Several industrial engineering and psychological studies have shown that noise affects the important aspects of communication for both adults and children. For speech understanding by hearing aids users and language development in children, an accurate hearing is very important. A metric has been developed for measuring an individual & apos; s acceptance of noise while listening to speech in quiet. This metric is known as Acceptable Noise Levels (ANLs). Studies have shown large inter-subject variability in acceptance of background noise. An argument has been made that an acceptance of background noise is a “means” that will help to solve the puzzle and monumental problem of hearing aid rejection. Meanwhile, within subject age dependency has not been investigated. This study is conducted to determine if ANL inter and intra-subject variability under music signal depends on age. Twenty subjects participated in the study (average age = 29; SD = 3.7; range 23-35 years). All participants had hearing level not worse than 25dB HL at octave frequencies from 250Hz to 4000Hz. Listeners’ task was to adjust the level of music played in quiet to their most comfortable listening level and then to adjust the level of background noise to the maximum level that they still consider acceptable while listening to music. Further, music is not a speech signal that many researchers have used to determine the significance of age on ANL inter-subject variability. Results of this study supported the findings of others on age dependency, which shows that ANL inter and intra-subject variability is independent of age.

The Indigenous Ghanaian woman entrepreneur, this study found exhibits many similarities with their counterparts in other countries in terms of their personality traits. However, they differed in other aspects such as their educational backgrounds and modes of entrepreneurial skills acquisition. Through their entrepreneurial activities the women have made substantial contributions to the economic growth of Ghana in terms of innovation, job creation, and reduction in poverty and unemployment. Using a survey methodology, this study concludes that to succeed as a female entrepreneur in Ghana, one requires some specific knowledge, skills and attitudes.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors promoting knowledge sharing and knowledge creation in banking sector of Pakistan. With the help of literature review, we identified most important factors in knowledge sharing and knowledge creation including organizational culture, trust, motivation, employee’s attitude and socialization. The populations selected for analysis consist of (250) male and female employees of banking sector of Pakistan and response have been received from 225 respondents. The collection of data was a very difficult task and it has taken almost four months. The data were collected from the five cities of Pakistan including Islamabad, Faisalabad, Multan, Peshawar and Lahore. The results show that all the factors have significant impact on knowledge creation and Knowledge sharing. The findings of the study also show that these factors are necessary for the promotion of knowledge creation and knowledge sharing culture in an organization. The knowledge sharing and knowledge creation are the keys for the success of an organization. A firm or an organization can sustain its competitive edge in market with the help of Knowledge sharing and knowledge creation. The final results of this study conclude that socialization factor is at top, trust factor is at second and motivational factor is at third according to the respondents’ point of view.

Cultural intelligence (CQ) is a new area of research, which is considered in different areas including banking industry. In this paper, we design a questionnaire in Likert scale and measure CQ in banking industry. The proposed study of this paper distributes 53 questionnaires among 60 employees of bank Sarmyeh, which is one of the private banks in Iran. The study also distributes a standard questionnaire among them to measure the performance of the same employees. Cronbach alpha are calculated for both questionnaires as 0.8155 and 0.9421, respectively. The study calculates Pearson correlation ratio between these two items and the result indicates that there is a positive (0.41) and meaningful relationship between CQ and performance measurement. In addition, there is a positive and meaningful relationship between motivational CQ and performance measurement (0.378). However, the survey does not find any meaningful relationship between cognitive CQ, metacognitive CQ and behavioral CQ on one side and performance measurement.

Women play important role on building a sustainable family oriented society; they could also contribute to society by contributing to labor market. However, women’s personal characteristics such as educational background, years of experience, etc. could impact their future occupations. In this paper, we study the impact of various factors on women’s job status. The measurement tools for social factors of employment in this research is a questionnaire consists of 32 questions. The study measures the reflection of repliers to different social factors including social position, popularity, socialize, social manners, self-reliance, speech abilities, responsibility, etc. Data were gathered from a sample of 300 people using random sampling and analyzed using descriptive mono factor statistics, Spearman correlation, Kramer correlation coefficient, Chi-square, regression and path analysis. The validity of questionnaire is tested by using Cronbach alpha (%75). The results indicate that there are some meaningful relationships between woman’s educational level, age, residency status, socialization capability, urbanity, skill & ability and their employment. The study, however, does not find any relationship between marital status and number of children and outcome of woman’s employment.

Customer satisfaction plays an important role on the success of banking industry. A customer may switch his/her primary banking from one to another as soon as he/she is unsatisfied from the quality of services. In this paper, we study the impact of six factors on electronic banking including easy access, design, transaction speed, security, information content and customer support on customer satisfaction. The proposed study was performed in different branches located in north east of city of Tehran, Iran named Tejarat. The study selected a sample of 200 customers, designed, and distributed a questionnaire among them. The results of our survey have indicated that all six components significantly influenced on customer satisfaction. We have also investigated a linear regression between the six independent variables and customer satisfaction and using stepwise linear regression technique the most suitable regression model. The results of regression analysis have also indicated that an increase of one unit in easy access, information content and customer support will increase customer satisfaction by 0.201, 0.368 and 0.356, respectively.

In this study, we investigate whether transactional analysis (TA) training could improve social adjustment in a case study of women with spouses with drug addiction. This experimental study was performed on 40 people who were addicted to drugs and were under medication in some clinical centers in city of Esfahan, Iran. The patients were randomly divided into two groups (control and an experimental group). The experimental group was trained under transactional training for 8 one-hour sessions. Cronbach alpha was calculated as 0.89, which is well above the minimum acceptable. The results of the survey show that the means of two groups before test are close to each other. However, after TA has been accomplished, there is meaningful difference between these two groups. The result of F-value statistical test is also meaningful when the level of significance is five percent. In other word, there are some evidences to believe that transactional analysis training impacts on our surveyed people, positively.

Private schools play important role on developing economy especially in rural areas of Iran and when they operate efficiently it can also be considered as a rich source of income. During the past three decades, data envelopment analysis (DEA) has become a popular technique for measuring the relative performance of non-financial units. In this paper, we present an empirical study to measure the relative efficiency of 11 private universities located in region ten of Islamic Azad university. The proposed study of this paper assigns some points for human resources including university professor and regular employees and considers it along with assets as inputs of DEA model. We also consider the number of graduated students and operating profit as output of our proposed DEA model. The implementation of standard BCC method yields 6 efficient units and to have better results we use another DEA technique. The results of this study present some investment opportunities for management of this private university.

The purpose of this study is to explore the concept of cultural security and its practical implications in a case study of educational system. There are several definitions of culture, which describe different aspects of cultural security. In fact, cultural security tends to show various behaviors, thinking, beliefs and other people’s perspectives in a society, which represents the overall circumstances. Cultural security and its issues make it possible to have a clear image of a society or community. This paper aims to identify the important dimensions of cultural security in terms of basic components of cultural security identified in a framework. Therefore, after identifying the components, using a questionnaire, required data are gathered from the universities of the city of Ilam, Iran and they are analyzed by SPSS18.0 software and its appropriate statistical tests.

Child abuse is one of the most important issues in any society and any action to detect influencing factors could help take possible actions on its prevention. In this paper, we present an empirical study to find the impact of family income, occupation, size, age, education and drug addiction on growth of child abuse. The study uses a sample of 450 female students who were enrolled on guided schools in city of Esfahan, Iran. The study chooses 5 classes and in each school and 10 students are randomly selected. A questionnaire is designed and distributed among the sample people, which is categorized in four groups of physical, sexual, emotional and neglect child abuse. The results are analyzed using different tests including Pearson correlation test, Chi-Square, etc. to test different hypotheses. The results of our survey indicate that there are some meaningful relationships between different family characteristics including age, occupation, family size, educational background, and drug-addiction and child abuse. However, our survey does not provide any evidence to believe there is any relationship between home status and child abuse risk.