The Study of Bureaucratic Characteristics in the Administrative Organizations of Iran: The Case of Personnel of Governmental Organizations in Ahvaz City

This paper represents an attempt to study bureaucracy in the administrative organizations of Iran as a developing country. Therefore, it aims to explore how the bureaucratic characteristics are in the governmental organizations of Iran.This study was carried out through the survey method. The data research have been collected by survey from a sample 400 person taken from the staffs population of  30 governmental organizations of Ahvaz-capital of Khuzestan, a province in south west of Iran- through stratified  cluster sampling.The results showed that bureaucracy in the administrative organizations of Iran couldn’t be considered as an unitary concept. Six bureaucratic characteristics formed two high-order factors that were inversely correlated together. First factor was control including Hierarchy of authority, rule observation and formality in relationships(Impersonality). Second factor was expertise including job codification, technical competence and division of labor.In conclusion, bureaucracy in the administrative organizations of Iran is multidimensional. Also, it seems that the internal relations among bureaucratic characteristics in Iran’s governmental organizations are rather different than the results of western studies. Keywords: Bureaucracy, bureaucratic characteristics, Control, Expertise, Administrative organizations of Iran

Environmental Policies from Ambition to Action: A Multi-aspect Policy Evaluation of SB 743 and Its Impact on Land Development and Transportation Network

California’s Senate Bill 743 (SB 743) of 2013 was a landmark policy that replaced automobile Level of Service (LOS) with Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) as the metric for evaluating transportation impacts under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). While SB 743 aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, promote infill development, and support sustainable land development patterns, the jurisdictions have the discretion to adopt a level of VMT as their thresholds of significance, raising important questions about variability in adoption, policy stringency, and environmental outcomes. I investigate the implementation of this policy from various perspectives in this dissertation. I use a mixed-methods design for my dissertation. I distributed a statewide survey of local officials and analyzed the responses to assess the institutional, political, and technical determinants of VMT threshold adoption. Logistic and linear regression models reveal that ideological alignment, staff advocacy, and agency core values significantly influence both the decision to adopt VMT thresholds and the degree of stringency of adopted thresholds. I also use the city of San Jose as a case study to evaluate how a large, transit-oriented jurisdiction operationalizes SB 743 through integrated land use planning and transportation policies. I first examine the discretionary adoption and stringency of VMT thresholds among California substate jurisdictions under SB 743. Based on survey data from 133 cities and counties and logistic regression analyses, the results demonstrate that local political ideology, planning staff advocacy, and institutional alignment with environmental goals are statistically significant predictors of threshold adoption. Jurisdictions with larger populations, greater technical capacity, and supportive learning cultures are more likely to adopt VMT thresholds. The presence of environmental advocates among planning staff increases the odds of adoption by over 30 times, underscoring the influence of internal leadership on environmental policy implementation.It is important to distinguish between jurisdictions adopting a status quo threshold and those committing to percentage-based VMT reductions below baseline levels. Findings show that jurisdictions with higher socioeconomic capacity, lower existing VMT levels, and more proactive environmental orientations are more likely to adopt more stringent VMT thresholds. These findings emphasize the need for integrated regional coordination and state-level mandates to enhance the consistency and effectiveness of SB 743’s environmental objectives.Analysis of residential projects permitted before and after SB 743 implementation in San Jose shows a shift toward low-VMT areas, providing evidence of this policy's regulatory influence on the geography of development. However, the findings also highlight the limitations of project-level mitigation, particularly in high-VMT, infrastructure-deficient areas. Interviews and policy documents confirm that VMT reduction is a challenge, necessitating systematic investments in multimodal transportation, regional mitigation frameworks, and interagency coordination at a large scale.My research contributes to the literature on environmental policy implementation, sustainable urban planning, and transportation-land use integration. It concludes that while SB 743 holds transformative potential, its outcomes are highly contingent on local institutional capacity, political will, and policy integration. To achieve California’s climate goals, VMT-based planning must be supported by state-led technical assistance, funding alignment, and broader systems-level reforms beyond CEQA

Large Eddy Simulation of Wall-bounded Turbulent Flows at High Reynolds Numbers

In the simulation of turbulent flows, resolving flow motions near a solid surface requires a high resolution that is computationally expensive. The present research investigates reducing the computational cost of simulating wall-bounded flows through a technique, called wall-modeling, that introduces the effects of the near-wall flow dynamics as a wall shear stress to the outer layer. Turbulent wall bounded flows were studied using large eddy simulation at moderate to high Reynolds numbers to evaluate the performance of the wall-modeling. The results of wall-modeled turbulent channel flow at Re = 2000 were in good agreement with the experimental data. However, a log-layer mismatch was observed in the mean velocity profile below the matching point due to the inconsistency between the local grid resolution and that required by the subgrid scale model. Moving the matching point further from the wall mitigated the mismatch. The effects of time averaging and temporal filtering schemes on the performance of the wall model were also investigated. It was found that smaller time periods for time averaging result in a wall model that is more responsive to the flow structures in the outer layer. The results indicated that the temporal filtering scheme is strongly dependent on the location of the matching point. Next, the wall-modeling was implemented in the simulation of a turbulent boundary layer. Inflow generation methods were reviewed, and a recycling rescaling method was employed to generate realistic turbulence at the inlet boundary. Zero pressure gradient turbulent boundary layers over a wide range of Reynolds numbers up to Re = 25 523 were studied in terms of the mean velocity profile, Reynolds stress, and skin-friction coefficient. It was found that a wall-modeled turbulent boundary layer can be resolved using a much lower grid resolution in the wall layer. Finally, the wall stress model was implemented to introduce the effects of wall roughness into the wall-modeling via the eddy viscosity. The proposed wall model was examined for transitionally and fully rough channel flows and successful results were achieved. For high-Reynolds number wall-bounded flows, wall-modeling can effectively couple a large eddy simulation to the wall via the wall shear stress without the need to fully resolve the inner region

The Reality of Man’s Freewill According to Mulla Sandra

Freewill is one of the main pillars of a human being’s voluntary actions and the explanation of its reality plays an important role in the description, commentary and interpretation of human actions. Mulla Sadra has mentioned his views regarding the reality of the human freewill in numerous places in his works; but his discussions are scattered, disordered and sometimes mixed with others views. This article explains Mulla Sadra’s view regarding the human free will in his philosophical system through citing and collecting the different expressions in relation to this topic from his works, analyzing them and presenting logical arguments for them; and the article shows how the changing of foundations in Mulla Sadra’s philosophy has resulted in an innovative explanation for the human freewill. The conclusion that has been drawn in this article is that according to Mulla Sadra freewill possesses a “material-immaterial” pervasive existential essence and that which is known as the decisive decision is only one of the immaterial levels of this pervasive essence; this article also concludes that based on Mulla Sandra’s foundations and due to a logical argument, it seems that a part of Mulla Sandra’s view can and should be amended; in a way that decisive decision can have a material essence

Contact Angles in Two-Phase Flow Images

In this work, we calculate contact angles in X-ray tomography images of two-phase flow in order to investigate the wettability. Triangulated surfaces, generated using the images, are smoothed to calculate the contact angles. As expected, the angles have a spread rather than being a constant value. We attempt to shed light on sources of the spread by addressing the overlooked mesh corrections prior to smoothing, poorly resolved image features, cluster-based analysis, and local variations of contact angles. We verify the smoothing algorithm by analytical examples with known contact angle and curvature. According to the analytical cases, point-wise and average contact angles, average mean curvature and surface area converge to the analytical values with increased voxel grid resolution. Analytical examples show that these parameters can reliably be calculated for fluid–fluid surfaces composed of roughly 3000 vertices or more equivalent to 1000 pixel2. In an experimental image, by looking into individual interfaces and clusters, we show that contact angles are underestimated for wetting fluid clusters where the fluid–fluid surface is resolved with less than roughly 500 vertices. However, for the fluid–fluid surfaces with at least a few thousand vertices, the mean and standard deviation of angles converge to similar values. Further investigation of local variations of angles along three-phase lines for large clusters revealed that a source of angle variations is anomalies in the solid surface. However, in the places least influenced by such noise, we observed that angles tend to be larger when the line is convex and smaller when the line is concave. We believe this pattern may indicate the significance of line energy in the free energy of the two-phase flow systems.publishedVersionOpen AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Com-mons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Predicting Resistivity and Permeability of Porous Media Using Minkowski Functionals

Permeability and formation factor are important properties of a porous medium that only depend on pore space geometry, and it has been proposed that these transport properties may be predicted in terms of a set of geometric measures known as Minkowski functionals. The well-known Kozeny–Carman and Archie equations depend on porosity and surface area, which are closely related to two of these measures. The possibility of generalizations including the remaining Minkowski functionals is investigated in this paper. To this end, two-dimensional computer-generated pore spaces covering a wide range of Minkowski functional value combinations are generated. In general, due to Hadwiger’s theorem, any correlation based on any additive measurements cannot be expected to have more predictive power than those based on the Minkowski functionals. We conclude that the permeability and formation factor are not uniquely determined by the Minkowski functionals. Good correlations in terms of appropriately evaluated Minkowski functionals, where microporosity and surface roughness are ignored, can, however, be found. For a large class of random systems, these correlations predict permeability and formation factor with an accuracy of 40% and 20%, respectively.publishedVersion© The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made

Fuzzy Efficiency Measure with Fuzzy Production Possibility Set

The existing data envelopment analysis (DEA) models for measuring the relative efficiencies of a set of decision making units (DMUs) using various inputs to produce various outputs are limited to crisp data. The notion of fuzziness has been introduced to deal with imprecise data. Fuzzy DEA models are made more powerful for applications. This paper develops the measure of efficiencies in input oriented of DMUs by envelopment form in fuzzy production possibility set (FPPS) with constant return to scale

Geometrically derived efficiency of slow immiscible displacement in porous media

The efficiency of a displacement is the fraction of applied work over the change in free energy. This displacement efficiency is essential for linking wettability to applied work during displacement processes. We quantify the efficiency of slow immiscible displacements in porous media from pore space geometry. For this end, we introduce pore-scale definitions for thermodynamically reversible (ison) and irreverisble (rheon) processes. We argue that the efficiency of slow primary displacement is described by the geometry of the pore space for porous media with a sufficient number of pore bodies. This article introduces how to calculate such geometry-based efficiency locally, and integrating this local efficiency over the pore space yields an aggregate efficiency for the primary displacement in the porous medium. Further, we show how the geometrical characterization of the displacement efficiency links the efficiency to the constriction factor from transport processes governed by the Laplace equation. This enables estimation of displacement efficiency from traditional and widely available measurements for porous media. We present a thermodynamically based wettability calculation based on the local efficiency and a method to approximate this thermodynamically based wettability from traditional experiments.publishedVersio

Mobility Hubs

This project reviews and summarizes empirical evidence for a selection of transportation and land use policies, infrastructure investments, demand management programs, and pricing policies for reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The project explicitly considers social equity (fairness that accounts for differences in opportunity) and justice (equity of social systems) for the strategies and their outcomes. Each brief identifies the best available evidence in the peer-reviewedacademic literature and has detailed discussions of study selection and methodological issues.VMT and GHG emissions reduction is shown by effect size, defined as the amount of change in VMT (or other measures of travel behavior) per unit of the strategy, e.g., a unit increase in density. Effect sizes can be used to predict the outcome of a proposed policy or strategy. They can be in absolute terms (e.g., VMT reduced), but are more commonly in relative terms (e.g., percent VMT reduced). Relative effect sizes are often reported as the percent change in the outcome divided by the percent change in the strategy, also called an elasticity