مطالب

In a different context, the user's needs in a housing apartment are constantly changing; it is required that the provided house, by having flexibility, can always be responsive to the user's needs in various situations, which would be a challenge for specialized areas of housing, including design. To perform a flexible housing design, the architects face many different design solutions and variables, leading to confusion in this field. So, the objective of this study is to identify these variables and achieve an effective solution by considering their priority of them. The variables of this study were proposed in three scales of macro, medium, and micro according to the previous valid research studies in the field of flexible housing. Then, the variables have been evaluated using the specialist's idea through the Fuzzy Delphi method (FDM). The Friedman test has been used to analyze the data obtained from the questionnaires and achieve a valid ranking, which performs the ranking by calculating the mean rank for each variable. According to the results of data analysis, the characteristics of "spatial expansion and division," which means the possibility of space to be expanded (the expansion) or divided (the contraction), as the medium scale of housing design, has the greatest impact on the housing flexibility. On the macro scale, the "structure" component, and the micro-scale, the "use of flexible elements" provide the highest effectiveness in this regard. Moreover, as the medium scale, the modular design of space falls in the second place of influence compared to all other variables. Increasing the properties of spatial expansion and spatial division can be an effective design strategy for achieving flexibility in apartment housing. Also, modular space designing and flexible elements have been introduced as two solutions in the next priorities. All are considered small and medium scales and can be prioritized in designing flexible apartment housing.

Objective: Given that cultural perceptions regarding marriage are shifting and the pathways to marriage are more complex, scholars interested in marital rela tionships have recently focused their attention on understanding the individual’s attitudes, values, and beliefs regarding marital transitions and relationships, and how those beliefs may alter individual and relational behaviors. In this article we have tried to rely on various theoretical approaches to explain marital meaning - particularly the theory of symbolic interactionism and concept of "Marital Paradigm" as the central concept of the study - to create an appropriate model that provides a different explanation for differences in individual’s marital paradigms. Methods: The model explains the marital paradigm using four groups of factors. Our basic idea was marital paradigm which was a production of encountering four groups of factors including personal, structural, cultural and commutative factors. The model was tested by a secondary analysis - based on dataset from a survey conducted in 2016 in Tehran - and has been confirmed by results of this study. Results: The results showed that variables such as religiosity, age, income, marriage duration and gender directly affect the marital paradigms of Iranian people. Conclusion:  Given that paradigm differences may be the root of many marital problems, the present study introduces a new form of homogamy called "paradigmatic homogamy” as a solution. This concept considers the paradigmatic coordination of couples as an important factor in marital strength, and suggests that individuals learn about the partner's paradigmatic characteristics before entering into marriage. These characteristics can be traced to the six dimensions of the marital paradigm that we discussed in this study.

The current quasi-experimental research aimed at exploring the influence of Lexically-Based Language Teaching (LBLT) on task response and coherence and cohesion aspects of the writing proficiency of Iranian university EFL learners. The research sample of the study included sixty male and female university students (N = 60) attending two university classes. They were selected by using a convenient sampling procedure and were assigned to experimental and control groups. To ascertain the groups' homogeneity at the beginning of the study, the researchers gave two groups the Key English Test (KET). Prior to starting treatment, two groups took the pretest writing task. While the participants comprising the experimental group were instructed consistent with the lexical approach's underlying practices and activities, those constituting the control group were instructed based on conventional techniques applied to present essay writing in universities. At the end of the experiment, the posttest writing, identical to the pretest, was given to both groups. To compare the two groups' mean scores with respect to coherence and cohesion and task response aspects of post-test writing, One-way Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) and independent T-test were drawn upon. Version 20 th of the SPSS software was applied for this end. The attained results were indicative of a significantly positive influence of the lexically-based language teaching on both coherence and cohesion and task response aspects of writing proficiency. However, the attained improvement was greater in the task response aspect. The findings suggest some implications for English language teachers and university instructors.

Examining the importance and influence of financial market companies is one of the main issues in the field of financial management because sometimes the collapse of a stock exchange company can affect an entire financial market. One systematic way to analyze the significance and impacts of companies is to use complex networks based on Interaction Graphs (IGs). There are different methods for quantifying the edge weight in an IG. In this method, the graph vertices represent the stock exchange companies that are connected by weighted edges (corresponding to the extent to which they relate to each other). In this paper, using the GARCH model (1,1) and the Clayton copula, we obtained the lower tail dependence interaction network of the first 52 companies of the Tehran Stock Exchange in terms of average market value, between June 2017 and October 2020. Then, based on the minimum spanning tree of the interaction network, we divided the companies into different communities. Using this classification, it was observed that the companies of the first group (Food Industry) and the second group (Oil Refinery) have the greatest impact on other companies. We also calculated the central indexes of the minimum spanning tree for each company. According to the results, the companies of the third group (Steel) have the highest average in the central indicators.

Disability was a ubiquitous image in the fiction of the nineteenth century, an age which witnessed controversial discussions regarding the questions of normalcy and deviance. Considered by many as the most famous writer of the period, Charles Dickens also widely employed disabled characters in his novels. One of the most memorable of these characters is Tiny Tim, a disabled child in Dickens’s novella A Christmas Carol, whose pathetic condition greatly moves Scrooge, the narrative’s notorious protagonist, facilitating and expediting his spiritual transformation. This paper aims to analyze the character of Tiny Tim and his influence on the main character in the light of the theory of narrative prosthesis. Introduced by disability critics David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, the theory holds that disabled characters have served as prosthetic devices in many narratives; that is, they have not been appreciated, described, and understood for who they are as physically / mentally different people. Rather, they have only functioned as metaphors and symbols that have been constructed to convey a moral message to “normal” characters and readers. Research findings show that Tiny Tim exemplifies narrative prosthesis as his short presence in the work only reinforces the ableist discourse of the novella.