Nowadays, dynamic and complex environment has made organizational change inevitable. In these circumstances, many organizational leaders face with challenge of aligning employees with changes. Many changes fail due to lack of employee support and even create heavy costs for organizations. Metaphor as a powerful and effective tool in engaging employees can strengthen organizational change. A tool that many poets and great writers have come to enjoy because a metaphor carries plenty of concepts in a few words. The present study aimed to investigate the role and function of metaphor in organizational change by using an ethnographic approach to collect data from one of the successful organizations in the field of organizational change. In more than a year of observing and attending numerous meetings of the organization's leader, it has been attempted to identify the metaphors that used and to categorize them by function. After reviewing the content analysis, four functions for metaphors were identified: the philosophy of the organization, the values, the redesign of the structure, and the development strategy. The leader seems to have focused more on the specific functions of metaphor at different times.

Due to the development of smart devices, the ability of computers to understand human language has become a key issue in technology. By learning and analyzing machine-readable, annotated linguistic data, computers are able to comprehend human language (corpus). Corpora plays a crucial role in helping computers comprehend human language. Metaphor is one of the most complicated linguistic data that computers cannot comprehend. Despite the prevalence of metaphor in everyday language use and the importance of identifying it, no corpus has been published for Persian yet. Compiling a corpus of Persian metaphors is the initial step in learning metaphors for computers. To compile a corpus of Persian metaphors, it is necessary to meet two main criteria. Deciding the best definition is the first prerequisite. The best definition is both comprehensive and applicable, comprehensive in the sense that it covers a significant proportion of metaphorical instances, and applicable in the sense that it could be used to build a corpus. The second requirement is the construction of a method for metaphor identification. Without a straightforward data annotation method, it is impossible to identify metaphors.

In this paper, an alternative approach in operational modal analysis is presented, utilizing image processing technique and transmissibility functions. Imaging sensors do not impose additional mass on the structure due to their non-contact nature, while transmissibility functions, independent of excitation type, can directly extract mode shapes. The innovation of this research lies in combining these two techniques to record dynamic responses and identify modal properties. To capture the temporal response history from video signals, the block-matching method with sub-pixel accuracy was employed. Validation was conducted by recording the response of the tip of a cantilevered steel beam subjected to impact excitation, using a high-speed camera and a laser vibrometer, simultaneously. The RMSE plots in the time domain and the PSD in the frequency domain indicate high accuracy of this method. Using this approach, the displacement time histories of various points on the structure were extracted from the video signals, and the modal properties, including natural frequencies, damping ratios, and mode shapes, were identified using the transmissibility matrix method. The results obtained from the proposed method were compared with the stochastic subspace identification (SSI) method and analytical solutions. The findings reveal the accuracy of the modal identification approach introduced in this article. The highest relative error in estimating the natural frequencies of the first and second modes, compared to the values from the laser method, are 0.19% and 0.13%, respectively, and in comparison to the analytical values, they are 0.34% and 1.5%, respectively.

It has been about four decades since George Lakoff and Mark Johnson brought up the notion of conceptual metaphor in their book Metaphors We Live By (1980). Since then, this theory has found numerous followers and accordingly it has been applied to Persian linguistic and literary researches as well. This essay contends that these two thinkers were not in fact the originator of conceptual metaphor and that, as Richards says, the theorization of this type of metaphor goes back to the olden times. The article attempts to compare literary and conceptual metaphor through the thoughts of Islamic and western masters of eloquence and the definitions of literary and conceptual metaphor that they have given in order to highlight the point that the definition of these two kinds of metaphor should be distinctly recognized and the consideration of one should not result in the overlooking of the other. Considering these two types as the same, undermines their value and independence and may even force the mind to choose one and ignore the other-there are cases in which this has happened or at least some writers have intended to do so. On the one hand George Lakoff’ s insistence on rejecting traditional definitions of metaphors in his essay titled “ The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor” (1993) and on the other hand the enthusiastic acclamation of conceptual metaphor in recent years are some of the reasons for doing this study. In this article, however, neither of these two notions are denied and efforts are made to consolidate the status of both of them. So the outcomes of conceptual metaphor in both language and literature are illustrated and it is argued that this new type of metaphor does not cause limitation to literary metaphor, but can be an appropriate element in linguistic and literary studies.

Identifying the constraining factors of production and yield gap is very important. Therefore; this research was performed to identify the production constraining factors of local rice cultivars. All management practices from nursery preparation to harvesting stages for 100 paddy fields of local rice cultivars were recorded through field studies, in Sari, from 2015-2016. In the CPA, the actual and calculated potential yield were 4495 and 5703 kg/ha, respectively and the gap was 1221 kg/ha. The yield gap caused by number of top-dressing variables was 324 kg/ha, equal to 27% of the total yield gap. The yield gap related to previous year of legumes cultivation was 218 kg ha-1, equal to 18% of the total yield variation. Among the 10 variables entered in the CPA model, the effects of top-dress fertilizer application and its application frequency and foliar application were remarkable, which could compensate a significant part of the yield gap (444 kg/ha, 37% of total) in the farmers’ fields by managing these variables. According to boundary line analysis (BLA) finding, actual yield mean on the basis of optimal limit related to 12 variables under study was 5369 kg/ha, with 881 kg/ha yield gap . Mean relative yield and relative yield gap for 12 variables (transplanting date, seedling age, number of seedlings per hill, planting density, nitrogen and phosphorous per hectare, nitrogen before transplanting, harvesting date, lodging problem, pest problem, diseases problem and weeds problem) were 83.64 and 16.35 kg/ha, respectively. Based on the finding, it can be stated that the model precision is appropriate and can be applied for both estimation of the quantity of yield gap and determining the portion of each restricting yield variables.

Since metaphors occur in language, it is an appropriate tool to identify ideology with. The choice of different metaphors in a text by language users would reveal its dominant ideology. Contrary to this, different ideologies may produce different metaphors to support their basic beliefs. Taking conceptual metaphor theory and Teun van Dijk’s theory of ideology as the basic definitions in this paper, the functions of metaphor in an ideological system and also the role of metaphor in different social contexts are being studied.

The objective of the present paper is to detennine the factor(s) involved in the death of metaphor, or better said, .lexicalization of metaphorical concepts.To achieve the objective, attempts have been made to provide the readers with definitions proposed by scholars. Furthennore, the writer describes the manner in which metaphor is fonned, drawing a distinction between "dead" and "live" metaphors, showing how a live metaphor turns into a lexical polysemy entering dictionaries.