Sharif Digital Repository

In this article we develop a 'Stakeholder Mapping' approach to ex-ante policy evaluation. The proposed framework helps to assess policy implementation activities by applying several tests to evaluate the completeness, non-redundancy, proper assignment and internal consistency of a policy design. We illustrate the method by applying it to the analysis of e-commerce policy in Iran. We conclude by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. © 2009 SAGE Publications  

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.... 

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.... 

Agile Software Development is regarded as an effective and efficient approach, mainly due to its ability to accommodate rapidly changing requirements, and to cope with modern software development challenges. There is therefore a strong tendency to use agile software development methodologies where applicable; however, the sheer number of existing agile methodologies and their variants hinders the selection of an appropriate agile methodology or method chunk. Methodology evaluation tools address this problem through providing detailed evaluations, yet no comprehensive evaluation framework is available for agile methodologies. We introduce the Comprehensive Evaluation Framework for Agile... 

Agile Software Development is regarded as an effective and efficient approach, mainly due to its ability to accommodate rapidly changing requirements, and to cope with modern software development challenges. There is therefore a strong tendency to use agile software development methodologies where applicable; however, the sheer number of existing agile methodologies and their variants hinders the selection of an appropriate agile methodology or method chunk. Methodology evaluation tools address this problem through providing detailed evaluations, yet no comprehensive evaluation framework is available for agile methodologies. We introduce the Comprehensive Evaluation Framework for Agile... 

The city of Tehran, the capital of Iran, has been facing severe air quality problems. The air quality of Tehran has been stated as unhealthy over one-third of year during the last two decades. According to the last emission inventory of Tehran for the base year of 2013 mobile sources contribute by about 6, 46, 98, 87, and 70% of total primary SOx, NOx, CO, VOC and PM emission. A number of policies have been implemented in Tehran during the last two decades to tackle the air quality issue. Concentrated mostly on transportation sector, these policies aimed to improve fuel quality and emission performance of vehicles. Nevertheless, there is no quantified evaluation regarding the effectiveness... 

The best usual way in order to diagnosis, control and therapy different kind of Epilepsy is to refer to patient's EEG signals. Usually, in normal conditions of a patient, Epilepsy shows itself through EEG signals in the shape of transient waves. Identification of this waves using human eyes is so difficult that automatic detection methods based on mathematics and signal processing, should have been applied as an auxiliary tool to help physician identify this waves. The most significant transient epileptic waves in EEG are spikes. Up to now, various methods are presented for detection of spikes, but a quantitative and comparative evaluation hasn't been performed. In this work, we suggested a... 

Purpose – This paper aims to provide a criteria-based evaluation framework for assessing knowledgemanagement system (KMS) development methodologies. Design/methodology/approach – The evaluation criteria have been elicited based on the features expected from a successful KMS. Furthermore, a number of prominent KMS development methodologies have been scrutinized based on the proposed evaluation framework. Findings – It was demonstrated that the proposed evaluation framework is detailed and comprehensive enough to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of KMS development methodologies. It was also revealed that even though the evaluated methodologies possess certain strong features, they suffer... 

It has become essential to scrutinize and evaluate software development methodologies, mainly because of their increasing number and variety. Evaluation is required to gain a better understanding of the features, strengths, and weaknesses of the methodologies. The results of such evaluations can be leveraged to identify the methodology most appropriate for a specific context. Moreover, methodology improvement and evolution can be accelerated using these results. However, despite extensive research, there is still a need for a feature/criterion set that is general enough to allow methodologies to be evaluated regardless of their types. We propose a general evaluation framework which addresses... 

Web search engines play a significant role in answering users’ information needs based on the huge amount of data available on the internet. Although evaluating the performance of these systems is very important for their improvement, there is no comprehensive, unbiased, low-cost, and reusable method for this purpose. Previous works used a small and limited set of queries for their evaluation process that restricts the assessment domain. Moreover, these methods mainly rely on human evaluators for manual assessment of search engines which makes the results of the evaluation subjective to the opinion of human evaluators and also prone to error. In addition, repeating the evaluation would be a... 

This paper proposes a full-featured fault injection framework to assess reliability of FPGA-based designs. The framework provides non-intrusiveness, portability, flexibility and performance in reliability evaluation of FPGA-based designs against adverse effects of SEUs. It works in a non-intrusive manner, allowing the reliability of ready-to-be-released designs to be assessed independently, without any intrusion into their place and route characteristics. We have studied implications of framework's intrusiveness into design under test by comparing proposed non-intrusive framework with previous intrusive methods; up to 5% deviation in the number of effective faults is observed in intrusive... 

The present paper is an attempt to evaluate Pacesetter Series (Strange and Hall, 2005), an EFL course book series, in four levels of starter, elementary, pre-intermediate, and intermediate, being currently instructed at several language institutes in Iran. The purpose of this study is to determine the appropriateness of the series in Iranian EFL contexts. Litz (2000) questionnaire was exploited to examine the series thoroughly in all essential aspects. Sixty four EFL teachers rated the series. The results of descriptive statistics indicated that there is an overall consensus among the teachers that Pacesetter rightly addresses the needs of the learners in a communicative curriculum. However,... 

The present work aimed to investigate the frequency of occurrences and proportions of speech acts of complaints and compliments in the four volumes of the course book English Result (Elementary, Pre-intermediate, Intermediate, and Upper-intermediate), by Mark Hancock and Annie McDonald (2009), published by Oxford University Press. Investigation of the two speech act strategies was based on complaints strategies (Olshtain and Weinbach, 1987) and compliment strategies (Wolfson and Manes, 1981). It was found that the books were rich in terms of the number of the two speech acts, but in presenting them, there were one or two dominant strategies in both cases. Chi-square analysis demonstrated... 

Coupled weather forecasting and chemical transport models are useful tools to evaluate air pollution episodes in big cities for the purpose of forecasting and air pollution abatement measures' evaluation. However, large set of accurate data of various sources and modeling calibrations are needed for such complex modeling system to be reliable. The problem becomes more obvious when the model is operated over a domain in which there is a general lack of accurate input data such as emission inventory data. The current study investigates the possibility of model tuning for more accurate prediction of air pollutant concentrations in the city of Tehran in an air pollution episode as a case study.... 

There are several critical measures in the project performance evaluation such as time, cost, and quality. In this paper, a new method for project performance evaluation is presented by combining the project Golden Triangle and the methods in decision science. At first, strategies and measures are introduced for the perspectives of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) method according to their effect on time, cost, and quality. Next, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method is used to weigh the measures by the judgments of experts after integrating AHP and BSC. Then, the weights of the five project phases - from the initiation to the closure - are calculated by the Technique for Order of... 

Manual material handling (MMH) tasks were evaluated and compared under different lifting conditions. For the theoretical evaluations, a two-dimensional sagittally symmetric human-body model was established to compute the moment and joint load time histories for MMH tasks for a variety of different lift specifications and constraints such as lifting durations, loads, and modes. Nonlinear control techniques and genetic algorithms were utilized in the optimizations to explore optimal lifting patterns. Since the kinetic measures such as joint moments are vital metrics in the assessment of the likelihood of injury, the simulation results obtained may be compared using these metrics for each lift... 

One of the major goals of Artificial Life is to know 'life-as-it-could-be'. Several platforms for ALife simulations are presented but not all are suitable for every cognitive study in ALife. Platforms designed for studying the origin of life are based on a world of simple rules and simple objects, capable of producing complex organisms. But such worlds are not suitable for cognitive studies focused on complex behaviors, because they are too slow for emergence and simulation of such behaviors. A platform called Zamin is presented, which is believed to be fast, expandable, realistic, and suitable for cognitive simulations aimed to study the emergence of complex behaviors. © Springer-Verlag... 

Objective: This study aimed to present and evaluate a new deep learning model for determining cervical vertebral maturation (CVM) degree and growth spurts by analyzing lateral cephalometric radiographs. Methods: The study sample included 890 cephalograms. The images were classified into six cervical stages independently by two orthodontists. The images were also categorized into three degrees on the basis of the growth spurt: pre-pubertal, growth spurt, and post-pubertal. Subsequently, the samples were fed to a transfer learning model implemented using the Python programming language and PyTorch library. In the last step, the test set of cephalograms was randomly coded and provided to two...