Investigating audiences’ attitudes towards local radio programs: A case study of city of Esfahan

For almost a century, radio stations have been some primary sources for presenting arts, entertainment, news, etc. and the primary concern on many studies is to understand audience attitude on this media. This paper attempts to investigate audience attitude on radio programs broadcasted in city of Esfahan, Iran. The proposed study selects random sample of 600 out of 1,745,428 residence of this city where 345 people actively were listening to these programs, actively. All questions were designed in Likert scale and Cronbach alpha was 0.941, which was well above the desirable level and validated the survey. According our survey, the most popular part of radio programs was associated with news where 78.3% of the audiences were listening to these programs. According to our survey, audiences were mostly satisfied with family oriented programs and the mean score was 4.05. The other observation indicates that people have good attitude towards educational guidance programs (mean=3.37) and programs related to people and officials (mean=3.41). The results of Freedman test with Chi-Square value of 52.507 determines that there is meaningful difference among different components (mean difference = -0.23 and P-value =0.022). We have also performed an investigation to find out whether there is any difference between different components of this survey in terms of participants’ personal characteristics such as age, gender, educational background and job. Our survey only confirms the mean difference in terms of job specifications and other personal characteristics did not have any impact on people’s attitude. The other observation in our survey indicates that there is a difference between students and people with no job or housekeeper on their attitudes towards educational programs

Tandem queues attended by a moving server

grantor: University of TorontoOptimization analysis of tandem queues attended by a moving server with holding and switching costs are the main concern in this research. First, as basic models, two-stage tandem queues attended by a moving server are analyzed to find the optimal policies in the first and the second stages in a two-stage tandem queue. It is shown that the optimal policy in the second stage which minimizes the total discounted and long run average holding and switching costs is a greedy and exhaustive policy. Considering greedy and exhaustive policy for the second stage, three different service policies: (i) static, (ii) semi-dynamic (gated-limited) and (iii) dynamic (double-threshold) policies are defined for the first stage of a two-stage tandem queue, an M/G\sb1 - G\sb2/1 queue, to respectively deal with situations that (i) no information, (ii) partial information, or (iii) complete information about the number of customers in the system are available. To obtain the optimal static, gated-limited and double-threshold policies, three different models are developed and it is shown that the optimal gated-limited policy is almost independent of the arrival rate if switchover times are zero. For N-stage tandem queue M/G\sb1 - G\sb2 -{\cdots}-G\sb{N}/1, greedy and exhaustive policies downstream of stage 2 are defined and then three different models are developed to find the optimal static, gated-limited and double-threshold policies which minimize the total average holding and switching costs in these queues. Also, optimal policies in N-stage tandem queues with batch arrivals, G\sp{(x)}/G\sb1-G\sb2-{\cdots}-G\sb{N}/1 queues, are studied through a new operational tool which reveals the properties of greedy and exhaustive policies and establishes two efficient and accurate heuristic algorithms to obtain the optimal policy. Finally, U-shaped lines which are actually tandem queues attended by moving servers are reviewed and a general definition and classification scheme are presented which organize the previous research and lead to the potential for further research on these lines. Then, by decomposing U-shaped lines into tandem queues attended by a moving server, the effects of switching costs and switchover times on some types of these lines are analyzed.Ph.D

A social work study on measuring the impact of age and job title on stress: A case study of hydro-power employees

The study performs an empirical study based on the implementation of ANOVA and LSD tests to measure the impact of stress among people with different job titles and ages in a hydropower unit located in city of Esfahan, Iran. The study performed the survey among all 81 people who were working for customer service section of this company and consisted of two parts, in the first part; we gather all private information such as age, gender, education, job experience, etc. through seven important questions. In the second part of the survey, there were 66 questions, which included all the relevant factors impacting employees' stress. Cronbach alpha was calculated as 0.946, which is well above the minimum acceptable level. The implementation of ANOVA and LSD tests have revealed that there are no meaning differences among people with different job titles but people in different age groups maintained various level of stress

A social work study on relationship between leadership style and organization change: A case study of Semnan high schools' teachers

The primary objective of this survey is to study the relationship between leadership style among teachers who work in high schools and their orientation on organizational change. The study is performed among students who attended guided schools in province of Semnan, Iran. There are five hypotheses associated with the proposed study of this paper including managers' attitudes on change based on demographic characteristics, the relationship between leadership style and organizational change, the effects of different leadership styles and the organizational change orientation in terms of demographical characteristics. Statistical population includes all teachers who for high schools in city of Semnan, Iran and the study used a sample of 373 people who were randomly selected from three regions of the city. The proposed study used standard leadership questionnaire based on initiating structure and consideration originally developed at Ohio university in two dimensions with 30 questions. The questionnaire also used another type questionnaire consists of 32 questions with three dimensions of structure, technology and employee. The results indicate that there is no meaningful relationship between leadership style and gender, leadership style and job experience, organizational change and gender, management change and gender

A social work study on effects of pre-marriage relationship on long-term marital status

Marriage is one of the most important events of people's lives and when it happens, it could have both positive and negative consequences. There are different types of marriage such as traditional and modern ones. In traditional marriage, there are some marriage arrangements where man and woman can meet and talk for a short time and in case both parties are interested, marriage is initiated. There is also another type of marriage where girl and boy meet each other for a while, in some events, they may have some limited or unlimited relationships, and once they are interested in each other, they may marry each other. This relatively new type of marriage is popular in many western countries but it is still a controversial type of marriage in eastern countries. In this paper, we perform an empirical study on the effect of pre-marriage relationship on long-term marital status. The results indicate that pre-marriage relationship can reduce after marriage conflicts. The people who had pre-marriage had less aggressive behavior compared with the people who did not