uses one bit-line and thus has lower bit-line leakage compared to CV-SRAM. Furthermore, the proposed SRAM incurs no area overhead, and has comparable read/write performance versus the CV-SRAM. Simulation results in standard 0.25μm CMOS...