The Role of the Iranian Library and Information Science Association in the Informal Education of Librarians

This article reports on a survey of librarians on their view of the role of the Iranian Library and Information Science Association in informal education of librarians. The survey uses a descriptive-analytical approach with categorized sampling of two groups of members in Tehran and Khorasan. The results show that the association is successful in holding informal training programs for librarians. The T test indicates no significant difference between librarians in Tehran and in Khorasan except in two factors. The difference is shown in positive effect on job evaluation, and suitability of scheduled dates, date of monthly seminars, and level of education. The F test shows no significant difference between member categories except in three factors. The difference is in the suitability of subjects, the number of librarians attending, and the factor of history of the association

A world without hunger : organic or GM crops?

It has been estimated that the world population will increase to 9.2 billion by 2050; supplying the growing population with food will require a significant increase in agricultural production. A number of agricultural and ecological scientists believe that a large-scale shift to organic farming (OF) would not only increase the world's food supply, but might be the only way to eradicate hunger sustainably. Nevertheless, OF has recently come under new scrutiny, not just from critics who fear that a large-scale shift in this direction would cause billions to starve but also from farmers and development agencies who question whether such a shift could improve food security. Meanwhile, the use of genetically modified (GM) crops is growing around the world, leading to possible opportunities to combat food insecurity and hunger. However, the development of GM crops has been a matter of considerable interest and worldwide public controversy. So far, no one has comprehensively analyzed whether a widespread shift to OF or GM would be the sole solution for both food security and safety. Using a literature review from databases of peer-reviewed scientific publications, books, and official publications, this study aims to address this issue. Results indicate that OF and GM, to different extents, are able to ensure food security and safety. In developed countries, given that there are relatively few farmers and that their productivity, even without GMOs, is relatively high, OF could be more a viable option. However, OF is significantly less efficient in land-use terms and may lead to more land being used for agriculture due to its lower yield. In developing countries, where many small-scale farmers have low agricultural productivity and limited access to agricultural technologies and information, an approach with both GM and OF might be a more realistic approach to ensure food security and safety

Sustainability indicators of Iran's developmental plans : application of the sustainability compass theory

The main purpose of this study was to analyze Iran's developmental plans in order to examine and compare their direction and conformity with the sustainable development theory via the compass of sustainability. The approach involves a content analysis used in line with qualitative research methodologies. The results indicated that, in the first developmental plans, there was no direct reference to sustainable development. In the second to fifth plans, the main focus was on the social, environmental, and economic dimensions of development; which were common elements seen in the policies of all the plans. An analysis of the fourth plan revealed that expressions related to sustainable development appeared more frequently, indicating a stronger emphasis on sustainable development by decision-makers

Impact of agricultural land conversion on climate change

Climate change and land use conversion are two major global environmental issues. A claim is made that climate change has brought new challenges for global land use, while land use conversion is hardly realized as a major driver for climate change. Using mapping techniques, this study aims to investigate the relationship between climate change and agricultural land conversion (ALC), by which land is converted from agricultural to other uses (e.g., urban areas, national and natural parks, roads, industrial areas, and afforestation projects). CO2 emission is considered as the main impact of climate change, and agricultural land conversion is regarded as the most important global land use. In this study, data are obtained from two databases: the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for the period of 1962-2011. Considering the FAO (2015) classification, the countries are categorized into five different groups (high-income non-OECD, high-income OECD, upper-middle-, lower-middle-, and low-income countries). Economies were divided into several income groups according to 2014 gross national income per capita. The results show that agricultural areas in high-income countries have decreased, while in low- to middle-income countries, they have increased. The highest CO2 emissions can be observed, especially in high-income countries, whereas the lowest CO2 emissions happen in the low- and lower-middle-income countries. The results further show that there is a positive relationship between CO2 emissions and ALC across the world. It can be observed that CO2 emission is increasing where agricultural area is declining. On the contrary, CO2 emission is declining where agricultural area is increasing

Mismatching-Aware Unsupervised Translation Quality Estimation For Low-Resource Languages

Translation Quality Estimation (QE) is the task of predicting the quality of machine translation (MT) output without any reference. This task has gained increasing attention as an important component in the practical applications of MT. In this paper, we first propose XLMRScore, which is a cross-lingual counterpart of BERTScore computed via the XLM-RoBERTa (XLMR) model. This metric can be used as a simple unsupervised QE method, while employing it results in two issues: firstly, the untranslated tokens leading to unexpectedly high translation scores, and secondly, the issue of mismatching errors between source and hypothesis tokens when applying the greedy matching in XLMRScore. To mitigate these issues, we suggest replacing untranslated words with the unknown token and the cross-lingual alignment of the pre-trained model to represent aligned words closer to each other, respectively. We evaluate the proposed method on four low-resource language pairs of WMT21 QE shared task, as well as a new English-Farsi test dataset introduced in this paper. Experiments show that our method could get comparable results with the supervised baseline for two zero-shot scenarios, i.e., with less than 0.01 difference in Pearson correlation, while outperforming unsupervised rivals in all the low-resource language pairs for above 8%, on average.Comment: Submitted to Language Resources and Evaluatio

Inter-Rater Agreement of Emergency Nurses and Physicians in Emergency Severity Index (ESI) Triage

Introduction: Triage is one of the most important systems in patients prioritizing at the time of arrival to hospital. Based on the severity of the injury and the need for treatment, this system manages patients in the least time which could lead to rotation of patients with high reliability and safety. Currently, the most accepted method for triage is emergency severity index (ESI) system, considered as five-level triage method, too. This method were implemented in Al Zahra Hospital of Isfahan by trained nurses since March to May 2010. This study was aimed to evaluate the accuracy of emergency nursing triage using ESI. Methods: This prospective cross sectional study was carried out on 601 patients referred to Al-Zahra hospital of Isfahan through May 2010. The patients’ triage level were determined by physicians and nurses separately and the results compared. To define the level of agreement between two groups (inter-rater agreement), the kappa index was evaluated. To specify the association between the time interval of initial triage and patient final status, Chi-Square test was applied using SPSS 18 statistical software. Results: There was no significant difference between results of nurses and physicians triage (P<0/0001). The agreement level (kappa index) between two groups was 94% (95% CI: 0.931-0.957). Of 601 patients, 44.1% ones were hospitalized at the emergency department, 52.6% discharged and 3.3% died. The average of time interval between nursing triage and physician visit was 9.55 minutes at the level one triage, 21.64 minutes at level two, 26.03 minutes at level three, 26.93 minutes at level four, and 11.70 minutes at level five. Conclusion: It seems that there is an acceptable inter-rater agreement between emergency nurses and physicians regarding patients’ triage in terms of ESI system

Synthesis and Characterization of Simvastatin-N-succinyl chitosan-citicoline Conjugated Form Intended for Improving Alzheimer’s Disease in Long Term Use of Simvastatin

Introduction: Simvastatin is a semisynthesis statin. Statins inhibit 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase, a key enzyme of cholesterol synthesis, in AMPK (AMP-activated protein kinase) signaling pathway. Simvastatin is able to cross blood brain barrier more than the other statins, due to its lipophilic nature. There is controversy about the effect of simvastatin on Alzheimer’s disease (AD). For example, simvastatin can induce AD through insulin signaling pathway but can ameliorate AD via MAPK (Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase) signaling pathway.  In this study, we report the synthesis of a conjugated form of simvastatin with citicoline, to block negative effect of simvastatin on insulin signaling pathway and increase positive effect of simvastatin on MAPK signaling pathway and chitosan as a linker between these two drugs.   Methods and Results: for simvastatin-n-succinyl chitosan-citicoline synthesis, chitosan reacted with succinic acid to form n-succinyl chitosan. Then simvastatin connected to n-succinyl chitosan via acetylation reaction. After 24 hours citicoline was added to reaction media. H-NMR and FT-IR were done to examine whether the conjugation reaction has been done or not. Characterization and morphology tests have been done on reaction result. H-NMRresults approved the synthesis of drug-polymer. FT-IR results showed both amide and ester peaks.  Maximum absorptions (λmax) of all primary chemicals were seen in UV visible spectroscopy results of conjugated form.SEM result showed that the conjugated form has nanoparticulate structure in size range of 100-300 nanometers. X-RD result showed a peak under 25 theta. Another characterization test wasRBC hemolysis with six different concentrations, in which normal saline was negative control and Triton was positive control. Conclusions: Conjugation of lipophilic simvastatin with hydrophilic citicoline to improve AD can be done with helping of a polymer which is rich in carboxylic acid

Effects of livestock grazing on key vegetation attributes of a remnant forest reserve : the case of Desa'a Forest in northern Ethiopia

The study was conducted in Desa'a Forest with the objective of investigating livestock-forest interaction. This study also evaluated the grazing pressure on Desa'a Forests from livestock, the potential of forests biomass feed production and current livestock density relation to the sustainable stocking rate. Data on socio-economic and community perception about livestock-forest interaction were collected through structured questionnaire on 90 households. To determine the species composition, abundance, density and diversity of woody plants, using stratified random sampling, four transect lines were laid out in east, west, north and south direction. Accordingly, the results are representative of Desa'a Forest. In the study area, 90% of the respondents (81 households) entered their livestock into Desa'a Forest and only 10% of the respondents (9 households) did not use Desa'a Forest. A total of 63 woody plant species were identified in the study area. According to farmers and pastoralists' opinion, 49.15%, 15.25%, 28.81% and 6.79% of woody species were identified as highly palatable, palatable, less palatable and unpalatable respectively. The mean herbaceous biomass production in Desa'a Forest is 1255.86 kg/ha. The predicted mean annual browse biomass production was 3000.72 kg/ha. The potential stocking rates for Desa'a Forest were 68480.39 TLU/year obtained based on the amount of fodder available to the livestock in the forest. The available potential browsing unit per hectare in the centre, North-West direction and south-east direction was 1432.66 BU/ha, 665.83 BU/ha and 203.66 BU/ha, respectively. Only 5.65% of the total surveyed households practice forage development which are the key to overcome feed shortage and decrease the pressure from the forest

Wireless sensor network for small-scale farming systems in southwest Iran : application of Q-methodology to investigate farmers’ perceptions

The application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has been promoted worldwide as an approach to smart farming, sustainable resource management and improved crop productivity. Despite their promotion, WSNs are not widely adopted in the whole world, especially by small-scale farmers. The adoption of WSN technologies is strongly affected by the perceptions of farmers who are the main users and potential adopters of such technology. Yet, the way WSN technology is perceived has been poorly studied. This study aims at closing this gap by investigating the small-scale farmers’ perception regarding the application of WSNs for farming systems in Khuzestan Province, Iran. This research employed Q-methodology, an approach that integrates both qualitative and quantitative data allowing to study individuals’ subjective understandings of a specific topic. The Q-sort procedure was performed in the field with twenty-five small-scale cereal farmers (with less than 2 ha of land). Next Q-factor analyses were conducted using the PQMethod software. Results propose to group farmers along with four types of perceptions regarding the application of WSNs, namely support-seekers, resistance-adherents, optimists and adoptive-adherents. These four groups cover 67% of the variance across perceptions. Various perceptions have shown that farmers have different views on WSN applications. Awareness of these perceptions can provide a valuable frame for policy and decision-makers, and allow for addressing the farmers’ concerns and for developing appropriate and specific strategies for each group

Urban sprawl and its impacts on land use change in Central Ethiopia

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