Sharif Digital Repository

The current study investigated the attitudes of 140 Iranian English language learners toward World Englishes. The participants were required to listen to recordings of the same natural speech from a series of speakers with five different accents. The results showed that the participants had a more positive attitude toward American and British English. On the other hand, African-American Vernacular English received the lowest level and Persian English and Australian English were in the middle of this scale. While American English was evaluated as the most socially attractive and African-American as the least socially attractive, British and African-American accents were evaluated as of the... 

The current study investigated the attitudes of 140 Iranian English language learners toward World Englishes. The participants were required to listen to recordings of the same natural speech from a series of speakers with five different accents. The results showed that the participants had a more positive attitude toward American and British English. On the other hand, African-American Vernacular English received the lowest level and Persian English and Australian English were in the middle of this scale. While American English was evaluated as the most socially attractive and African-American as the least socially attractive, British and African-American accents were evaluated as of the... 

Objective: Improving signal to noise ratio (SNR) and qualified images by the various methods is very important for detecting the abnormalities at the body organs. Scatter and attenuation of photons by the organs lead to errors in radiopharmaceutical estimation as well as degradation of images. The choice of suitable energy window and the radionuclide have a key role in nuclear medicine which appearing the lowest scatter fraction as well as having a nearly constant linear attenuation coefficient as a function of phantom thickness. Methods: The energy windows of symmetrical window (SW), asymmetric window (ASW), high window (WH) and low window (WL) using Tc-99m and Sm-153 radionuclide with... 

During the last decade, reports show that the incidence and prevalence of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other dementias have significantly increased. AD poses an enormous escalating threat to health services and resources. Early diagnosis of AD is recognized as one of the major challenges and primary aims in scientific communities. With the arrival of nanoscience and nanotechnology to medicine, hopes for early diagnosis and treatment of AD have considerably increased. To this end, nanobioresearchers are focused on three major areas consisting of early detection and recognition, biological markers and diagnosis, and pharmacotherapy. Several efforts are in progress for the discovery of new... 

In this paper, "Subspace" method is generalized to asymmetrical case. In the new algorithm described here, "Lanczos" method is used to find the first subspace and to solve the eigenvalue problem resulted in generalized subspace method. To solve the standard eigenvalue problem developed by "Lanczos" method "Jacoby" method is used. If eigenvalue problem includes damping matrix, that will be imported in new defined mass and stiffness matrices  

Utilization of nanoparticles in oil and gas industry has attracted considerable attention of engineers and researchers. In this article, the feasibility of nanoemulsion flooding is investigated as a method for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) through coreflooding experiments, using a packed bed and real reservoir fluids. Nine different mixtures of the solvent, surfactant, and nanoparticles in the form of a nanoemulsion phase are generated and used to recover the oil in the context of an EOR process. Various tests are conducted to determine the properties of porous medium and fluids. To study the production performance of this EOR technique, pressure drop across the packed bed are measured, along... 

A transmission line model is developed for coupled plasmonic metal-insulator-metal (MIM) waveguides. In the proposed model coupling between electric fields of two plasmonic waveguides is modeled by distributed mutual capacitor while distributed mutual inductor accounts for magnetic field coupling. These mutual elements are determined using propagation constants of supermodes of coupled waveguides. The model is applied to analyze coupled line directional coupler and side-coupled rectangular resonators. The effectiveness of the model is assessed using fully numerical finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) technique. The results have excellent agreement with the numerical methods  

Control of unstable non-minimum-phase delayed stochastic processes is a challenging problem. In this work based on the Diophantine equation and using pole-placement technique, a discrete control scheme for such processes has been proposed. Robust stability of the suggested control structure has been shown. Advantages of the proposed scheme over the existing algorithms have been shown through computer simulations. It has been shown that performance of the proposed scheme for handling model mismatch and colored noise is superior to the previous work proposed in the literature  

This article indicates the accurate method for load level calculation to solve the power flow problem when capacitor reactive power is involved. Using the correct method causes some changes in the results and conclusion stated in the discussed paper on optimal reconfiguration and capacitor placement in radial distribution systems  

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to describe optical flow-based navigation of a very light fixed-wing aircraft in flight between obstacles. Design/methodology/approach - The optical flow information of two cameras mounted on the aircraft is used to detect the obstacle. It is assumed that the image processing has been completed and the optical flow vectors have been obtained beforehand. The optical flow is used to detect the obstacles and make a rapid turn manoeuvre for the aircraft. Findings - It is shown that using the optical flow feedback by itself is unable to give a rapid turn to the aircraft and its rate should be employed into the control law. Six degree-of-freedom flight... 

Capacitor placement/setting is one of the main means for loss reduction and voltage profile improvement in distribution systems. If capacitor placement is meant, the objective function will be the cost of energy losses besides the capacitors costs in a specified period of time. Here, reconfiguration can be used as a strategy to reform the base configuration of the distribution network in order to place the capacitors more efficiently with lower costs. On the other hand, if capacitors are already available in a network, optimum capacitors setting and network reconfiguration should be performed for power loss minimization. In this paper both power loss minimization and capacitor placement cost...