Sharif Digital Repository

The term “scientific naturalism” is the invention of Thomas H. Huxley. He used it to describe a philosophical outlook that shunned the supernatural and adopted empirical science as the only reliable basis of knowledge about the physical, social, and moral worlds. Recent decades have witnessed a flurry of philosophical activity in the name of naturalism. Most contemporary philosophers identify themselves as naturalist, and much recent work in philosophy can be seen as part of general trend toward conducting philosophical inquiry under the umbrella of naturalistic assumptions. Today the label “naturalism” refers to a particular worldview. Nevertheless, naturalism is not a clearly defined... 

In recent years with the growth and development of emerging technologies, one of the main challenges in various organizations is the issue of Business-IT Alignment programs at different levels of strategic, tactical, and operational. Many managers and experts in the field of information technology recognize the importance of this issue because of its broad effects on the development and maturity of the organization. However, they face various difficulties in creating actionable plans to achieve high levels of alignment. The main problem is the inability to measure the alignment degree index. This index is affected by various sub-indicators in various fields of business and information... 

Due to the expansion of the Internet, web-based systems have rapidly proliferated. Firms, corporations, supermarket chains and governments provide their services through web-based systems, and there are companies that provide web-based services for other companies. Because of this development and expansion, many web-application development methodologies have been developed, and web-development versions of many renowned methodologies are now available. In order to improve the performance of system engineering teams and increase product quality, it has become necessary to construct or adapt software development methodologies in order to fit the specific project at hand. This method of... 

In this study, lyophilized advance platelet rich fibrin (A-PRF) was used in combination with collagen membrane for the first time to accelerate bone regeneration as a result of growth factor release. Firstly, collagen was extracted from calf skin and analyzed using SDS-PAGE. FTIR has shown that EDC/NHS were chemically crosslinked collagen to collagen and collagen to chitosan. The morphology of collagen, collagen/chitosan composite membrane with different chitosan content, lyophilized A-PRF attached to membrane were showed using SEM images. The pore sizes were varied from 100 to 300 µm. Response surface methodology (RSM) was used to design experimental condition and to correlate the effect... 

In the recent years, the world has been faced with a spectacular increase in variety and usage of electronic and electric devices. Unfortunately, the highly increasing march of technology reduces the time of their usage, causing a high degree of electric and electronic waste. Nonetheless, these E-waste enjoys a high percentage in precious metals such as Cadmium, Copper, Nickle, Zinc, Barium, Beryllium, Aluminum, Gold, Silver, Platinum, and so forth. With this in mind, they can be named as “secondary mines”, enjoying higher in degree of these metals even than natural mines. Therefore, extraction and recovery of the very metals are of great importance. Nowadays, using microorganisms in order... 

It is proposed, in this research, a methodology for a public sector organization to integrate policy making in human capital development and utilization area. In this case the researcher used system dynamics method for modeling and analyzing the situation, to describe the mechanisms that produce the difficulties in the organization. The researcher mentioned the differences between public sector and profit organization, in designing the main part of the model and also the use of dynamic capability approach in designing human capital development parts of it. The model built in this research, describe the events before and after the 1990s separately, according to the different policy making... 

The discipline of enterprise architecture (EA) is concerned with applying the concept of system architecture to enterprises, esp. to their information technology, so as to create a common perspective, facilitate understanding and improvement of the enterprise, and help better organizational change management. EA methodologies are used for modeling, planning, implementation and management of EA. A plethora of such methodologies have been introduced in recent decades, that widely differ in terms of structure, content and terminology, which has hindered their evaluation, comparison and selection. Furthermore, a consensus has emerged that EA methodologies should be contingent on the specifics of... 

Constructing bespoke software development processes according to the specifications of the project at hand has become a crucial issue, but defining a separate process for each potential project context is a time-consuming and costly endeavor. The Software Process Line (SPrL) is a concept similar to the Software Product Line (SPL), except that it belongs to the domain of software development process engineering; it allows software processes to be constructed according to a specific context by reusing core process assets. Tailoring a process line for constructing project-specific processes is time-consuming and error-prone if done manually; therefore, it is important that a high... 

Constructing bespoke software development processes according to the specifications of the project at hand has become a crucial issue, giving rise to a new branch of engineering known as Situational Method Engineering (SME). Compared with Software Engineering, Situational Method Engineering has not suitably matured, in that many of its deficiencies have not been properly addressed yet; SME approaches are especially deficient in support for modeling, portability, and automation.Model-Driven Development (MDD) has been effectively used for enhancing portability and automation in Software Engineering, and it is also considered as a promising approach for resolving the same issues in SME.... 

Agents are autonomous entities that have independent threads of control, and that interact with each other in their environment. Due to the intelligence of agents and their ability as to social interaction, an agent-oriented system exhibits remarkable synergistic traits. Agent-oriented software development facilitates the development of flexible systems that exhibit complex behaviors.Traditional software development methodologies do not sufficiently satisfy the special needs of the agent-oriented paradigm. Therefore, many researchers have focused on developing specialized agent-oriented methodologies, or have worked on extending or adapting existing methodologies so that they can be used for... 

Polychlorobiphenyl compounds are a class of persistent organic pollutants consisting of two biphenyl rings and chlorine substations. Polychlorobiphenyls do not dissolve in water, are very stable at high temperatures, and are considered a good conductor. Due to the mentioned properties in the 1930s and 1940s, these compounds were widely used in various industries such as power plants, Painting industry, Plastics industry, etc. After years of use, these substances have been found to be very dangerous to the health of living organisms and the environment due to their high resistance to decomposition and the ability to accumulate in adipose tissue. Today, although the production and use of these...