Sharif Digital Repository

In this millennium there has been a thought-provoking dispute over the inclusion of Critical Thinking (CT) programs into teaching syllabi; this inspiring challenge of change has led researcher to investigate the teachability and transferability of Critical Thinking. Thus, this study investigated whether explicit critical thinking instruction can foster critical thinking skills of in-service EFL teachers and enhance their disposition, perception and attitude. To fulfill the purposes of this study, California Critical Thinking Skill Tests (CCTST), EMI Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory, as well as perception and attitude questionnaires were utilized. The participants of this research were... 

This paper develops a theoretical model based on economic misconceptions to explain the stylized facts of unsatisfactory long-term economic growth rates. Should the economic agents lack sufficient public understanding of economics, office-seeking politicians can take advantage of the situation and adopt populistic policies to get elected into office. Undermined economic growth is the price society pays for its ignorance. This mechanism is most relevant in democratic resource-abundant countries suffering from weak institutions. That is because natural resource price fluctuations make it more challenging to distinguish politicians’ performance and exogenous economic shocks, translating... 

Health influencers leveraged social networks to connect with people and society during the Covid-19 crisis. Platforms like Twitter served as suitable channels for disseminating published messages through word-of-mouth communication. In times of crises like Covid-19, individuals and organizations involved in managing the situation harnessed this capability, contingent upon the quantity and quality of word-of-mouth exchanges. During public crises, public polarity and sentiment toward the issue and the maintenance of public morale hold paramount significance. Consequently, crafting messages that garner positive word-of-mouth communication became a focal point for health influencers. In this... 

In this piece of work, a gravity model is suggested as Iranian non-fuel export model to OIC countries. The most important results out of this model are the acquired coefficients of two variables, namely “ECO membership” and “Economic and Trade Freedom of Importer”. At first, we expected that for importer, being a member of ECO would increase the amount of trade with iran. Surprisingly, this is not what we see in a model. In fact, as ECO has not achieved any tangible success in increasing trade between its members, eastern Asian Muslim countries has become an important trade partner for iranians. This result is compatible with other pieces of researches about ECO. “Economic and Trade Freedom... 

Today’s growing interest to the underwater explorations and navigations demands to design appropriate underwater communication methods and systems. However, radio frequencies which are widely being used in free space communications, can’t be a good candidate for underwater wireless communications, due to their sever attenuation in water. On the other hand, underwater acoustic communication has been widely studied and implemented in the past decades, inspired by suitable propagation of acoustic waves through the underwater medium. Nevertheless, acoustic communication systems have limited bandwidth, lower propagation speed and lower security than optical counterparts, which suggests underwater... 

Visible light communication (VLC) uses huge license-free spectral bandwidth of visible light for high-speed wireless communication. Since each VLC access point covers a small area, handovers of mobile users are inevitable. In order to deal with these handovers, developing fast and effective resource allocation algorithms is a challenge. this paper introduces the problem of mobility-aware optimization of resources in hybrid VLC and 5G radio access technologies networks using the T-step look-ahead policy and employing the notion of handover efficiency. It is shown that the handover efficiency can correlate the overall performance of the network with future actions based on the mobility of... 

In present research, a cohesive based finite element model has been introduced to estimate median crack depth during mechanical machining on optical glasses. Development of the machining numerical model has been initiated by investigating the indentation process. Experimental results of this step have been calibrated primary numerical model which has been used in the scratch process. Due to differences between the scratch mechanism and indentation one, mathematical bases fracture formulas and cohesive relations have been developed. After extracting primary result, using them in the scratch model and developing the primary model, ultimately numerical model has been evolved to an abstract... 

Hydrothermal supercritical method is one of the most suitable methods for metal oxide nano powder, ceramics and mineral catalyst synthesis. Metal oxides nanopowder in its pure or mixed form has wide potential application as chemical industrial catalyst, hot Superconductors, magnetic material, gas sensors and car catalyst convertors. One of the most important metal oxides aspects of application is uranium oxide as nuclear reactor fuel is used. In addition, UO2 is selective catalyst for converting methane to methanol process and Decomposition of organic Chlorine material. In Supercritical hydrothermal method done in high pressure reactor with critical to fluid, is new method for the... 

Lithium has 9 isotopes which two isotopes are stable and remaining isotopes are unstable and have half-life. Lithium stable isotopes include 6Li and 7Li that their abundance is 7.53% and 92.47% respectively. Importance of lighter lithium isotope appears for its small cross section against thermal neutron and producing fusion reactors fuel in nuclear industries. Thermal neutron absorption cross section for 6Li and 7Li are 950 barn and 37 mbarn respectively. Interesting of these isotopes in nuclear industry is due to the large difference in the absorption cross section.6Li compounds implied for tritium producing in coat of nuclear fusion reactor with DT fuel. Following tritium is used in... 

Foil gas bearings are compliant surface, self-acting hydrodynamic bearings that use ambient gas as their working fluid. They do not require external pressurization and are typically constructed from several layers of sheet metal foils. In high-speed, high-temperature applications the GFB’s have the advantage of developing higher load capacities than with fixed geometry gas bearings. Since GFB’s have a complex structure consisting of a spring-like substructure with an overlying flexible surface, there exists a great variety of permutations on any given design. At current work presents a 1D model for GFB with couple solving Reynolds and Euler-Bernoulli beam equation. This mean top foil assume to... 

Lameness in dairy cattle is a crucial welfare issue in dairy industry, and over the years scientists are attempting to present a detection method. In recent years it is attracting more attention to make the identification and discrimination of sounds and lames systematic and automatic. Right now, the most hopeful results have been obtained through the measurement of Ground Reaction Forces (GRF) of hooves, and analysis of load distribution between four legs, which seems applicable for wide use in dairy industry. However, the accuracy, validity, and reliability of discrimination is still far from an acceptable point, that is because of a great lack in understanding quantitative effects of the... 

Natural boron consists of two stable isotopes, mass 10 (19.3%) and mass 11 (80.7%). 10B isotope has a large thermal neutron capture cross-section and it therefore, used widely in such aspects as modern industry, military equipment, medical science and so on. specially the demand of atomic energy industry for the boron isotope is increased severely. So the separation of 10B from natural boron has received very wide attention at present. There are many kinds of methods on the boron isotopes separation, such as chemical exchange reaction and distillation in boron trifluoride method, ion exchange in boric acid solution method, counter current recycle membrane cascades in boron trifluoride... 

In this study the feasibility of xenon separation from xenon-krypton mixture was investigated by utilizing of the chromatographic column filled with nano and micron sized NaY zeolite. For this purpose the nano NaY with the yield of 100% related to Al2O3 and the average size of 98.6 nm was synthesized through the clear solution method with the mid-adding of NaOH. Furthermore, a novel method for granulation of nano zeolite was developed by utilizing sodium alginate as an external template. In this method the production of uniform spherical granules with the different sizes in the range of several milimiteres to 100 µm was easily performed. Moreover, the results showed that the adding of... 

Natural boron includes two stable isotopes 10B and 11B with 19.3 and 80.7 weight percent respectivley.10B isotope has a high thermal neutron absorption cross section. So isotope 10B material is suitable for making atomic reactor control rods. Other and even more important applications of 10B are in disclosing neutrons in order to measure neutron reactors fluxes and also are in nuclear physics laboratories and medical radiation. This isotope also is used in the pharmaceutical and the military industries. There are several methods for separating boron isotopes. Among the distillation methods, thermal diffusion of BF3, distillation of BF3, distillation of methyl borate, boric acid distillation... 

Due to both dynamic and opportunistic spectrum access, Cognitive radio networks is a promising solution for spectrum scarcity problem. In cognitive radio networks, users need to have a control channels in order to cooperate for sharing the sensing information, channel sharing and etc. In Ad-hoc cognitive radio networks because of the absence of infrastructure and central nodes, every user runs a distributed algorithm to create a common control channel. If the control channel gets jammed, network’s performance degrades dramatically, therefore the jammer’s target in cognitive radio networks is the control channels to disturb the networks’ performance. The traditional solution to confront... 

In this work, graphene oxide (GO) and Amino ethyl phosphonic acid (AEPA) functionalized graphene were synthesized using chemical method. In addition, reduced graphene was prepared by chemical and supercritical methods. Physical, chemical, morphological properties of as-synthesized materials were investigate using XRD, FTIR, RAMAN, UV, TEM, TGA, and BET. Thickness of monolayer GO which synthesized using Hummer’s method was evaluated 1 nm using AFM. FTIR and CHN results were affirmed the presence of AMPA onto graphene nanosheets. Adsorption properties of functionalized graphene for Th ions from aqueous solution was examined. Isotherm adsorption results demonstrated that maximum adsorption... 

Technology, especially in recent centuries, has changed human form of life. Case studies show that there is a mutual relationship between human being and technology; Human is a technological being and technology is also a social entity. Therefore, trying to develop a conceptual framework to describe the important role of technical artifacts in our life can be regarded as a legitimate philosophical concern. Peter Paul Verbeek is one of the contemporary philosophers who take this concern seriously. He, by using the doctrines of The Empirical Turn in the philosophy of technology, has developed a lexical system, called post-phenomenology, to describe the role of Technology in human’s perception... 

In the proccess of making key slots in lock parts, broaching is necessary. The only procedure or at least the best procedure for making the slots is broaching. High speed and precision, surface quality and the ability to create complicated surfaces in one step are the advantages that make broaching suitable for this product. The cost of tool maintainance and replacement is very important to make this process efficient economically, therefore, determining the factors affecting tool life are important for industries. The purpose of this study is to increase the life of narrow broaching tools. In other words, in this study, the purpose is to design and manufacture the tool in such a way that... 

A number of players are positioned on the vertices of a finite graph, and each is wearing a hat whose color has been randomly and equally likely selected from a finite set of colors. Player A sees Player B if and only if there is a directed edge from the vertex corresponding to A to the vertex corresponding to B. The players must agree on a specific strategy before the game begins and carry it out. Once the game begins, no communication is allowed between the players, and each player must simultaneously guess the color of their own hat. The team wins if at least one guess is correct. For a given directed graph, we define the 'guessing number' of the graph as the maximum number of colors for...