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The final outcome of promotion and recruitment processes in universities should be conventional and plausible by the members of the relevant scientific community, to affirm that the processes have been competitive and fair. The objective of this opinion letter is to make a plea for the importance of the post-auditing and quantitative assessment of the selection criteria. It is shown that for an example case the outcome of the post-audit does not look reasonable from an external point of view, at least regarding the research competency. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht  

Presents information on global MTTS society education initiatives. © 2000-2012 IEEE  

Popular method for assessment of final exam answer scripts in university and among the engineering drawing answer scripts based on absolute true or false judgment and assigning a single number or letter to answer of each problem cannot be so fair. To obtain a fair assessment method, we considered “imagination”, “accuracy”, “drawing” and “innovation” that are objectives of engineering drawing course to be separately assessed for each problem. Flexibility and linguistic properties of fuzzy logic made us use it as the basis of our method. In addition, fuzzy variables and membership functions are easily linguistic explainable, and adjustable to different conditions. “Answering time” was added as... 

In this study, physically cross-linked hydrogels were developed by freezing-thawing method while different concentrations of honey were included into the hydrogels for accelerated wound healing. The hydrogel was composed of chitosan, polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), and gelatin with the ratio of 2:1:1 (v/v), respectively. Further, the effect of honey concentrations on antibacterial properties, and cell behavior was investigated. In vivo studies, including wound healing mechanism using rat model and histological analysis of section tissue samples were performed. The results illustrated that the incorporation of honey in hydrogels increased the ultimate strain of hydrogels approximately two times,... 

Fabrication of scaffolds with enhanced mechanical properties and desirable cellular compatibility is critical for numerous tissue engineering applications. This study was aimed at fabrication and characterization of a nanofiber skin substitute composed of collagen (Col)/sodium alginate (SA)/ polyethylene oxide (PEO)/Rhodotorula mucilaginosa sp. GUMS16 produced exopolysaccharides (EPS) were prepared using the biaxial electrospinning technique. This study used collagen extracted from the bovine tendon as a natural scaffold, sodium alginate as an absorber of excess wound fluids, and GUMS16 produced exopolysaccharides as an antioxidant. Collagen was characterized using FTIR and EDS analyses. The... 

In this paper the principles of submarine dynamics modeling have been gathered as distinguished steps. Of course, in these few pages the details cannot be discussed and the formulae cannot be proved. The interested reader has to study more detailed references to attain a better perception of the subject. The paper, in addition to gathering and editing principles, has gone through offering simplifications in each part of modeling. Such simplifications will result in a good approximation of submarine dynamic behavior, which is exactly complicated in reality. In higher levels of modeling each part can be completed and details can be processed  

Advanced model-based control of pH processes is noticeably a chemical modeling issue, because it can have a profound effect on the attainable control quality. This is especially the case when the pH regulation of streams, consisting of hundreds of constituents with varying concentrations, is encountered. The severe non-linear behavior of pH processes is reflected in the titration curve of the process stream. The performances of all model-based controllers are highly dependent on the accuracy of the model. Considering a great number of parameters such as dissociation constants, solubility products and characteristic concentrations places the designer in a dilemma of choosing between... 

Web search engines play a significant role in answering users’ information needs based on the huge amount of data available on the internet. Although evaluating the performance of these systems is very important for their improvement, there is no comprehensive, unbiased, low-cost, and reusable method for this purpose. Previous works used a small and limited set of queries for their evaluation process that restricts the assessment domain. Moreover, these methods mainly rely on human evaluators for manual assessment of search engines which makes the results of the evaluation subjective to the opinion of human evaluators and also prone to error. In addition, repeating the evaluation would be a... 

This book focuses on a central question in the field of complex systems: Given a fluctuating (in time or space), uni- or multi-variant sequentially measured set of experimental data (even noisy data), how should one analyse non-parametrically the data, assess underlying trends, uncover characteristics of the fluctuations (including diffusion and jump contributions), and construct a stochastic evolution equation?
Here, the term "non-parametrically" exemplifies that all the functions and parameters of the constructed stochastic evolution equation can be determined directly from the measured data.
The book provides an overview of methods that have been developed for the analysis of... 

Organoclay modification is receiving attention as a nano-modifier for asphalt binders. Nanoparticles are able to effectively mend the damaged sites of the nanocomposite without external intervention. Particle-polymer interaction results in packing particles into developed cracks, thereby mending the cracks during patch formation. This study investigates the rheological properties of organoclay modified binders with a focus on their fatigue properties. To this end, the dissipated energy concept, the ratio of dissipated energy change and plateau value (PV) energy were examined during fatigue tests using a dynamic shear rheometer. The effects of strain level, frequency and temperature on unaged... 

We study the kidney market in Iran. The most effective treatment for end-stage renal disease is a kidney transplant. While the supply of cadaveric kidneys is limited, the debate has been focused on the effects of the existence of a free market for human organs. Economists as well as medical and legal researchers are divided over the issue. Iran has a unique kidney market which has been in place for over 20 years, frequently reporting surprising success in reducing the waiting list for kidneys. This paper demonstrates how the Iranian system works  

In recent years, with the growth of software engineering, agile software development methodologies have also grown substantially, replacing plan-driven approaches in many areas. Although prominent agile methodologies are in wide use today, there is no method which is suitable for all situations. It has therefore become essential to apply Situational Method Engineering (SME) approaches to produce agile methodologies that are tailored to fit specific software development situations. Since SME is a complex process, and there is a vast pool of techniques, practices, activities, and processes available for composing agile methodologies, tool support-in the form of Computer Aided Method... 

This brief deals with finding the necessary conditions which should be met by the polynomials appeared in the admittance functions passively realizable by using RLC components and two fractional elements. These conditions include structurally necessary equalities/specifications and positive-realness-based inequalities which should be satisfied by the involved polynomials. In the realizable cases, the acceptable region for choosing the pseudo inductances/capacitances of fractional elements is found from the obtained conditions. © 2004-2012 IEEE  

Analogous to Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE), which aims to facilitate Software Engineering through specialized tools, Computer-Aided Method Engineering (CAME) strives to support a wide range of activities carried out by method engineers. Although there is consensus on the importance of tool support in method engineering, existing CAME environments are incomplete prototypes, each covering just a few steps of the method engineering process. This paper summarizes the history and the state of the practice in CAME technology, and provides criteria-based critique on existing CAME environments, thus highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg  

"Product" and "process" are two mutually orthogonal and important aspects of software. As Part 1 discusses "product", Part 2 discusses "process". "Process" is independent of "product" and is used commonly by various "producers". This paper first explains the structure of "process" and then introduces important technique by "divide and conquer". Various important management issues are discussed  

In this paper, we present an axiomatic modeling of lean production system design, using process variables (PVs). So far, we had developed a model for conceptual design of lean production systems by means of FR-DP relationships, the key characteristics of axiomatic design (AD) methodology, appeared in the proceedings of Second International Conference of Axiomatic Design. Albeit the model in question was thorough enough to be applied in various cases, its embedded abstract principles hamper straightforward applications and the required resources, tools, and techniques are not clarified. In AD terms, it lacks PVs created by mapping the design parameters (DPs) to the process domain to clarify... 

There have been significant developments in the design and application of algorithms for both one-dimensional signal processing and multidimensional signal processing, namely image and video processing, with the recent focus changing from a step-by-step procedure of designing the algorithm first and following up with in-depth analysis and performance improvement to instead applying heuristic-based methods to solve signal-processing problems. In this book the contributing authors demonstrate both general-purpose algorithms and those aimed at solving specialized application problems, with a special emphasis on heuristic iterative optimization methods employing modern evolutionary and swarm... 

This article deals with the design and optimization of a cascade thermoacoustic Stirling engine. Different configurations for cascade thermoacoustic Stirling heat engine are investigated. A simplified model is proposed to enable initial design guidelines. The most important characteristics of the cascade system are examined. The results indicate that the thermoacoustic engines in cascade configuration may achieve very low onset temperatures. A suitable configuration is selected and the locations and dimensions of different thermoacoustic units are optimized to achieve low onset temperatures as well as high values for the acoustic power output and efficiency. The results support the... 

Contaminant materials in lubricants are signs for prediction and measurement of wear in engines. Therefore oil monitoring is considered as one of the most effective techniques for maintaining the heavy equipments. However based on oil analysis data, the identification of engine problem is very hard due to different contribution factors. Hence, this paper is purposed to analyze the wear behavior of some sets of selected heavy equipment engine based on documented oil analysis data during two years in different conditions to track engine failures using trend analysis. Furthermore the selected equipments are divided into two major groups (plantation and forestry, and general construction) based...