Fundamental investigation on inkjet printing of reactive nylon materials

Several additive manufacturing processes have been developed for plastic parts. However, there is an ongoing interest to increase the functionality of these parts which are mainly considered as prototypes due to the material and process limitations. This research investigated a novel additive approach for producing a functional engineering plastic, nylon 6. The idea was to combine inkjet printing technology and anionic polymerisation of caprolactam by depositing mixtures of caprolactam with activator and catalyst on top of each other under the appropriate conditions. An experimental setup was integrated based on two identical jetting assemblies with pneumatic and thermal control, synchronised with a deposition system for the reaction of the mixtures upon radiation heating. Different offline material characterisation and inline process monitoring methods were employed to obtain an understanding of the material behaviour at each stage of the research. These included the use of high speed imaging, fluorescent microscopy, particle tracking and image analysis tools. Samples were monitored before and after the drop-on-drop deposition and radiation heating, and then assessed by thermal analysis to find the appropriate conditions for the reaction. It was found that although some monomer conversion was achieved, the rates were much less than with the bulk polymerisation approach. Jetting of thousands of tiny droplets in air could have resulted in a very high monomer deactivation. This highlighted the importance of the environment as a more significant parameter for jetting of nylon 6 compared with the conventional method.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Examining the Effects of Writing Instruction through Blogging on Second Language Writing Performance and Anxiety

This study investigated the effects of blog-mediated instruction on English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) learners’ writing performance and anxiety. In addition, it aimed to probe into the EFL learners’ attitudes towards blog-mediated writing instruction. The participants of the study included forty-six Iranian EFL learners from two intact university classes, who were randomly assigned to the Control Group (N = 21) and the Experimental Group (N = 25). Over a 16-week university semester, the Control Group was taught using traditional writing instruction while the Experimental Group was taught using a blog-mediated writing course. The data were collected through two timed writing tasks, Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (Cheng, 2004), and semi-structured interviews. The results indicated that, although both groups benefited from their writing sessions, there was a significant difference in the positive effects of blog-mediated and traditional writing instruction on L2 writing performance, showing that the Experimental Group had a better performance on the posttest writing performance task than the Control Group. The results also revealed that the blog-mediated course reduced the participants’ L2 writing anxiety in the Experimental Group while traditional instruction did not have positive effects on reducing L2 writing anxiety in the Control Group. The data from semi-structures interviews indicated that the interviewees from the Experimental Group were generally positive about the blog-mediated writing course, with little skepticism and negativism echoed about the course. The findings offer significant implications for theory and practice on L2 writing instruction

The Effect of Corporate Governance on the Firms` Financial Performance Using Meta-Analysis Approach

Managers can maximize shareholders' wealth by managing variables in the financial structure (such as capital structure, dividend, and investment). Using corporate governance mechanisms, shareholders try to guide managers in this direction. The sample of this research is the statistical tests in past experimental studies that experimentally tested the research hypotheses. In this research, with the meta-analysis approach (in seven stages), the influence of the aforementioned variables on corporate governance and their effect on financial performance is tested. Due to the presence of three intermediate variables, three hypotheses about the effect of corporate governance on the mentioned variables and three hypotheses about the effect of intermediate variables on financial performance, and one hypothesis on the direct effect of corporate governance on financial performance were designed and 64 studies including a total of 260 effect size (r type) that their publication dates were between 1993 and 2019 were meta-analyzed. In the groups of the sample where the effect sizes were divergent, the random effects method, and for the convergent cases, the fixed effects method was used to calculate the cumulative effect size. Based on the results, corporate governance affects financial performance, capital structure, dividends, and investment. In addition, all three variables of capital structure, dividend, and investment have a significant influence on financial performance. For each hypothesis, after determining the size of the joint effect, a robustness test has been performed and analyzed on the results.IntroductionIn many past studies, the impact of corporate governance on the company's financial performance has been measured directly (Che et al., 2008). It is expected that corporate governance will lead to the improvement of financial performance not directly but through the impact on some structural variables of the company. If these variables do not have a favorable impact on corporate governance or on performance, the impact of corporate governance on performance will be distorted. In this research, the effect of corporate governance on mediating variables and the effect of mediating variables on financial performance are tested with a meta-analysis approach. After meta-analyzing about 110 studies searched with the keywords of corporate governance and financial performance, the mediating variables identified are capital structure (Hussainey and Aljifri, 2012), dividend (Elmagrhi, et al. 2017), and investment (Sharma, 2012). Optimal capital structure as a structure for which the wealth of shareholders is maximized is one of the mediators of corporate governance and performance. While the dividend is one of the important factors studied by previous studies in maximizing shareholders' wealth. Opportunistic managers use the extra cash for their self-serving. With the effective implementation of corporate governance mechanisms, dividend policy works to overcome agency problems (Ogden, et al., 2003). Does corporate governance influence management actions? Do companies with different degrees of governance experience different managerial practices? Do management practices facilitate the achievement of the goal of maximizing shareholders` wealth? And in general, has the development of corporate governance directly or indirectly affected the company's financial performance? These are the questions that the authors were motivated to find answer to solve the functional paradox of corporate governance and performance. Methods & MaterialThe meta-analysis of this research has been implemented in seven stages. In the first stage, corporate governance as an independent variable, financial performance as a dependent variable, and capital structure, dividend, and investment as intermediate variables were defined. In the second stage, three main steps, including determining keywords, determining databases, and searching for studies, were implemented. Indexing databases include Science Direct, Emerald, Google Scholar, SSRN, ResearchGate, Jstor, and Semantic Scholar and keywords include “Corporate governance, Board of directors, Board independence, Ownership, Concentration, Institutional ownership, Performance, Financial performance, ROE, ROS, ROA, Tobin’s Q, EVA, Return on equity, Return on Sales, Return on assets, Economic value added, Capital expenditure, Corporate investment, Positive NPV projects, Dividend, DPS, Capital structure, Debt ratio, and Leverage ratio”. In the third stage, after applying the conditions: 1) the subject of the research is following one of the hypotheses of this meta-analysis, 2) the information necessary to calculate the effect size is reported, and 3) the study is correlational. 64 published studies including 260 empirical tests (the sample of this research) were meta-analyzed between 1993 and 2019. In the fourth stage, general information, information related to the effect size, and information necessary for the reliability test were extracted, sorted in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, and entered into the CMA software for the next steps. In the fifth step, the effect size was calculated for each member of the sample (each test). In cases where the correlation coefficient between the independent and dependent variable has been calculated, the correlation coefficient has been recorded as the r effect size. In cases where the regression analysis method was used, the t statistic corresponding to each regression coefficient was converted into the effect size r with the following formula (Rosenthal, 2001).where “t” is the value of the test statistic, and n is the number of observations in the empirical test in the field study. In the sixth step, the cumulative effect size was calculated for each hypothesis. After testing the hypotheses using the significance of the cumulative effect size, it has been tried to check the robustness of the results by changing the research conditions. FindingsIn all hypotheses, the common effect size is divergent, that is, it is related to a group of different effect sizes with high deviation, and the random effects method is used for calculating the cumulative effect size. The results indicate the rejection of the null hypothesis related to all hypotheses. In other words, the effect of corporate governance on financial performance and all three mediating variables and the effect of all three mediating variables on financial performance are confirmed. Therefore, based on the meta-analysis of past studies, capital structure, dividends, and investment play a mediating role between corporate governance and financial performance. To robustness check the results, the answer to this question is considered: Does the relationship between corporate governance and financial performance change with changing the research conditions? The conditions that are the basis of the robustness check include the country's development, the corporate governance index, and the time of the study. That is, it is checked that when the tests are separated based on the development of the countries, the time of the empirical study, and the indicators of corporate governance, do the results remain the same? The robustness check results show that in developed countries the results of hypothesis 1 remain stable, but the impact of investment and dividends on financial performance is not. The time of empirical studies was categorized into three subperiods (2005-2009), (2010-2014), and (2015-2019). The direct relationship between corporate governance and financial performance and capital structure, even though it was positive and significant in the whole sample and the past, in recent years, has become insignificant. The impact of dividends and investment on financial performance and the impact of corporate governance on investment in recent years, i.e., from 2015 to 2019, has been positive and significant. In other words, these five relationships have changed from a negative state in the past years to a significant positive state in recent years. Conclusions and ResultsDuring the first hypothesis test, the existence of a positive relationship between corporate governance and financial performance and the repetition of this relationship in developing and developed countries have shown the success of shareholders in directing management and governance policies to protect their wealth. This effect on the level of financial performance indicators due to the positive and significant impact on asset return, equity return, and Q-tubin shows that the corporate governance system has been able to align the accounting and market indicators of financial performance. Since the independence of the board of directors and the audit committee has the greatest impact on financial performance (Buallay, et al., 2017; Kajola, 2008; Merendino & Melville, 2019), it is appropriate for shareholders to try to ensure that the board of directors is not empty of independent directors and that internal audit and a strong internal control system are under the supervision of independent members of the board. The positive relationship between corporate governance and capital structure, and dividends, as well as its significant relationship with financial performance (especially return on equity and return on assets) and the strengthening of both relationships in the last five years, allow this index to be one of the mediators of performance. Shareholders have managed to direct the company's financial policies to improve financial performance through corporate governance. This and the effective role of many corporate governance indicators show the effectiveness of the corporate governance system in this regard. Investment is the last mediating variable between corporate governance and financial performance. The positive relationship of this variable with corporate governance and financial performance (especially return on assets and Q-Tobin) has made it accepted as one of the mediators of these two variables in this research. It means that the shareholders have been able to control the investment policies of the management and improve the financial performance criteria through that

Regimes of droplet train impact on a moving surface in an additive manufacturing process

In jetting-based additive manufacturing, one or more droplet trains are deposited on a moving surface to fabricate layers in an additive approach. The impact behaviour of the droplets onto the surface defines the final fabricated layer properties in terms of geometry and surface finish. This paper reports on such behaviour when depositing a solution of a bio-degradable resin towards an ultimate goal of fabricating bone implants in an additive manufacturing process. The solution was jetted via a fixed single nozzle continuous piezoelectric printhead on a moving surface. The effect of two main process parameters, jetting frequency and substrate linear velocity, on the impact behaviour was investigated. Quantitative analysis was undertaken to investigate the droplet formation characteristics and droplet/surface interactions. The phenomena associated with the interaction at the front of the advancing liquid layer were correlated with the process conditions. The result was a classification of the droplet train/moving surface interactions into three main regimes depending on the droplet impingement characteristics and the surface motion

English to Persian Translation Accuracy of “Rules and Regulations” of International Banking System

This study comparatively analyzed the English to Persian translations of “rules and regulations” of the international banking system, at lexicon, phrase, sentence and paragraph levels to find out if the translations had been semantically comparable to their English versions. The translated texts, together with their English scource texts, were handed in to raters to assess and score semantically based on a three-point scale of “incorrect”, “fair” and “correct”. According to the results, the majority (96%) of lexicons had been translated correctly into Persian, while a small percentage of translated lexicons (3%) had a fair quality and an even smaller percentage (1%) were incorrectly translated. As for the phrases, most of them (86%) had been translated correctly into Persian, while a small percentage of translated phrases (8%) had a fair quality and an even smaller percentage (6%) had been incorrectly translated. Regarding sentences, 44% of their translations had a good and 44% had fair quality, whereas some smaller numbers (12%) had been incorrectly translated. Compared to previous components, i.e. lexicon and phrases, the percentage of incorrect translations had noticeably increased at the level of sentence. Yet, the mean words in Persian sentences (i.e., 23.48) were rather similar to the source language sentences (i.e., 25.72). Regarding paragraphs, 40% of the translations had a good and 40% had a fair quality, but a significant number (20%) had incorrect translations. So, unlike the lexicons and phrases, a significant number of sentences and paragraphs had semantically been inaccurately translated. In addition, the mean number of words in Persian paragraphs (64.6) was considerably smaller than the mean words in English paragraphs (71.1).     Keywords: Semantic accuracy in translation, English to Persian, Banking rules and regulation

Grit and Foreign Language Anxiety as Predictors of Willingness to Communicate in the Context of Foreign Language Learning: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach

Given its key role in enhancing learners’ communicative competence, willingness to communicate (WTC) has received much research attention in the field of second language (L2) teaching and learning. Numerous studies have explored the antecedents of WTC in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. As an attempt to shed more light on this line of research, this study was set to investigate the effects of grit and foreign language anxiety as predictors of L2 WTC among Iranian EFL learners. For this purpose, a number of 163 undergraduate English major students from several universities participated in this survey. The required data were collected by distributing valid and reliable instruments measuring the three target variables (i.e., WTC, grit, and anxiety). A structural equation modeling (SEM) approach was utilized to test the hypothesized structural models for the relations between these variables. The SEM results indicated that grit accounted for 10.6 % of the variance and FL anxiety explained 20% of the variance in the participants’ L2 WTC. Furthermore, the unique impact of foreign language anxiety on WTC was greater than that of grit. The implications of these findings for language teaching and learning are discussed at the end of the paper

Designing a model for the acceptance of electronic stock exchange by individual investors

AbstractAcculturation in the field of familiarity of stockholders and individuals with modern methods of electronic stock exchange has a special position. Applying and paying attention to these methods is an inevitable and considerable issue. So, developing electronic stock exchange culture is considered one of the research priorities in our country. One of the fields for this subject is innovation and technology acceptance model [1]. In this study we have tried to identify necessary strategies for developing the culture of electronic stock exchange in order to access productivity in capital market as well as productivity of service section and at last increasing productivity in the whole economy. In this study, attempts are made to recognize effective factors in enhancing intension to use electronic stock exchange application by real investors through combining models of innovation diffusion and technology acceptance and merging it with dimensions of online trading. Period of data collection for this research has been from July to September 2009. Structural equations modeling has been used by means of LISREL software in order to test this model. Results reveal that there is a relationship between normal tendencies, perceived ease of use, perceived risk and market effectiveness with intension to use electronic stock exchange

Application of lactobionic acid and nonionic surfactants as solubilizing agents for parenteral formulation of clarithromycin

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to enhance the solubility of clarithromycin (CLR) using nonionic surfactants and some type of acids for preparation of the new formulations. Methods: Myrj 52 and chremophor (2.5 and 5% w/v) were used in two concentrations. To investigate solubility, the formulations were shaken for 48 hours at room temperature. For stability test, lyophilized samples were maintained in refrigerator at 4° C, and in oven at 40° C. Drug analysis was performed by reverse phase high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with ultraviolet detection. Results: Solubility tests indicated that lactobionic acid was the most effective to increase clarithromycin solubility and chremophor showed higher enhancing effect than myrj 52 on CLR solubility. The stability tests results also confirmed that shelf-lives of all formulations have been the equivalent to 24 months. Conclusion: On the whole, formulations described in this article may be very suitable for industrial-scale manufacturing and clinical application

Exploring the Pattern of Civil Education from Abu Nasr Farabi’s Viewpoint: a Qualitative Study

Civil education is known as one of the important functions of education, and to teach and learn civil education, there must be a model. One of the important theories related to civil education belongs to Farabi, who is an Iranian-Islamic philosopher. The present study aims at exploring the model of civil education from Farabi’s viewpoint. The approach of the study is qualitative and its method is content analysis. All Farabi’s first- and second-hand translated works, which were selected using the purposeful sampling method and convenience sampling, were explored. Thematic analysis method was used to analyze the results of this study. The findings of the thematic analysis were organized in the terms of 50 categories, 34 basic themes, 7 organizing themes and 4 global themes. The results showed that civil education and its dimensions appropriate to the culture and values of our society should be introduced into the educational system. Furthermore, this study introduced some methods of active and participatory civil education and the way to use them from Farabi’s viewpoint