Juxtaposition of Women, Culture, and Nature in Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy

The present paper focuses on the tradition of women's circumsicion in the African tribe of Olinkan in Alice Walker's Possesing the Secret of Joy. The Olinkans are asked by the white settlers to stop women's mutilation, but Olinkan men continue this custom stealthily to ensure their patriarchial dominance. This novel is a complicated juxtaposition of two different types of oppression: one by White male colonizers over an African native land, and the other one by the native Olinkan men over native women. In this juxtaposition women and land are both victims exploited and manipulated by men, no matter Black or White. This novel is also seen as a fertile ground to analyze the dual domination of both nature and women by the Olinkan men and White colonizers who are both trying to impose their androcentric rules that are created to dominate women and land, respectively

Analyzing the relationship between social and professional identity characteristics of the audit committee and the steering system on the quality of financial reporting: a legal oriented artificial approach

The purpose of this study was to analyze the impact of the social and professional identity of the members of the audit committee and the characteristics of the governance system on the financial reporting quality. The modified Jones model was used to express the financial reporting quality. Given that part of the data was obtained through a questionnaire and another part by using financial statements. The research period was 2019 and the sample size was 79 companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange. To test the research hypotheses, the method of decision making artificial intelligence method and MATLAB software were used. The results of the section of the governance system features indicate the effect of the dual role of the CEO and the ratio of institutional owners on the financial reporting quality. It can be stated that corporate governance mechanisms can reduce opportunistic behavior; they can improve the quality of information by reducing the cost of representation. Also, the results of the audit committee's benchmarks indicate the impact of the audit committee's social identity and the number of employees in internal accounting section on the financial reporting quality, which suggests that effective audit committees, as a determining factor in the financial reporting process, increase the credibility of audited financial statements. In this study, for the first time, the impact of audit committee social identity along with other characteristics of governance system on the quality of financial reporting was analyzed by artificial intelligence

TuNet: End-to-end Hierarchical Brain Tumor Segmentation using Cascaded Networks

Glioma is one of the most common types of brain tumors; it arises in the glial cells in the human brain and in the spinal cord. In addition to having a high mortality rate, glioma treatment is also very expensive. Hence, automatic and accurate segmentation and measurement from the early stages are critical in order to prolong the survival rates of the patients and to reduce the costs of the treatment. In the present work, we propose a novel end-to-end cascaded network for semantic segmentation that utilizes the hierarchical structure of the tumor sub-regions with ResNet-like blocks and Squeeze-and-Excitation modules after each convolution and concatenation block. By utilizing cross-validation, an average ensemble technique, and a simple post-processing technique, we obtained dice scores of 88.06, 80.84, and 80.29, and Hausdorff Distances (95th percentile) of 6.10, 5.17, and 2.21 for the whole tumor, tumor core, and enhancing tumor, respectively, on the online test set.Comment: Accepted at MICCAI BrainLes 201

Application of seismic attributes in structural study and fracture analysis of DQ oil field, Iran

The determination of the most unstable areas in oil fields is critical for addressing engineering problems of wellbore and sand production as well as geologic problems such as understanding dynamic constraints on hydrocarbon migration and fracture permeability. In this research work, coherency seismic attribute has been used for the determination of the most critical areas in terms of drilling stabilities in the DQ oil field, Iran. The results obtained have shown that the (1) predominant features are the SSE–NNW and N–S trends (2) the central part of the DQ structure shows the highest concentration of segment bundles, (3) the segment bundles seem to be aligned along some lineaments oriented SE–NW and SSE–NNW, and (4) on the eastern and western margins of the map there is an anomalous concentration of segments oriented E–W. It can be concluded that coherency attribute is a valuable tool for structural analysis highlighting those areas containing unstable features

Study of the effect of plant growth regulators, size, and cultivar of the grape inflorescence explant on production of phenolic compounds in an <em>in vitro </em>condition

Introduction: Phenolic compounds are a large number of secondary metabolites that have useful and desirable effects in the field of agriculture, medicine, and food. This research was aimed to achieve methods of in vitro propagation of grapevine in order to apply biotechnologies for correction, growth, and optimization of products and compounds of the cultivated plant in relation to phenol ratio. Methods: In this interventional study, the effects of cultivar and size of the inflorescence explant and the gibberellin hormone in two levels, benzylaminopurine, and auxin hormones in three levels with three replicates per treatment were evaluated in relation to phenol ratio, in order to evaluate the effect of plant growth regulators, the type and size of the grape inflorescence explant on the phenol production. Results: The type of plant growth regulators affected phenolic substances production. The production of phenolic substances decreased in a medium with the highest concentration of growth regulators, 4 and 2.5 &mu;M concentration of benzylaminopurine, and 4.9 &mu;M of auxin. Production of phenolic substances increased in the free-plant hormone medium. In smaller samples tendency to turn brown was more regarding high amount of the sugar. Conclusion: The plant sample and the cultivar as important factors in producing phenol environment are induced by environmental stimuli like sugar, light, temperature, stress, ozone, and wound and can be actually applied to increase phenol production.</p

An improved microculture method for diagnosis of cutaneous leishmaniasis

This study evaluated the performance of three diagnostic methods for cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL). Patients who came to the Health Center Laboratory of Gonbad-e-Qabus in Golestan Province, Iran, were enrolled in the study. Skin scraping smear, improved microculture (IMC) and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) were performed. A total of 303 subjects were recruited, among whom 273 subjects fulfilled the criteria for CL. Sensitivity and specificity were 88.8 % (95 % CI = 84.2–92.2 %) and 100.0 % for smears, 98.4 % (95 % CI = 96.1–99.1 %) and 100.0 % for IMC, both of them 100.0 % for PCR. Although, PCR was relatively more sensitive than the IMC, the high correlation (agreement = 96 %, Kappa = 0.82) between IMC and PCR along with the advantages of simplicity, rapidity, adequate sensitivity and as a needle free method, offers the IMC as a valuable alternative diagnostic method for PCR in diagnosis of CL. © Indian Society for Parasitology 2013