Readiness Assessment of Iran’s Insurance Industry for E-Commerce and E-Insurance Success

This paper attempts to develop a method for readiness assessment of potential electronic commerce (e-commerce) success of Iran’s insurance industry. This method can expand in other industries. Key factors impacting e-commerce are identified from Wells, D. and Thomann, j. (2006) researches. This model is a two-dimension 3*4 matrix. Each dimension consists of variables that influence on insurance industries readiness. These variables on horizontal dimension are: People Readiness, IT Readiness, and Business Readiness and on vertical dimension are: Business Imperative, Executive Sponsorship, Development Method and Business Process Orientation. Each cells of this matrix evaluated by 5 questions. This research’s data are collected via a 60-questions questionnaire-based survey from Iranian insurance companies. At the end of the research, the Iranian insurance companies were strongly recommended by us to invest on e-commerce and e-insurance area

Pattern of wave height changes around of pontoon's floating breakwater

The main goal of using floating breakwaters is to provide a sheltered area of calm water in a coastal zone. In the present research, for analyzing the hydrodynamic modeling of pontoon floating breakwaters, the AQWA module of ANSYS was selected. The main parameters that have been considered in this research are the patterns of significant wave height, wave period, and draft and the width of floating pontoons. Wave transmission coefficient can be obtained from water surface changes in any point of the leeward. Results of the numerical modeling demonstrate that a pontoon floating breakwater with a relative width of greater than 0.4 has an appropriate performance. Also, it has been found that the transmission coefficient of pontoon floating breakwaters will be in the range of 0.35 to 0.60 if the relative wave period changes in the range of 1.5 to 4

Perceptual learning of fine contrast discrimination changes neuronal tuning and population coding in macaque V4

Perceptual learning, the improvement in perceptual abilities with training, is thought to be mediated by an alteration of neuronal tuning. It remains poorly understood how tuning properties change as training progresses, whether improved stimulus tuning directly links to increased behavioural readout of sensory information, or how population coding mechanisms change with training. Here, we recorded continuously from multiple neuronal clusters in area V4 while macaque monkeys learned a fine contrast categorization task. Training increased neuronal coding abilities by shifting the steepest point of contrast response functions towards the categorization boundary. Population coding accuracy of difficult discriminations resulted largely from an increased information coding of individual channels, particularly for those channels that in early learning had larger ability for easy discriminations, but comparatively small encoding abilities for difficult discriminations. Population coding was also enhanced by specific changes in correlations. Neuronal activity became more indicative of upcoming choices with training