Industrialized and rich nations owe much of their development to advances and achievements they have made in science and technology. These assets have not only served as engines powering their advanced economies but have also led to their exponential social growth. Thus, advancements in science and technology may be regarded as indicators of fundamental development in any modern society as it is the knowledge-based society that is in a superior position to address and resolve its basic problems. While Iran has also been taking drastic steps towards its scientific and technological development, decisive measures are yet to be taken toward developing a strategic plan for these development objectives and gaining a comprehensive understanding of its different aspects. Employing an analytic-descriptive approach, the present study aims to develop fundamental strategies for the national scientific and technological development using the SWOT strategic model. The results indicate that the development of infrastructure for access to information networks with a weight of 0.56 ranks first among the strengths while absence of a strategic development plan with a weight of 0.372 ranks first among the weaknesses. IT infrastructure with a weight of 0.608 is found to have the highest weight among the opportunities while the low relevance between educational programs (at both levels of general and higher education) and scientific and innovation requirements is found to rank first with a weight of 0.46 among the threats. Among the most essential strategies that need to be adopted, one can refer to the development of a basic framework for the uniform and need-oriented connectivity and access to IT and the Internet across the nation; creation and development of such knowledge-based systems and facilities as business and technology incubators, science parks, science a & technology corridors, and innovation clusters aiming at a knowledge-based, dynamic, and developed society; directing efforts at striking a balance between the number of university graduates and the market demands for young educated work force; and maximum involvement of the educated youths in the realization of national development objectives.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of various factors influencing on customer loyalty, profitability and word of mouth advertisement for gaining competitive advantage in tourism industry. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among a random sample of 500 people who purchased some tours from travel agencies. Using structural equation modeling, the study has determined a positive and meaningful impact of pricing strategy, amenity, tourism services, content of trip, marketing mix elements, brand equity, competitive advantage and being exclusive on gaining competitive advantage. In addition, being exclusive and value creation influence positively on word of mouth advertisement. Finally, value creation influences on profitability, positively.

This paper presents a casual structure model between emotional intelligence and organizational citizenship behavior by using organizational commitment as mediator variable. The study is accomplished among 324 employees of united bus company in city of Tehran, Iran. Using structural equation modeling, the study has confirmed that emotional intelligence influenced on organizational citizenship behavior and commitment. The study also confirms that organizational commitment influenced on organizational citizenship behavior. Finally, the study has confirmed that there were significant relationships between emotional intelligence and its dimensions with organizational citizenship behavior and organizational commitment of employees.

Social networks form a basis for maintaining social contacts, finding users with common interests, creating local content and sharing information. Recently networks have created a fundamental framework for analyzing and modeling the complex systems. Users & apos; behavior studies and evaluates the system performance and leads to better planning and implementation of advertising policies on the web sites. Therefore, this study offers a framework for online social networks & apos; characteristics. In terms of objective, this survey is practical descriptive. Sampling has been done among 384 of graduate students who have good experiences of membership in online social network. Confirmatory factor analysis is used to evaluate the validity of variables in research model. Characteristics of online social networks are defined based on six components and framework & apos; s indexes are analyzed through factor analysis. The reliability is calculated separately for each dimension and since they are all above 0.7, the reliability of the study can be confirmed. According to our research results, in terms of size, the number of people who apply for membership in various online social networking is an important index. In terms of individual preference to connect with, people who are relative play essential role in social network development. In terms of homogeneity variable, the number of people who visit their friends’ pages is important for measuring frequency variable. In terms of frequency, the use of entertainment and recreation services is more important index. In terms of proximity, being in the same city is a more important index and index of creating a sense of belonging and confidence is more important for measuring reciprocity variable.

This study examines the relationship between corporate governance’s mechanisms and liquidity of stocks on 66 selected firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2005-2009. Board composition and ownership structure are used as corporate governance’s mechanisms and illiquidity measure proposed by Amihud (2002) [Amihud, Y. (2002). Illiquidity and stock returns: cross-section and time-series effects. Journal of financial markets, 5(1), 31-56.] is used to measure stock liquidity. The results show that an increase on the number of independent boards is associated with higher liquidity. In addition, the results show that there was a significant relationship between liquidity and ownership structure. In other words, the relationships between liquidity and individual investors and five biggest investors are positive and the relationships between liquidity and institutional ownership and the biggest investor ownership are negative. In addition, there is not a significant relationship between liquidity and duality of managers.

This paper presents a new basic clustering algorithm to increase the wireless sensor networks energy and longevity, efficiently. In each period, cluster heads are selected based on the maximum energy and the minimum distance through the nodes. Therefore, the protocol to obtain good performance in terms of longevity is achieved by balancing the energy load among all nodes. The simulation results obtained from the MATLAB software indicate that the suggested approach is effective in prolonging the network longevity.

Today, human resources are considered as the most important assets of any organization. Generally, human being has specific ethical features on personality characteristics forming the attitude, speech and behavior. It is possible that some factors create different attitudes, speech and behavior among people who are in one particular position. These human characteristics influence the efficiency and effectiveness of organization. The present study aims to investigate the relationship between work ethics and human resources productivity in banking network of city of Zahedan, Iran. The study chooses a sample of 236 employees who worked for different banks in city of Zahedan, Iran in 2013. To analyze the data, Pearson correlation test, Friedman ranking and independent t-test were used. The results show that there was a significant association between work ethics components and productivity (efficiency and effectiveness) of human resources.

This paper investigates the effects of government trade policies as well as the rules and regulations on smuggling cosmetic products in Iran. The study considers the effects of five important factors including high tariffs and bureaucratic procedures, registration process, size and expire date, lack of accurate monitoring of distribution channels and government recent regulation failure on growth of smuggling cosmetic products in Iran. The proposed study uses structural equation modeling to examine the effects of these five components. The results indicate a positive and meaningful relationships between four variables including registration process (B = 0.84, P-value = 0.000), size and expire date (B = 0.86, P-value = 0.000), high rate of tariff (B = 0.88, P-value = 0.000) and government recent regulation failure (B = 0.97, P-value = 0.000) on growth of smuggling cosmetic products in Iran. In addition, the study has detected a negative and meaningful relationship between lack of accurate monitoring of distribution channels and growth of smuggling cosmetic products in Iran (B = -0.18, P-value = 0.000).

Among various indices of job attitudes, job satisfaction has gained especial attention by researchers and employers. Its measurement dates back to older times and the investigation of the influential factors on it are newer. Furthermore, because of its influences on organizations and people, job satisfaction has gained an increasing importance. Among various influential factors on job satisfaction and job turn over, the effect of individual personalities and psychological Well-Being is undeniable. In this article, we identify and categorize the significant factors in the four elements of job turnover, job satisfaction, individual traits and psychological Well-Being. We investigate nine factors of job satisfaction with 36 questions, two factors of the field of job turnover with seven questions, individual personalities with forty four questions and psychological Well-Being with eighteen questions and categorize them after doing a factor analysis. In this categorization, the dimensions of job satisfaction are reduced to seven dimensions. Job turnover is provided into two new dimensions. Individual personalities are categorized in eight main dimensions and the dimensions of psychological Well-Being are reduced to four dimensions. The data of this research has been gathered from 199 employees of Tehran city hall.