One of the primary governmental concerns is to understand the level of economical and social development in different locations of a country. Understanding social and economical characteristics of different cities help provide necessary assistance for underdeveloped areas and promote some value added activities such as tourism in better-developed areas. In this paper, we present an empirical study based on Factor Analysis to rank different towns, villages and cities located in city of Isfahan, Iran in terms of various socio-economical criteria. The study gathers necessary information from 1996 to 2007. The results of our survey indicate that three cities of Feridan, Nayeen and Falavarjan are in the best position in terms of different social and cultural criteria while Lenjan, Barkhar and Mymehand Isfahan are located in the worst positions.

The study performs an empirical survey to measure the impact of stress among people with various gender and marital status in a hydropower unit located in city of Esfahan, Iran. The study performs the survey among all 81 people who were working for customer service section of this company and consists of two parts, in the first part; we gather all private information such as age, gender, education, job experience, etc. through seven important questions. In the second part of the survey, there were 66 questions, which included all the relevant factors impacting employees & apos; stress. We implement two Levin and t-student tests to see whether gender or marital status has any meaningful influences on creating stress among people. The results indicate that gender has no meaningful impact on creating stress among employees who worked for this hydro plant except difficulty of job conditions. The other findings of this paper is that stress posed from management team had different impacts on employees with various marital status but there were no meaningful differences between married and single couples in terms of other factors posing stress such as unsuitable working conditions, fear of job stability or difficulty of job conditions.

Today, customer return issue in e-purchase process is considered as important topic in companies' marketing and managerial decision making. In this paper, we present an empirical study on measuring the impact of e-loyalty for an Iranian auto-industry called Pars Khodro co. The proposed study measures reliability, responsiveness, design, security/privacy as independent variables, e-confidence and e-satisfaction as mediator variable, and e-loyalty as dependent variable. The preliminary results show that effectiveness of e-satisfaction and e-confidence on loyalty and effectiveness of e-confidence on e-satisfaction are in high level. Reliability/Fulfillment and security variables on e-confidence have significant impacts, and effectiveness level of reliability/Fulfillment and responsiveness and website design on e-satisfaction is high. The results indicate that there is no significant relationship between responsiveness and e-confidence.

With the rapid growth of the World Wide Web, finding useful information from the Internet has become a critical issue. Automatic classification of user navigation patterns provides a useful tool to solve these problems. In this paper, we propose an approach for classification of users’ navigation patterns and prediction of users’ future requests. Users’ profiles are constructed based on Web log server files and one of clustering methods is implemented to users’ profiles for assigning navigation patterns. Finally, using neural network, recommender engine produces a relevant recommendation list of web pages to the active user. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed approach has high accuracy and coverage in prediction of users’ future requests.

Cheap subsidized fuel supplied to transportation section has the most impact on traffic jam and air pollution in the Iranian megacities, especially Tehran. The 5th Five-Year Development Plan of the country aims at elimination of energy subsidies. Accordingly, this study examines the effects of the increase in the price of energy carriers in two different scenarios on megacities’ traffic and the corresponding variables. A system dynamics model is first designed to identify the most effective variables on traffic and urban transportation. The model considers an increase in the price of energy carriers based on the world price trends, until 2014 (the final year of the Subsidy Targeting Program), and evaluates the its impact on the relevant variables. The results reveal a short time reduction in transportation traffic volume. However, due to incremental trends in demand and production of vehicles, it returns to its first state.

During the past few years, there have been tremendous fluctuations on different currencies. For instance, European common currency, Euro, has be fluctuated between 0.60 to 0.9 against US dollar. Therefore, it is important to study the behavior of currency valuations using different techniques. In this paper, we present an empirical study to measure the impact of different items on risk of foreign currency using value at risk (VaR) and regression methods. The proposed model of this paper investigates whether the risk of open positions of six foreign currencies including US dollar, Euro, British Pound, Switzerland Frank, Norwegian Kroner and United Emirate Dirham increase during the time horizon. The proposed study of this paper uses historical daily prices of these currencies for a fiscal year of 2011 in one of private banks located in Iran and measures the relative risk. The results of the implementation of two methods of VaR and linear regression indicate that the risk of open positions increases during the time horizon.

The primary objective of this paper is to study the impact of stress on educational school- children who are enrolled in guided schools. Teenagers are normally facing with stress and feelings and when the level of stress increases, they may face with problems, which would become more serious as they get older. In this study, we perform a standard stress relief program (CS-R Coping With Stress-Revised) and try to reduce the burden of stress among 1240 students who attended guided schools. We split the people into two groups of experiment and witness and performed the study among one group. Before the exam, there was no meaningful difference between their average markings but after performing the exam, the average marking of the experienced students was increase by 0.53. The results clearly indicate that it is possible to make significant change on students & apos; personal characteristics.

One of the primary concerns of many governmental agencies is to create job and working opportunities. The job creation is often promoted by loans devoted from the banks. This paper performs an empirical study to measure the relative efficiency of job creation from year 2002 to 2010 in different cities including Semnan, Dameghan, Shahrood, Garmsar and Mahdishahr located in west region of Iran. The proposed model of this paper uses data envelopment analysis where there are two inputs including the granted loans to private sector and the job applicants and two outputs including the assigned to work and the number of jobs created. The results indicate that the city of Garmsar represents the highest efficiency and Damghan maintains the lowest efficiency.

Cash flow analysis is one of the most popular methods for investigating the outcome of an economical project. The costs and benefits of a construction project are often involved with uncertainty and it is not possible to find a precise value for a particular project. In this paper, we present a simple method to calculate the net present value of a cash flow when both costs and benefits are given as triangular numbers. The proposed model of this paper uses Delphi method to figure out the fair values of all costs and revenues and then using fizzy programming techniques, it calculates the fuzzy net present value. The implementation of the proposed model is demonstrated using a simple example.

This paper studies the effect of drought stress and plant density on yield, component yield and content oil of Safflower. The paper conducts an experiment spilt block in the form of randomized complete block design in three replications at the research farm of agriculture college of Zanjan university in the year 2009. The main factor includes four levels of drought stress, which are normal, cut of one time irrigating before flowering, cut of one time irrigating after flowering, cut of one time irrigating in grain filling stage and sub plot including three-level plant density (200, 300, 400 thousands plant per each hectare). The results of experiment showed that biologic yield, seed yield, component yield and oil yield in different levels of drought stress and plant density were significantly different. The greatest biologic yield and seed yield were for treat cut of one time irrigating before flowering and treat 200 thousand bushes per each hectare. The highest seed yield and oil yield getting for treat normal and after that for treat cut of one time irrigating in grain filling stage.