Sharif Digital Repository

In addition to the successes of modern science and technology in helping humanity, science has brought harmful effects ,which has led to criticisms from different domains such ethics, religion, politics, philosophy , etc. Nicholas Maxwell as an Emeritus Reader in the Philosophy of Science has shown , in several of his works, the harmful byproducts of science, and has proposed some ideas for bring about a revolution in the philosophy of science. His main thesis is to change the academic and non-academic aim of works, from knowledge to wisdom. In summary, his concerns are: inappropriate metaphysical presuppositions concerning the comprehensibility of our universe, attention to rational... 

The low performance of the natural resource economies in terms of economic growth has been considered in different fields of social sciences recently. Variety of policies suggested escaping from this phenomenon with respect to different standpoints. In this research, based on a theoretical approach, we tried to model the leader and people’s behavior in resource rich countries with political economics viewpoint and rational players. The contribution of this research is the introduction of state owned enterprises (SOE) as a basis to resource curse, which has not been considered precisely before. In our model, we have two players (leader, people), two alternatives for resource allocation... 

Today, several centuries after the time when science began to flourish of science, everybody is familiar with destroying consequences of modern science and technology, in addition to its achievments. Besides, domination and exclusive position of science in educational system and government organizations have marginalized alternative knowledge. Thus, some people found this trend dangerous for humankind’s fate and tried to change this situation. Nasr and Feyerabend are two philosophers that despite their different work area both criticise modern science and try to establish their own ideal scientific community.Nasr’s approach is regeneration of traditional science which was prevalent before... 

In this thesis we introduce Tropical Geometry and It’s Application in Arithmetic Geometry  

In this thesis, we are going to study Sobolev classes of weakly differentiable mappings, specially Orlicz-Sobolev class, between compact Riemannian manifolds without boundary. These mappings posses less regularity than the mappings in the borderline case. Two major themes we investigate are smooth approximation of these mappings and the integrability of the Jacobian determinant. We impose no topological restrictions on manifolds in the approximation issue. We characterize classes of weakly differentiable mappings satisfying the approximation property and claim the Orlicz-Sobolev class is in these classes. The importance of our approach is that we are able to find tiny sets on which Sobolev... 

Think of an Alpine hiker who because of avalanche and a blinding blizzard, is stranded on a desolate, mountain path facing a chasm. The hiker cannot return the way he came because of the avalanche, yet, if he stays where he is, he will freeze as the temperature plummets. The hiker’s only real hope is to jump the chasm. Knowing that exertion generally follows belief, the hiker realizes that his attempt will be half-hearted, diminishing his chance of survival, unless he brings himself to the belief that he can make the jump. In circumstances like these, one is clearly justified both in forming beliefs motivated by pragmatic reasons, and in suppressing beliefs (I cannot make the jump) motivated... 

Feyerabend was a philosopher of science that became famous for his purportedly anarchistic view of science and his rejection of the existence of universal methodological rules and rationality of science. Feyerabend’s view of science can be summarize in a few points; 1. On the issue of falsifiability, Feyerabend argues that no theory is ever consistent with all the relevant facts. He sees the use of ad-hoc postulates to save the dominant paradigm as an essential to the progress of science. He claims that scientists frequently depart completely from the scientific method when they use ad-hoc ideas to explain observations that are only later justified by theory. To Feyerabend, ad-hoc... 

Family economics consider children either as "goods" in consumption vector of their parents or as agents that have the ability of full economic independency. While the children reach adolescent age, the theory models their role, not only as individuals with their own preferences, but also as agents who can have an impact on family outcomes. Aim of this study is to focus on the fact that if children of certain ages take part in the households’ decisions or not. We use data from Households Income and Expenditures Survey 2011 for urban area and families with three members, parents and child with the age range 15 - 30. For a closer look, households were divided into four groups which include... 

The epistemic program in game theory uses formal models of interactive reasoning to provide foundations for various game-theoretic solution concepts. Much of this work is based on the (static) Aumann Partial models of interactive epistemology, but more recently dynamic models of interactive reasoning have been developed to analyse rational play in extensive form games. Here we surveyed (static) Aumman Partial models and (dynamic) Baltag and Smets plausibility models. compared these models, And investigated the backward induction problem by using these models  

There has been a lively debate between two major strategist groups in innovation strategy literature. The first, with Ansoff being the protagonist, pose a rational approach in describing a corporate innovation strategy formulation process while the other group, with Mintzburg as the protagonist, prescribe an incremental approach.It seems that in continuous change and uncertainty, rational approach can weakly predict the reality and one can claim that in such situations incremental approach is more effective than rational approach. Based on the review of literature and consequent classification, most of the strategies that are named as innovation strategies in literature use rational... 

A qualitative study has been conducted in order to identify evidence of bounded rationality in software engineers' career decision making. Tversky and Kahneman's heuristics and biases approach has been used as a theoretical framework of the study. The theoretical framework comprised four decision-making and judgment heuristics, i.e. availability, representativeness, anchoring and adjustment, and affect heuristic. The data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis method. The final results revealed that software engineers did make use of heuristics in making career decisions. Several incidents of the use of availability, representativeness, and... 

Assuring households’ access to essential goods at economy’s hard times has always been of policymakers’ main concerns. Using Household’s Income and Expenditure Survey data during Iran-Iraq war during 80’s, we have calculated welfare and distribution effects of rationing by coupons of three essential goods in these years. We found that rationed quantities were inefficiently excessive and due to their significant low prices, they were overconsumed. Also, without any extra financial burden, government could have improved lowest income quantile’s aggregate utility by 5.2% or 5.6%, if cash subsidy equal to each household’s previous subsidy value or an equal per-capita subsidy were distributed... 

Paul Feyerabend, an Austrian philosopher of science, is known as one of major critics of science and philosophy of science in 20th century. This inquiry is an attempt to study and criticize the bedrock of Feyerabend's philosophy of science. In the first chapter there will be an intruduction to enter the subject. In the second chapter the method of this study will be explained. Third chapter is a reconstruction of Feyerabend's philosophy of science. In the 4th chapter bedrock of Feyerabend's philosophy of science is derived to be: scepticism and fighting against dogmatism, defying monopolization, humanistic concerns and his personal character. In the last chapter there will be criticisms on... 

Finite dielctric structures are commonly used in optical devices, Microwave Integrated Circuitc (MICs) and printed antennas. To analyze these structures, full-wave analysis methods cannot be employed easily. They need huge computer resources and are time-consuming especially for electrically large structures. On the other hand, asymptotic techniques may not be exact enough for these structures. In this thesis, MPIE technique is chosen as an accurate and efficient technique for analyzing these structres. To use this technique, the magnetic vector potential and electric scalar potential are required. Uniform and closed-form spatial Green's function for finite dielectric structures is... 

Consider a production system with a single product which is demanded by n different customer classes and each customer class has a Poisson demand with rate of λ_i for class i customer class. The important note is that different customer classes have different values for the system and they have different lost sales cost for the system. Therefore, the optimal decision is not necessarily satisfying the customer which arrived sooner. The main idea in this thesis is that for this problem which needs rationing in stock out situations, we can use pricing in line with rationing.
First, we have formulated the problem for the case of two customer classes and two available prices. We formulated... 

Shia theology has gone through different transformations throughout history. In the contemprorary age diverse studies have been carried out in order to discribe it’s preceding changes and future transformations. This tesis tends to show at first that “MacIntyre’s method of historical-philosophical study” is an overally justified model for such studeis, in comparison with the two other models of “Kuhn’s model of scientific revolutions” & “Lakatos’s research programs.” Afterwards, this model has been used for the study of shia theology and a brief narration of the rationality traditions of shia theology through the Iranian tradition has been given. The focus of this section has been on the... 

Bhaskar, one of the pioneers of critical realism, pursues two aspects in his presentation in order to solve complex problems in the philosophy of science. The first aspect is highlighting and emphasizing the need of philosophy of science for ontology and paying attention to intransitive objects. The second aspect is acknowledging the social nature of science and the consideration of transitive objects of science as materials of knowledge, or in other words, the material causes of knowledge. What is done in this thesis, after a detailed description of Bhaskar's critical realism, is to examine the three categories of rationality, progress, and scientific realism in his view. With a layered... 

Prescribing and consuming drugs more than necessary is considered polypharmacy, which is both wasteful and harmful. In this study, an innovative data mining framework is developed for analyzing prescriptions regarding polypharmacy. The approach consists of three main steps: pre-modeling, modeling, and post-modeling. In the first step, after collecting and cleaning the raw data, several novel features are extracted for physicians and patients. In the modeling step, decision trees are applied to generate a set of If-Then rules to detect and describe physicians’ features or patients’ features associated with polypharmacy. A novel approach based on the response surface methodology (RSM) is... 

Both fields of distributed computing and game theory deal with similar sets of problems. In other words, both of the fields study autonomous agents and their interactions. However, these interactions are considered from the viewpoint of strategic and rational decision makings in game theory versus the viewpoint of tolerating faults and unusual behaviors in distributed computing. But, in real world and the era of internet we may encounter systems and problems which include failed or irrational agents along with rational agents. This research intends to study the problems spanned through both fields and also consider the benefits of the concepts developed in each field to the other. Part of... 

Non-statistical dynamics are those dynamical systems for which a large subset of points in the phase space (positive measure subset) have non-statistical behavior, meaning that the orbit of these points does not have asymptotic distribution in the phase space. We introduce two new classes of these kinds of dynamics: non-statistical rational maps on the Reimann sphere and non-statistical Anosov-Katok maps of the annulus. We then give a general formalization of the notion of "statistical (in)stability" and show how it is connected to the existence of non-statistical dynamics in a general family of maps