درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Scientific sources demonstrate different attitudes of researchers to cryptocurrencies because they treat them as a category of currency, virtual money, commodity, etc. Accordingly, the relation to the valuation and risk of cryptocurrency as an investment object is different. The purpose of the article is to identify cryptocurrency value formation factors and determine the risks of investing in cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is simultaneously considered a currency, an asset with uncertain income, and a specific product, the price of which is determined by the energy costs for mining new cryptocurrency blocks. Thus, the paper examines the risks of investing in cryptocurrency from several positions. First, the study identifies the factors of formation of the value and risk of cryptocurrency as ordinary money based on comparing cryptocurrency with traditional money. Unlike traditional money, cryptocurrency is not tied to the economic performance of a particular country; also, central banks do not control or regulate their mining. Instead, the cryptocurrency emissions depend on the computational capacity of the equipment used for their mining. As a financial asset, cryptocurrency can be a “financial bubble” because their value increasing often exceeds the cost of mining. On the other hand, given the emergence of cryptocurrency as a phenomenon of the information economy, the paper analyses the impact of specific technical features (cryptographic hashing algorithm, the complexity of creating new blocks, the technology of verification of mining operations, etc.) on the risk of investing in cryptocurrency assets.

Purpose: The compliance ethical characteristics plays an important role in urban management, and accordingly, the purpose of this study was identifying the effective ethical codes on urban management with a meta synthesis method. Methodology: This study in terms of purpose was applied and in terms of implementation method was qualitative. The field of research was all articles of effective ethical codes on urban management in 2012 to 2022 years, which number of 26 articles from 311 articles based on the inclusion criteria were selected with purposive sampling method. The data were collected by taking notes from the articles and analyzed with content analysis method based on meta synthesis approach of Sandelowski and Barroso's seven-step. Findings: The findings showed that were identified 94 concepts in 16 components and 6 categories for effective ethical codes on urban management. The categories were include urban management ethics codes (with 4 components of individual codes of ethics of employees, ethical codes of managers, ethical codes between employees and ethical codes of organizations with people), procedures of the organization (with 2 components of problem definition and stakeholders), content factors of the organization (with 3 components of environmental factors, organizational factors and fundamental factors), structural strategy (with 2 components of informing and training and correction and improvement of functions), content implementation levels (with 3 components of ethical system leveling, identification of values in the organization and mechanisms of moral strengthening) and implementation consequences of ethical codes (with 2 components of intra-organizational consequences and extra-organizational consequences). Finally, the pattern of effective ethical codes on urban management was drawn. Conclusion: The pattern of effective ethical codes on urban management can help specialists and planners in improving the situation of urban management.

In case not enough caution is exercised in the assessment of second or foreign language learners’ writing performance, one cannot trust the accuracy of decisions made accordingly. As experts or trained raters are often not available or it is not cost-effective to employ them in most educational contexts, writing assessment is often carried out by language instructors, who may not enjoy an adequate competence in teaching and assessing L2 writing. This makes the investigation of the accuracy of ratings done by language teachers a must. In so doing, 30 language teachers in three groups, each with a different background in teaching English and L2 writing, were selected, and their ratings of 30 IELTS samples were compared against those of expert raters using One-Way ANOVA tests. A statistically significant difference was found among the raters for the total writing score as well as the four components, with the L2 writing teachers demonstrating the closest performance to that of the expert rater and with language teachers with no or very little background in teaching L2 writing demonstrating the lowest accuracy. Moreover, the only significant correlations were found between the ratings done by the writing teachers and those of the expert rater, indicating that only they could interpret the scoring criteria not significantly different from the expert rater. The results demonstrate that language teachers are not generally suitable writing raters as they are affected by their own teaching background and understanding of the rating criteria.

Formative assessment is deemed the collaborative processes in which teachers and learners are engaged for the purpose of understanding the learners' learning and diagnosing their strengths and weaknesses. On the other hand, teachers' beliefs about formative assessment are paramount and might be influenced by a legion of variables such age, educational background, instructional experience, and gender. This study investigated the impacts of EFL teachers' age, educational background, instructional experience, and gender on their beliefs about formative assessment. To this aim, 100 male and 100 female EFL teachers from Ahvaz junior and senior high schools participated in the study. The participants were given the questionnaire of teachers' beliefs about formative assessment. The results regarding EFL teachers' age, educational background, and gender revealed no statistically significant influence on their beliefs about formative assessment. However, teachers' teaching experience had significant impacts on their beliefs about formative assessment. These findings can contribute to EFL authorities concerning assessment procedures in language learning and teaching.