Sharif Digital Repository

The process of preparing and enacting a bio1safety law in Iran lasted more than a decade. This paper examines the process of biosafety policy-making in Iran in relation to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (CPB) and to domestic Iranian factors. While some scholars argued that the CPB would be influential in developing countries, our findings indicate that it was not particularly important in Iranian biosafety legislation. This paper outlines the internal Iranian political processes, which initially envisaged a very precautionary approach, but which concluded with a biosafety law designed to promote the adoption of these technologies. Reference will be made to the changing influence of... 

Social enterprises are organisations comprised of two conflicting logics: social and commercial. However, simultaneous commitment to both logics often leads to tensions, making social enterprises fragile organisations at the risk of mission drift. The extant literature on hybridity highlights two important overall strategies–integration and differentiation - for managing tensions. However, integration or differentiation alone can create additional problems, which is especially true in the case of differentiation, creating a situation comparable to black and white, with a salient faultline and heated conflicts. In this inductive qualitative case study, responding to the recent call in the... 

The evolution of innovation system literature is scrutinized to delineate the conceptual trends over the past 30 years. We applied the Sigma index which is supposed to include not only the frontier contributions in the field but also the intellectual bases conveying transformative concepts. Our examination shows that after the establishment of the National Innovation System (NIS)as a principal framework, Regional IS literature emerged as a main branch during the period of 2002–2007, while Technological IS developed as the second main branch from 2007 to 2012. Surprisingly, Sectoral IS has not yet generated a separate constellation, whereas the period after 2012 mainly witnessed the emergence... 

This study aims to find the differences between national and international relationships in Iran and Switzerland’s Nanoscience research between 2008–2015. The results show significant differences some of which are attributed to the general dichotomy of developed-developing countries like stronger University-Industry-Government relations in Switzerland; but others are not, especially those pertaining to bilateral relations. In summary, the Government-Industry relations in Switzerland are generally closer in this field because the emerging characteristics of Nanoscience call for more state intervention, even in the context of developed countries. Greater Government-University relations in Iran... 

Vigorous debates have taken place within and between many countries about regulatory policy regimes covering the assessment and approval of genetically modified (GM) crops. In Iran, a very vigorous and hotly contested policy debate concerning legislation covering GM crops occurred between 2004 and 2009, but it was confined within government circles with almost no public discussion. This paper analyses the Iranian policy-making process in the period 2006-9. It explains how and why a stalemate arose in disputes between ministries and departments. The chosen analytical framework draws mainly on the regulation of technological risks and the analysis of public policy-making. It deploys the... 

Today's world needs new methods to deal with and analyze the ever-increasingly generated data streams. Two of the most challenging aspects of data streams are (i) concept drift, i.e. evolution of data stream over time, which requires the ability to make timely decisions against the high speed of receiving new data; (ii) limited memory storage and the impracticality of using memory due to the large amount of data. Clustering is one of the common methods to process data streams. In this paper, we propose a novel, fully-online, density-based method for clustering evolving data streams. In recent years, a number of methods have been proposed, which also have the ability to cluster data streams.... 

In this study, a new passive method suitable for geolocating low probability of intercept (LPI) radars is introduced. The method uses two electronic support receivers placed on a fast moving platform (e.g., an airplane or a satellite). The proposed method has a high processing gain, which makes it highly suitable for very weak LPI signals. The method processing gain was analytically derived and illustrated with simulation to determine if the proposed method can detect LPI radars in much lower SNRs compared to regular time-frequency LPI detection methods. Also, the resolution of the proposed method in both range and cross-range directions in radar location finding was analyzed. The results...