A bibliometric study of scientific output in Tabriz University of Medical Science 1988-1996

A bibliometrics analysis was recruited to visualize the scientific output of faculty members of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences for a period of eight years (1988-1996) .The subject fields surveyed are: Hygiene and Nutrition, Nursing and Midwifery, Medicine, Para medicine and Dentistry. The general purpose of study is :1- to determine whether academic status and prestige have any impact on the level of productivity, 2- to study the productivity within different fields of medical science.3- to determine the most productive area amongst the fields.4- to determine the least productive one. 5. To illustrate the trend of scientific output through out 1988-1996 in the university. The study illustrated that the number of publications during the period under study witnessed a sharp continuous growth, the study further showed that the population under study produced about 2166 scientific publications in the form of books(7%), periodical article (56%) and research reports (37%). 69.3% of researches were carried out by individual researcher; and the frequency of group research was only 30.7%. The majority of papers and research reports (93.3%) appeared in local journals and only 6.7% of them were published in international journals. The result showed that, those with a higher degree like PhD and postdoctoral qualification published and presented a lot more papers, compared to those who had lesser degree of qualifications. Observation from the analysis highlighted the following points: Medicine is the most productive area amongst the six subject fields (66.5) and Dentistry is the least productive one (1.5%). The number of publications showed a sharp increase during the period of study

Fueling the Superpowers: What Role for Iran?

This article by Hossein Askari is taken from the proceedings of the EPIIC Symposium at Tufts University, February 200

Public Evaluation Of Historical Building Facades In The Vicinity Of Dataran Merdeka, Kuala Lumpur

Historical district is an important element of city image content. Among the visual elements of a historical district, the building façade is an important element in representing the architectural features. Building façade is mostly the matter of evaluation to portray the visual characteristics of an environment. Therefore, giving attention and imposing sensitivity to the evaluation of building facades in a historical district directly influence the historical images. A historical area adjacent to Dataran Merdeka, located in Kuala Lumpur city, was chosen as the study area. The issue is focussed on the lack of harmony among the shapes, colours, decorations, and architectural styles of the historical building facades which have influenced the historical images in the study area. This inconsistency is in contrast with the Kuala Lumpur Structure Plan 2020 visions, which emphasizes on creating strong images for all the districts in Kuala Lumpur city. Thus, to deal with the stated issue, the main objective of the study was to investigate the building facades which represented the historical images of the study area based on the public‘s evaluation. The second objective was to investigate the architectural elements and characteristics which influence the public’s evaluation of the historical images of the building facades in the study area. The third objective was to identify the visual elements which influence the historical images of the building facades in the study area based on the public’s evaluation. Finally, the research tried to explore the urban elements which influence the historical images of the building facades in the study area based on the public’s evaluation. A quantitative method was used to achieve the objectives of the study. In this line, a questionnaire-based survey was chosen as a data collection instrument. The research participants chosen were visitors who are familiar with the area, and willing to answer the questions. Data analysis was carried out using both the content analysis and inferential analysis. The results suggested that the facades, with the highest mean scores, were considered as strongly representing the historical images and these include harmonious arches, columns, pilasters, ornament, and bright-coloured materials. Cleanliness, the use of appropriately architectural details, legibility, coherence, and the harmonious repetition of the elements were identified as the other factors which also improved the historical images of the facades. Moreover, the results also denoted the architectural style, colour, shape and material of the facades as the architectural elements, and the harmony between historical and modern buildings and street furniture as urban elements which influenced the evaluations of the historical building façade images. The findings of the study assist urban designers and planners to consider the importance of people’s evaluation of historical building facades

The effect of guessing vocabulary in reading authentic texts among pre-university students

The omnibus question proposed here is to pinpoint the impact of a contextual guessing strategy (CGS) on vocabulary and reading authentic texts at the pre-university level. One hundred male and female students were randomly selected and assigned to &lsquo;context&rsquo; and &lsquo;non-context&rsquo; groups. The context group received a CGS instruction to infer the meaning of low-frequency words while the non-context participants were treated by a direct method. The results revealed that CGS instruction was more effective vis-&agrave;-vis direct vocabulary instruction in all particulars, and was more effective than the non-context method in improving reading. The tentative estimation would be that some of the assumptions about the futility of teaching contextual clues should be rigorously re-examined and that CGS can account for a substantial proportion of vocabulary growth during the school years.<br /

Culture, Income, and CO2 Emission

Given the devastating effects of global warming, the problem of human-induced climate change, and in particular carbon dioxide emissions, has been high on the global policy agenda. In this study, we examine the relationship between national culture, carbon dioxide emissions, and economic growth in the framework of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). Applying system GMM panel estimator across 69 developed and developing countries, we confirm the existence of EKC and show that culture significantly affects the income-emission relationship. Moreover, the effects of the six cultural dimensions on EKC can be collapsed into two: (i) masculinity, power distance and indulgence move the EKC upward and shift the income turning point to the left; and (ii) individualism, uncertainty, and long-term orientation move the EKC downward while shifting the income turning point to the right. The impact of culture on EKC remains also robust for alternative specifications. Future policy and global initiatives in sustainable development should incorporate the multidimensional impact of culture on national behavior towards environment and economic growth, a relationship that has been largely ignored in economic decision-making models

How Islamic are Islamic Countries?

In the post 9/11 era, there is growing interest in the complex relationship between religion,\ud economics, finance, politics, law, and social behavior. This has brought with it a disagreement\ud on how to investigate the impact of religiosity, whether religion affects the economic, political,\ud and social outlook of countries or whether these factors affect religiosity? In other words, should\ud religion be viewed as a dependent or an independent variable? In this paper we ask what we\ud believe to be the precursor question to such linkages, namely, do self-declared Islamic countries,\ud as attested by membership in the OIC (Organization of Islamic Conference), embrace policies\ud that are founded on Islamic teachings? We believe that only once this question is addressed can\ud one begin to estimate how Islam adherence to Islam may affect economic, political and social\ud behavior. In the first part of the paper we present what we believe should be the characteristics and\ud scaffolding of an “Islamic” country. We base our depiction on the Quran, and the life, practices\ud and sayings of the Prophet Mohammad – the two principal channels that provide Muslims with\ud the road map. In the second part, we develop an index to measure the “Islamicity” of Islamic and\ud non-Islamic countries. This IslamicityIndex (or I2\ud ) measures 208 countries adherence to Islamic\ud principles using four sub-indices related to economics, legal and governance, human and political\ud rights, and international relations.\ud KEYWORDS: Islam, economic development, index, religion, economics, finance, politics, law,\ud socia

Identification of Factors that prevent Potential Entrepreneurs from Founding

The goal of this research paper is to identifypersonal and environmental factors that prevent individualsfrom founding a company despite perceiving a businessopportunity. Our findings suggest that a weak economic growthand low start-up activity in a country increases the individuals’fear of failure whereas we don’t find any correlation between theavailability of start-up capital and the fear of failure rate

Where is Justice? Islam, Equality, and COVID-19

Hossein Askari considers how justice in Islam differs from Western understandings of equality and examines how the teachings of Islam can provide a corrective to unchecked capitalism. He notes how COVID-19 will change our economic and health care systems in the future

Relaxed Invariant Representation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

The success of supervised machine learning relies on the availability of a large amount of annotated training data from different domains, which is often cost-ineffective to collect, and unrealistic in many scenarios. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to overcome this problem by transferring predictive models trained on a labelled source domain to an unlabelled target domain, with the difficulty of resolving distributional shift between domains. To bridge this distribution gap, recent advances in deep learning focus on learning representations that are invariant across domains. However, such an approach may fail to generalize well to target domains and may even considerably deteriorate adaptability, due to the existence of an inherent trade-off between adaptability and invariance. Building on advances in deep generative models, this thesis aims to relax the learning of invariant representations, and to develop efficient algorithms for UDA. This thesis comprises two parts. The first part introduces the problem of learning invariant representations. In particular, we mathematically derive a lower bound on the joint probability distribution of the source and target domains as a framework for UDA and theoretically discuss how this bound can be used to relax the invariance in representation learning. Following this motivation, in the second part, we design a simple, yet efficient algorithm to address the challenges of forcing too much invariance in domain distributional matching. We empirically show how the trade-off between adaptability and invariant representation can be mitigated with an invertible architecture between the representation and predictor models while learning the invariant representation. The experiments are run on public benchmark problems and the results show that the proposed method relaxes the excessive invariance effectively and outperforms the existing domain adaptation approaches.Thesis (MPhil) -- University of Adelaide, School of Computer Science, 202

Studying Brand Equity in Terms of Beliefs Shaping Consumers’ Attitudes on Advertising through Mobile Phones

Any innovation creates new opportunities and in recent years, advertising has experienced radical changes due to technological progresses. Mobile phone is a type of such technological changes which has converted into an important advertising channel. Regarding such importance, present study is conducted to promote three aims. The first aim of this research is to identify beliefs which shape audiences’ attitudes on mobile advertising. The second aim is that this research evaluates the impact of those identified beliefs which shape an attitude on mobile advertising on a general attitude on advertising. The ultimate aim is to study the impact of the attitude on advertising on brand equity. Present study is a survey which uses questionnaire to collect data. To achieve the aims of this research, 384 users of Irancel’s products and services who were exposed by mobile advertising as the sample. To analyze data and to test research hypotheses and model, structural equation modeling (SEM) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were used. Research findings show the significant impact of such beliefs as “being informative”, “good for economy”, “hedonism”, “annoyance factor”, “validity”, “personalization” and “permission” in mobile advertising on “attitude on advertising” and the significant impact of “attitude on mobile advertising” in “brand equity”. Keywords: Advertising, Mobile Advertising, Attitudes on Mobile Advertising, Brand Equit