Archives-December 

Excellent companies have clear missions and strategic intent; they have core competencies and the intense dedication of their staff enable them to match these against customer needs. Through mergers and acquisitions a firm stands a chance to build on its achievement and surpass their competitors. The primary sources of long term profitability are talents or resources that competitors cannot imitate. Abilities or resources that are easily copied soon lose their value. But the core competencies, competitive advantages and synergies (mergers) that inhere in a tight configuration and very hard to imitate. Mergers creatively combine many elements that mutually reinforce one another. This makes merging difficult to duplicate/copy. From the research conducted, it was concluded that highly merged organisations possess a clear sense of direction. Their goals inspire, their strategies are clear, and their efforts are well targeted. So employees are committed and co-ordination is graceful. Merging present advantages and get firms with distinctive competencies and product/service that key competitors cannot imitate. Mergers can be as great competitive advantage as any other aspect of strategy.

Using Fourier transforms, the evolution of linearized perturbations in a thermally stratified magnetohydrodynamic shear flow is solved as an initial value problem. The resulting equation in terms of the Fourier amplitudes is solved for the case of bounded couette flow with a point source of the field of transverse velocity, density and temperature. Solutions are obtained for small values of Alfve?n velocity and Brunt Vaisala frequency. The velocity plots are drawn for different values of Alfve?n velocity and Brunt frequency.

This study endeavors to investigate if assessment tools such as TKT, DELTA, and the alternative assessment have any statistically significant washback effects on the reflection of Iranian EFL in- service teachers. To fulfill the requirements of the study, the researchers selected 90 subjects and categorized them into three groups. Three assessment packages which included the actual samples of TKT, DELTA, and alternative assessment tools, along with the instructional and coaching materials related to all these modes of assessment, were randomly presented to the three groups respectively. The researchers adopted a pre-test post-test comparison group design to investigate the washback effect of each assessment tool and compare the three groups in terms of teacher reflection. Having used one-way ANOVA to analyze the collected data, the researchers concluded that the alternative assessment tools, compared to DELTA and TKT, had the strongest washback effect on teachers' reflection.

The study of translation has increasingly drawn the attention of more scholars in the last few decades. The translation process has been reduced to different forms of analysis at one time or the other (see Catford, 1965; Uwajeh, 1994, 2001, 2007, etc) in an attempt to explain the hierarchical relationship at which translation equivalence may be achievable. Recently, however, more studies have shown that the existing four ranks/levels are not enough to successfully show the process that is involved in translation practice generally. This paper seeks to show one of these inadequacies as evident in the translation of euphemistic expressions in ?do. An additional level is, herein, proposed to be added to the existing four levels to give a five-level translation model. This paper is therefore, an improvement on the existing model and it is hoped that it will help in making the process of translation better understood in modern Linguistics.

The ultrasonic velocity, density and viscosity have been measured for the binary liquid mixture of polyvinyl alcohol+ water has been measured as a function of the composition of 303,308,313and318 K. The experimental data have been used to calculate some parameters namely, acoustic impedance (z), adiabatic compressibility (?), intermolecular free length (Lf), and relative association (RA). The results are discussed and interpreted in terms of structural and specific interactions that predominated by intermolecular hydrogen bonding.

Overheating is the major problem ofhermetic compressor due to extra amount of heat added from the motor windings to the shell. It reduces the mass flow rate of the system which results in reduced compressor volumetric efficiency and extremely high discharge temperature. The refrigerant injection is a technique to improve the system performance. This paper reviews the major research on refrigerant injection techniques in detail. The refrigerant injection technique divided into two categories, first is vapor injection and another is liquid injection. Flash tank and internal heat exchanger are two cycles for refrigerant injection. These two cycles are discussed in detail.

The high growth of the semiconductor industry over the past two decades has put Very Large Scale Integration in demand all over the world. Digital Signal Processing has played a great role in expanding VLSI device area. The recent rapid advancements in multimedia computing and high speed wired and wireless communications made DSP to grab increased attention.For an N-point transformation the direct computation of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) requires N2 operations. Cooley and Turkey explained the concept of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) which reduces the order of computation to Nlog¬2N. The FFT is not an approximation of the DFT, it's exactly equal to the DFT. FFT decomposes the set of data to be transformed into a series of smaller data sets to be transformed. The size of FFT decomposition is called "radix". Then, it decomposes those smaller sets into even smaller sets. At each stage of processing, the results of the previous stage are combined with twiddle factor multiplication. Finally, FFT is calculated for each small data set. Generally, FFT's can be decomposed using DFT's of even and odd points, which is called a Decimation-In-Time (DIT) FFT, or they can be decomposed using a first-half/second-half approach, which is called a "Decimation-In-Frequency" (DIF) FFT.A large number of FFT algorithms have been developed, but among all radix-4 are most widely used for practical applications due to their simple architecture, with constant butterfly geometry and the possibility of performing them ‘in place’. The algorithm for 16-point radix-4 FFT can be implemented with decimation either in time or frequency. In this work, the decimation in time (DIT) technique will be adopted in order to implement the 16-point radix-4 FFT.

Alternative assessment has been acclaimed as an approach to assess activities which are authentic and engaging students with active and cooperative learning. It also foster skills needed in the 21st century and preparing students for future careers. The study is an attempt to build an analytical rubric to evaluate students science project and enriching it with 21st century skills and providing a space for students to develop their potential. Delphi technique is used to validate the rubric and intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) was conducted to measure the reliability of the rubric. The study encountered that the rubric reached high consensus by panel of experts and high absolute agreement of [ICC = .75(95%CI, .41 to .93)] which can be concluded that is has a fair reliability of 75.0%. Thus the rubric can be practiced and implemented to assess students science project. However the study have found numerous issues and constraints but the creation of the rubric concedes assessment of students activities which are authentic and relevant to nourish 21st century skills. Though, further research on the validity and reliability of the rubric is crucial.

In this article, the authors attempt to find the economic order quantity under fuzzy environment. The ordering quantity, optimal order quantity, and the total profit are finding by use of Matlab. In this paper, we derive the conclusion by comparison of Crisp and Fuzzy Model.

The phenomenon of alienation that Marx, unlike that of limited means, is not only of the economic structure, but also have been a widespread subjective and objective orientation in human and economic structure is a part of it. Alienation of Iranian society as a society in transition is a sociological problem. In the past decades, especially in the sixties that rapid social changes undermined the traditional values and customs, modernism dealing with traditionalism without being able to create conceptions and cultural identity created two-fold condition which the result can be considered as social- political alienation. Given the importance of the youth in this study followed by a discussion of the relationship between alienation from the political system, political participation, the use of local media, the use of foreign media, economic - social, age and gender as independent variables. social - Political alienation as the dependent variable we are. The results suggest that variable other than economic - social, there is a significant relationship between independent and dependent variables.