Religiosity and Cyberspace: a Meta-Analysis on the Studies of Religion and Cyberspace

This paper focuses on the impact of cyberspace on religiosity in Iran through reviewing previous studies. The situation of religion in the age of the internet has always been a major matter of concern for Iranian scholars and policy makers. Accordingly, there have been many researchers who have addressed and approached this problem but there has been no comprehensive understanding of the impact of the internet on religiosity, as no comparative study has been conducted to date. This paper applies meta-analysis as the method for reviewing previous attempts while trying to gather all the data by classifying problems, methods, theoretical approaches and more importantly their results. The outcome of this study is to indicate the impact of cyberspace on religiosity and religious identity, apart from classifying and clarifying the status of religiosity in Iran. Having a stronger religious identity causes less online misbehaviors like searching and engaging in pornography. It also indicates using cyberspace for recreational purposes compared to using it for communication or gathering information etc. makes the users more likely to have a weaker religious identity

PG-Continuous frames in Banach space

In this paper, we introduce pg-continuous frames and study the operators associated with a give pg-continuous frames. We also show many useful properties with corresponding notions, pg-continuous frames and pg-frames in Banach space

Dutasteride plus Tamsulosin therapy versus Tamsulosin Monotherapy in the treatment of lower urinary tract symptoms: A Cost-utility analysis

Introduction: Lower Urinary Tract symptoms (LUTS)? impacts the quality of life of about 23.8% of the male population in Iran, diagnosed with Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia, annually . The current pharmacological treatment protocol for LUTS are α-blockers and 5-alpha reductase inhibitors (such as Dutasteride). This study was designed to estimate the cost-utility of dutasteride plus tamsulosin therapy for LUTS from the perspective of the Iran Health System. Methods and Results: A Markov model was developed to estimate healthcare costs and patient outcomes, measured by quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), for patients with moderate to severe LUTS. The model, compared four mutually exclusive health states in two alternative treatment options: tamsulosin (0.4 mg/day) and dutasteride plus tamsulosin (0.5mg+0.4 mg/day). time horizon was 35 years, with the duration of one year per cycle. The discount rates for utilities and costs were 3% and 5% respectively. A meta-analysis was conducted to estimate advese drug reactions (ADRs) and After Surgery Events (ASEs) probabilities. Total Cost consists of the direct costs of medications, as well as inpatient and outpatient services (general practice and urology specialist examinations, hospitalizations, laboratory services, diagnostic procedures, TURP surgical procedures, treatment of AUR, and treatment in emergency care services). One-way sensitivity testing and Probabilistic Sensitivity Analyses (PSA) were performed for virtual cohort of 1,000 patients with LUTS. Utility weights for each health states were obtained from a meta-analysis of published studies with EQ5D method. These weights are calculated 0.86, 0.79, 0.72 and 0 in mild, moderate, severe and death states, respectively. The probability of ASEs (CI 95%) were calculated as: TUR syndrome (0-0.0109), Blood transfusion (0.0296-0.0676), Urinary incontinence (0.0198-0.1894), urethral stricture (0.0392-0.0769) and UTI (0.0169-0.0787). After 35 years, the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio for combination therapy was $5159, well within the threshold range typically applied in Iran. PSA showed that the probability of being cost-effective in combination therapy is 89% to 94%, also the model showed the most sensitivity to dutasteride unit price and surgery incidence with monotherapy. Conclusions: Combination therapy has a high probability of being cost-effective in comparison to tamsulosin monotherapy in Iran

Incremental Local Linear Fuzzy Classifier in Fisher Space

Optimizing the antecedent part of neurofuzzy system is an active research topic, for which different approaches have been developed. However, current approaches typically suffer from high computational complexity or lack of ability to extract knowledge from a given set of training data. In this paper, we introduce a novel incremental training algorithm for the class of neurofuzzy systems that are structured based on local linear classifiers. Linear discriminant analysis is utilized to transform the data into a space in which linear discriminancy of training samples is maximized. The neurofuzzy classifier is then built in the transformed space, starting from the simplest form (a global linear classifier). If the overall performance of the classifier was not satisfactory, it would be iteratively refined by incorporating additional local classifiers. In addition, rule consequent parameters are optimized using a local least square approach. Our refinement strategy is motivated by LOLIMOT, which is a greedy partition algorithm for structure training and has been successfully applied in a number of identification problems. The proposed classifier is compared to several benchmark classifiers on a number of well-known datasets. The results prove the efficacy of the proposed classifier in achieving high performance while incurring low computational effort

Effect of Combined PD-1 and IL-6 Blockade on K-ras Mutant Lung Cancer

https://openworks.mdanderson.org/sumexp21/1212/thumbnail.jp