Sharif Digital Repository

High-performing organisations are those which practise exemplary Culture of Excellence (CoE). Global competition dictates that only high-performing organisations will survive in the long term. This study attempts to focus on the relationship between CoE constructs and organisational performance (OP) in the context of Iranian manufacturing sector. Data are gathered via survey, of 222 excellence award-winning companies in Iran. The SPSS and smartPLS were used to test the relationship between CoE factors and OP. The result of correlation analysis proved that all 10 CoE constructs were significantly correlated with OP and there exists a significant relationship between CoE and OP. Strong... 

High-performing organisations are those which practise exemplary Culture of Excellence (CoE). Global competition dictates that only high-performing organisations will survive in the long term. This study attempts to focus on the relationship between CoE constructs and organisational performance (OP) in the context of Iranian manufacturing sector. Data are gathered via survey, of 222 excellence award-winning companies in Iran. The SPSS and smartPLS were used to test the relationship between CoE factors and OP. The result of correlation analysis proved that all 10 CoE constructs were significantly correlated with OP and there exists a significant relationship between CoE and OP. Strong... 

Removal or suppression of key proteins in an essential pathway of a pathogen is expected to disrupt the pathway and prohibit the pathogen from performing a vital function. Thus disconnecting multiple essential pathways should disrupt the survival of a pathogen even when it has multiple pathways to drug resistance. We consider a scenario where the drug-resistance pathways are unknown. To disrupt these pathways, we consider a cut set S of G, where G is a connected simple graph representing the protein interaction network of the pathogen, so that G-S splits to two partitions such that the endpoints of each pathway are in different partitions. If the difference between the sizes of the two... 

Zeolitic imidazole frameworks (ZIFs) provide an exciting platform to design and fabricate non-precious-metal carbon-based catalysts for oxygen reduction/evolution reaction (ORR/OER). Herein, we elaborately design a facile enzyme-assisted synthetic strategy that enables to tailor the ZIFs precursors into structural stable decussation shape, which derived Co nanoislands grafted on decussate N-doped carbon nanoleaves (D-Co@NC) can well retain the interpenetrating nanostructure. Benefiting from the combined advantages of compositions and interpenetrating nanostructures, D-Co@NC possesses 5.2 times higher exposed electrochemical active area than the conventional dodecahedral one, thus endowing... 

A subgraph in an edge-colored graph is multicolored if all its edges receive distinct colors. In this paper, we prove that a complete graph on 2m (m ≠ 2) vertices K2m can be properly edge-colored with 2m - 1 colors in such a way that the edges of K2m can De partitioned into m multicolored isomorphic spanning trees. © 2006 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics  

Early onset adjacent segment degeneration (ASD) can be found within six months after anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF). Deficits in deep paraspinal neck muscles may be related to early onset ASD. This study aimed to determine whether the morphometry of preoperative deep neck muscles (multifidus and semispinalis cervicis) predicted early onset ASD in patients with ACDF. Thirty-two cases of early onset ASD after a two-level ACDF and 30 matched non-ASD cases were identified from a large-scale cohort. The preoperative total cross-sectional area (CSA) of bilateral deep neck muscles and the lean muscle CSAs from C3 to C7 levels were measured manually on T2-weighted magnetic resonance... 

In this article, we propose a lightweight security scheme for ensuring both information confidentiality and transmission resiliency in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) communication. A single-Antenna transmitter communicates with a half-duplex single-Antenna receiver in the presence of a sophisticated multiple-Antenna-Aided passive eavesdropper and a multiple-Antenna-Assisted hostile jammer (HJ). A low-complexity artificial noise (AN) injection scheme is proposed for drowning out the eavesdropper. Furthermore, for enhancing the resilience against HJ attacks, the legitimate nodes exploit their own local observations of the wireless channel as the source of randomness to agree on shared secret... 

The huge volume change and unstable interface of the silicon anode usually result in the fracture of the active material and the disconnection with conducting agent/current collector, which would highly hinder the application of silicon in powering battery. Moreover, the un-uniform charge distribution at the surfaces of silicon would cause a degration of capacity at fast charging condition or low temperature. Thus, developing a stable interface with good mechanical stability to tolerate huge volume change of the silicon, and keep the robust adhesive property is one of the effective methods of resolving the above questions but a great challenge. Here, a molecular zipper fastened strategy is... 

Some tetra substituted derivatives of 2,2′ and 4,4′ bithiazoles have been synthesized and characterized in various solvents  

Stimulated devices are highly demanded for actuators and artificial muscles in the recent era but susceptible to low deformation at an applied voltage. In the present work, ionic liquids (ILs) based gel films were prepared from the polyvinyl chloride (PVC), dibutyl adipate (DBA), 1-butyl, 3-methimidazolium chloride, and 1-pentyl-3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate by a simple solvent evaporation method. The structural, morphological, optical, and mechanical properties of the composite PVC/ILs gel were characterized by Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), Large Angle X-ray scattering (LAXS), UV–visible (UV–vis) absorption spectroscopy, scanning electron micrpscopy (SEM) and... 

Stimulated devices are highly demanded for actuators and artificial muscles in the recent era but susceptible to low deformation at an applied voltage. In the present work, ionic liquids (ILs) based gel films were prepared from the polyvinyl chloride (PVC), dibutyl adipate (DBA), 1-butyl, 3-methimidazolium chloride, and 1-pentyl-3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate by a simple solvent evaporation method. The structural, morphological, optical, and mechanical properties of the composite PVC/ILs gel were characterized by Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), Large Angle X-ray scattering (LAXS), UV–visible (UV–vis) absorption spectroscopy, scanning electron micrpscopy (SEM) and... 

We report here a newly and facile synthesis of the phospholipids@gold nanoflowers (AuNFs) from intact cells as a new biomimetic organic-inorganic hybrid. The most appealing feature of this nanostructure is its dual-absorbing peak in near infrared (NIR) and visible region of spectra, which makes them a potential light-sensitive agent for reactive oxygen species (ROS)-induced apoptosis. Here, in contrast to previous studies, proposed nanostructures are synthesized in a one-pot reaction using phospholipids present in living cell membranes (as a donor cell) with detectable micro process of AuNF formation. The properties of the resulting AuNFs were evaluated through transmission electron... 

In this paper, the theoretical issues governing release characteristics of a solute of composite materials are validated experimentally, using composites of cross-linked poly (hydroxyethyl methacrylate) (PHEMA) particles dispersed within ethylene vinyl acetate copolymer (EVAc) matrices, and composites of cross-linked poly (methacrylic acid) (PMAA) particles dispersed within poly (dimethyl siloxane) (PDMS) networks which were prepared. Using theophylline and caffeine as the model drugs, the results of release, permeation and swelling experiments were employed to validate the theoretical issues. In PHEMA-EVAc matrices, due to equilibrium swelling, Fickian diffusional release kinetics was... 

In this paper, composites containing hydrophilic particles uniformly dispersed within a hydrophobic network have been studied. Theoretical issues governing the release characteristics have been defined. When the hydrophilic content is below the percolation threshold, either equilibrium swelling or osmotic rupturing would occur. Theoretical criteria to determine whether equilibrium swelling or osmotic rupturing would occur are defined and a model for predicting the extent of equilibrium swelling in the presence of mechanical constraint is offered. Different drug release mechanisms can be achieved by choosing different materials and various formulation factors  

This paper presents an effective control scheme in dc microgrids to precisely share the load current oscillatory and dc components among distributed generation (DG) units. The proposed control strategy includes current and voltage control blocks. The current control block consists of oscillatory and dc current-sharing units. The main idea of the proposed method is to share the load current oscillatory and dc components among the DG units based on their rated power, by assigning appropriate output impedance values and droop coefficients to each DG unit. The voltage control block is a multiloop voltage control unit employed to control the microgrid voltage. The detailed model of the proposed... 

Electro-oxidation of methanol on Ni in NaOH solutions with the alkali concentration in the range of 0.05-0.5 M and in the presence of 0.5 M Na 2SO4 supporting electrolyte is studied. All the mentioned species compete for adsorption on Ni and OH- is essential for the electro-oxidation process. The electro-oxidation seems to proceed through the electro-chemical reactions of adsorbed methanol and hydroxide species and the removal of the resulting intermediate by adsorbed hydroxyl groups. The mechanism is consistent with the cyclic voltammetry and impedance spectroscopy results and can semi-quantitatively account for the appearance of capacitive, inductive and negative resistance loops as well... 

The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of two compatibilizers, namely maleated polypropylene (PP-g-MA) and maleic anhydride grafted poly (ethylene-co-octene) (EOC-g-MA), on the morphology and thus properties of ternary nanocomposites of polypropylene (PP)/ethylene-octene copolymer (EOC)/clay nanocomposite. In this regard the nanocomposites and their neat polymer blend counterparts were processed twice using a twin screw extruder. X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy, Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, and scanning electron microscopy were utilized to characterize nanostructure and microstructure besides mechanical and rheological behaviors of the... 

The present research examines the effects of UV radiation, moisture and elevated temperature on the mechanical properties of GFRP pultruded profiles. Flexural, compressive and tensile properties of different GFRP sections were studied after they were exposed for 1000, 1500, 2000 and 3000 h to UV radiation and water vapour condensation cycles. Mechanical tests, including three-point bending, compression and tension tests, SEM analyses, and statistical studies were conducted to gather comprehensive results. The results showed that the mechanical properties of various GFRP sections generally decreased with the duration of conditioning: however, the rate of the decrease that was only slight up... 

By combining portable, handheld near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy with state-of-the-art classification algorithms, we developed a powerful method to test chicken meat authenticity. The research presented shows that it is both possible to discriminate fresh from thawed meat, based on NIR spectra, as well as to correctly classify chicken fillets according to the growth conditions of the chickens with good accuracy. In all cases, the random subspace discriminant ensemble (RSDE) method significantly outperformed other common classification methods such as partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector machine (SVM) with classification... 

Diffuse reflectance near-infrared (NIR) data (908–1676 nm) of chicken breast fillets was recorded in a non-destructive way using a portable miniaturised NIR spectrometer. The NIR data was used to discriminate between fresh and thawed breast fillets and to determine the birds’ growth conditions. NIR data was recorded of 153 commercial supermarket chicken fillet samples by applying the NIR device equipped with the standard issue collar on the samples in three different ways: (i) directly on the meat (ii) through the top foil of the package (i.e. with an air pocket between the foil and the breast fillet), and (iii) through the top foil with the packaging turned bottom up (i.e. no air pocket...