Sharif Digital Repository

This study investigated Iranian language students' perception of and familiarity with plagiarism, their attitudes toward their professors regarding this issue, and their reasons for doing so. The participants were 122 undergraduate and graduate language students in Translation, Literature, TEFL, and Linguistics who filled out a validated and piloted questionnaire. Overall, the results indicated that students had different views about the definition of plagiarism and plagiarism was mostly perceived by students as using someone else's words as if they were their own rather than taking someone's ideas without permission. It was also found that in their academic career, students mostly consider... 

In this work, Weakly Compressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (WCSPH) is applied for numerical simulation of impulsive wave. Properties of linear and angular momentum in WCSPH formulation are studied. Kernel gradient of viscous term in momentum equation is corrected to ensure preservation of angular momentum. Corrected WCSPH method is used to simulate solitary Scott Russell wave and applied to simulate impulsive wave generated by two-dimensional under water landslide. In each of the test cases, results of corrected WCSPH are compared with experimental results. The results of the numerical simulations and experimental works are matched and a satisfactory agreement is observed.... 

Mechanical properties of materials are an important factor in designing nanoscale systems. Several researches and experiments have shown that the mechanical properties of the nano-scale materials are different from those of bulk. One of the major reasons for this difference is that the ratio of surface to volume increases at the nano-scale, and the effects of free surfaces become very important. In this paper, we have measured the surface elastic constants of silicon crystalline structure using different interatomic potentials. The potentials employed here are EDIP (Environment-Dependent Interatomic Potential), Stillinger-Weber and Tersoff, and also different crystalline orientations are... 

This study explored the conceptualization of socially just teaching in higher education. Participants were English language professors who were studied through a qualitative study. The data collected through interviews and memos were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. Three themes were extracted: a critical stance, a dialogic and emergent curriculum, and ontological turns. The findings indicated that socially just teaching requires foregrounding the questions of being. Furthermore, the findings revealed that socially just teaching necessitates critiquing othering based on essentialist stereotypes through the contextualized teaching which revolves around cultural recognition,... 

Drawing on a modified version of Delphi technique, the researchers in this study tried to develop a rubric comprising the main criteria to be considered in the evaluation of works of fiction. Review of the related literature, as well as the administration of a Likert scale questionnaire, and a series of unstructured interviews with experts in the fields of literature and creative writing, led to the identification of ten elements which were used in the construction of the first version of the rubric. To ensure its validity, a number of distinguished creative writing professors were asked to review this assessment tool and comment on its appropriateness for measuring the intended construct.... 

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical analysis of the fracture behavior of multiple axisymmetric interface cracks between a homogeneous isotropic layer and its functionally graded material (FGM) coating under torsional loading. Design/methodology/approach: In this paper, the authors employ the distributed dislocation technique to the stress analysis, an FGM coating-substrate system under torsional loading with multiple axisymmetric cracks consist of annular and penny-shaped cracks. First, with the aid of the Hankel transform, the stress fields in the homogeneous layer and its FGM coating are obtained. The problem is then reduced to a set of singular integral equations... 

Drawing on a modified version of Delphi technique, the researchers in this study tried to develop a rubric comprising the main criteria to be considered in the evaluation of works of fiction. Review of the related literature, as well as the administration of a Likert scale questionnaire, and a series of unstructured interviews with experts in the fields of literature and creative writing, led to the identification of ten elements which were used in the construction of the first version of the rubric. To ensure its validity, a number of distinguished creative writing professors were asked to review this assessment tool and comment on its appropriateness for measuring the intended construct.... 

The present study was an attempt to explore international English-medium publication in humanities and social sciences in Iran. In so doing, 50 PhD students from 8 humanities and social sciences disciplines, who had already published or attempted to publish in English-medium journals, were requested to write reflection guide accounts and to take part in follow-up semi-structured interviews. The reflection guide and interview data were analyzed based on the principles of grounded theory research yielding the four major themes of motivations, hurdles, strategies, and call for support. The results indicated that the Iranian PhD students in the fields of humanities and social sciences are... 

Nowadays, many second/foreign language (L2) academic writing instruction programs place a high premium on pre-writing strategies. The current study examined the effect of software-supported concept mapping on lexical diversity (LD) of English learners' argumentative essays within a process writing framework. Additionally, the relationship between the learners' LD and their overall writing quality was investigated. To this end, 53 university English as a foreign language (EFL) undergraduates were assigned to a computer-aided concept mapping (CACM) and a traditional outlining condition over a span of seven weeks. The CACM group was instructed through the graphic organizer software... 

This research addresses the escalation of the ‘discourse of going’ among Iranian educated people in recent years through highlighting the influential role played by for-profit study abroad institutions. Utilizing a discourse-analytic approach, we engage the theoretical concept of chronotope, caliberation, and commodification to investigate the ways through which for-profit study abroad institutions represent the images of ‘life beyond’. The data were obtained in interview sessions with ten certified Iranian study-abroad institutions. The results of the data analysis revealed two main themes, namely, hypothetical utopia there and dystopia here as well as success here-and-now and... 

Minority language studies have received increasing attention over the last decade in Iran. Drawing on Spolsky's (Spolsky, Bernard. 2004. Language policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) language policy theoretical framework, this inquiry reports on the language ideologies, practices, and management efforts of an under-explored group of Kurdish families residing in the city of Kermanshah. To this end, semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork guided the collection of data from 40 Kurdish-Persian bilingual parents. The thematic analysis of data revealed glaring inconsistencies among the three elements of family language policy (FLP). That is parents' strong attachment to... 

Piezoelectric actuators are widely used in micro manipulation applications. However, hysteresis nonlinearity limits the accuracy of these actuators. This paper presents a novel approach for utilizing a piezoelectric nano-stage as the slave manipulator of a teleoperation system based on a sliding mode controller. The Prandtl-Ishlinskii (PI) model is used to model actuator hysteresis in feedforward scheme to cancel out this nonlinearity. The presented approach requires full state and force measurements at both the master and slave sides. Such a system is costly and also difficult to implement. Therefore, sliding mode unknown input observer (UIO) is proposed for full state and force... 

Mobile networks have been growing rapidly, where it is of paramount importance to evaluate the performance of any protocol designed for such networks before deployment. Mobility is one of the main mobile network issues that directly affects performance metrics. Since mobile nodes are often carried by their owners, nodes movement should be modeled according to humans movement. In this paper, we extend our previously published human mobility model based on real collected data. The real human movement is traced, cleaned up and analyzed. To the best of our knowledge, our collected data set is the only one that contains the detail of both walking and driving nodes. The analysis shows several... 

As multi-hop wireless networks are attracting more attention, the need to evaluate their performance becomes essential. In order to evaluate the performance metrics of multi-hop wireless networks, including sending and receiving rates of a node as well as the collision probability, a model based on Stochastic Reward Nets (SRNs) is proposed. The proposed SRN models a typical node in such networks, considered as a general template to be applied to any wireless node. The SRN model of a single node is designed to take transmission effects of all neighboring nodes into account, while ignoring the ones whose transmission has no effect on the node under-study. Applying the proposed SRN to each node... 

We present a new high signal-to-noise ratio spectroscopic survey of the Northern hemisphere to probe the Local Bubble and its surroundings using the λ5780Å and λ5797Å diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs). We observed 432 sightlines to a distance of 200 pc over a duration of three years. In this study, we establish the λ5780 and λ5797 correlations with Na I, Ca II and EB-V, for both inside and outside the Local Bubble. The correlations show that among all neutral and ionized atoms, the correlation between Ca ii and λ5780 is stronger than its correlation with λ5797, suggesting that λ5780 is more associated with regions where Ca+ is more abundant. We study the λ5780 correlation with λ5797, which... 

Background: Comprehensive and comparable estimates of health spending in each country are a key input for health policy and planning, and are necessary to support the achievement of national and international health goals. Previous studies have tracked past and projected future health spending until 2040 and shown that, with economic development, countries tend to spend more on health per capita, with a decreasing share of spending from development assistance and out-of-pocket sources. We aimed to characterise the past, present, and predicted future of global health spending, with an emphasis on equity in spending across countries. Methods: We estimated domestic health spending for 195...