Middle East Research Institute. Iran: MERI Report. Middle East Research Institute Routledge Revivals. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Book review

City sustainability: the influence of walkability on built environments

A vital issue in community is providing an easy access to the transport network for different range of community members such as; very young, old, children and disable people. The functions that walking and walkable area can be support includes community involvement, health, meeting and gathering and recreation which has positive effects on sustainability and vice versa. Walkability is the basis of sustainable city. The same as bicycling, walking can be known as ‘green’ type of transportation which except crowding reduction and also has low level of environmental influence, energy conserving without any air and noise pollution. It can be more than a purely useful type of travel to shopping, school and work. Also have both social and recreational importance. This research aims at supporting urban design knowledge and practice and contributing to the broader field of “walkability” by refining the methods and measures used to analyse the relationship between walking behaviour and physical environment and its impacts on city sustainability. In order to integrate knowledge from theories and research on walkability from different fields and of different perspectives, it is crucial to first build a broader view and a more comprehensive understanding of how the built environment influences walking. What has been done during the earlier part of this project, and will be shown in this research, is to provide a better understanding of the complexity of the relationship between the built environment and walking and also the complexity that lies in both of these entities, the urban form and walking activity

Formative assessment feedback to enhance the writing performance of Iranian IELTS candidates: Blending teacher and automated writing evaluation

With the incremental integration of technology in writing assessment, technology-generated feedback has found its way to take further steps toward replacing human corrective feedback and rating. Yet, further investigation is deemed necessary regarding its potential use either as a supplement to or replacement for human feedback. This study aims to investigate the effect of blending teacher and automated writing evaluation, as formative assessment feedback, on enhancing the writing performance among Iranian IELTS candidates. In this explanatory mixed-methods research, three groups of Iranian intermediate learners (N=31) completed six IELTS writing tasks during six consecutive weeks and received automated, teacher, and blended (automated + teacher) feedback modes respectively on different components of writing (task response, coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy). A structured written interview was also conducted to explore learners’ perception (attitude, clarity, preference) of the mode of feedback they received. Findings revealed that students who received teacher-only and blended feedback performed better in writing. Also, the blended feedback group outperformed the others regarding task response, the teacher feedback group in cohesion and coherence, and the automated feedback group in lexical resource. The analysis of the interviews revealed that the majority of the learners confirmed the clarity of all feedback modes and learners’ attitude about feedback modes was positive although they highly preferred the blended one. The findings suggest new ideas to facilitate learning and assessing writing and support the evidence that teachers can provide comprehensive, accurate, and continuous feedback as a means of formative assessment

Association of Prostate-Specific Antigen Density and Gleason score of Positive Surgical Margin with Biochemical Recurrence in Prostate Cancer

Background: We aimed to investigate the association between prostate specific antigen (PSA) density and Gleason score of the positive surgical (PSM) margin after radical prostatectomy with biochemical recurrence in patients with prostate cancer.  Materials and Methods: In this retrospective cohort study, patients with prostate cancer referred to Hasheminejad Hospital in Tehran, Iran, during 2009-2019, who underwent radical prostatectomy were enrolled through the convenience sampling method. The follow-up period was determined as at least one year after radical prostatectomy to determine biochemical recurrence. Prostate-specific antigen density (PSAD) and the Gleason score of surgical specimen and positive surgical margins (PSM) were evaluated and their association with biochemical recurrences was investigated. Results: One hundred and three patients were assessed. The overall biochemical recurrence rate was 48.5% with a mean follow-up of 24 months (12-42 months) and an average time to biochemical recurrence of 18 months (16-20 months). BCR-free (Biochemical recurrence-free) survival rates of patients divided based on the PSAD cut-off point (0.205 ng/ml/cc) were significantly different using the log-rank test (P= 0.008) (85.7%, 57.1%, and 14.3% for values ≤ 0.205 ng/ml/c versus 55.8%, 20.9%, and 0% for values ˃ 0.205 ng/ml/cc, respectively for 1-, 2- and 3-year survival). Moreover, Cox regression showed that the Gleason score of PSM, the Gleason score of the surgical specimen, and the PSAD predicted biochemical recurrence more, respectively. Conclusion: PSAD and PSM Gleason scores were strong predictors of biochemical recurrence after radical prostatectomy and their use along with other common indicators including tumor grade and stage and PSA level can increase the accuracy of risk assessment in patients with prostate cancer

A fair access mechanism based on TXOP in IEEE 802.11e wireless networks

IEEE 802.11e is an extension of IEEE 802.11 that provides Quality of Service (QoS) for the applications with different service requirements. This standard makes use of several parameters such as contention window; inter frame space time and transmission opportunity to create service differentiation in the network. Transmission opportunity (TXOP), that is the focus point of this paper, is the time interval, during which a station is allowed to transmit packets without any contention. As the fixed amounts of TXOPs are allocated to different stations, unfairness appears in the network. And when users with different data rates exist, IEEE 802.11e WLANs face the lack of fairness in the network. Because the higher data rate stations transfer more data than the lower rate ones. Several mechanisms have been proposed to solve this problem by generating new TXOPs adaptive to the network's traffic condition. In this paper, some proposed mechanisms are evaluated and according to their evaluated strengths and weaknesses, a new mechanism is proposed for TXOP determination in IEEE 802.11e wireless networks. Our new algorithm considers data rate, channel error rate and data packet lengths to calculate adaptive TXOPs for the stations. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm leads to better fairness and also higher throughput and lower delays in the network.

A unit-based symbolic execution method for detecting memory corruption vulnerabilities in executable codes

Memory corruption is a serious class of software vulnerabilities, which requires careful attention to be detected and removed from applications before getting exploited and harming the system users. Symbolic execution is a well-known method for analyzing programs and detecting various vulnerabilities, e.g., memory corruption. Although this method is sound and complete in theory, it faces some challenges, such as path explosion, when applied to real-world complex programs. In this paper, we present a method for improving the efficiency of symbolic execution and detecting four classes of memory corruption vulnerabilities in executable codes, i.e., heap-based buffer overflow, stack-based buffer overflow, use-after-free, and double-free. We perform symbolic execution only on test units rather than the whole program to avoid path explosion. In our method, test units are considered parts of the program's code, which might contain vulnerable statements and are statically identified based on the specifications of memory corruption vulnerabilities. Then, each test unit is symbolically executed to calculate path and vulnerability constraints of each statement of the unit, which determine the conditions on unit input data for executing that statement or activating vulnerabilities in it, respectively. Solving these constraints gives us input values for the test unit, which execute the desired statements and reveal vulnerabilities in them. Finally, we use machine learning to approximate the correlation between system and unit input data. Thereby, we generate system inputs that enter the program, reach vulnerable instructions in the desired test unit, and reveal vulnerabilities in them. This method is implemented as a plugin for angr framework and evaluated using a group of benchmark programs. The experiments show its superiority over similar tools in accuracy and performance

The effect of Empowerment of Grandmother on Depression and Maternal Role Realization in Primiparae with Hospitalized Infant: A Randomized, Controlled, Clinical Trial

Background: Hospitalization of the newborn infant can cause depression crisis and severely undermine the attainment and realization of maternal role in a primipara. The neonate’s maternal grandmother can provide the support needed to help the primipara avoid or overcome the ensuing problems. Aim: This study aimed to investigate the effect of empowerment of grandmothers on depression and maternal role realization in primiparae with hospitalized newborn. Method: In this randomized, controlled, clinical trial, 84 primiparae with their infants admitted to Shahid Rajaei Hospital of Gachsaran, Iran, were assigned to intervention and control groups. A grandmother empowerment intervention was devised by combining the concepts of Mercer’s theory with the stages of Ravanipour’s self-management empowerment model. The control group received the routine care. Depression and maternal role realization in all the primiparae were measured with Beck Depression Inventory and a researcher-made role realization questionnaire before and one month after the intervention. Data was analyzed by independent and paired t-test in SPSS, version 18. Results: The mean ages of the mothers in the intervention and control groups were respectively 27.02±5.3 and 24.0±4.1 years. Before the intervention, there was no significant difference between the depression scores (P>0.38) and role realization scores (P>0.40) of the subjects in the two groups; however, after the intervention, both scores showed significant differences (P<0.05). Implications for Practice: The intervention based on the self-management empowerment model led to significant improvement in depression and maternal role realization of the primiparae with hospitalized infant. This model can serve as a directive in neonatal wards and neonatal intensive care units

STUDYING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIAL TRUST AND TAX EVASIO

Abstract. Social trust is the reflection of the laid down laws and regulations and their execution. Social trust is occurred when one understands the acceptance of the truth as his/her duty. The basic working procedure for promoting tax acceptance, the development of tax ethics in the structure of the tax system, agents, auditors and, in particular, tax payers and its executive solution is the growth of community trust. The purpose of this research is to examine the relationship between social trust and tax evasion. Data were collected by a questionnaire and analyzed by structural equation modeling. The statistical sample of this research includes 384 tax payers from North Khorasan Province, which were surveyed in1995. Findings of the research indicate that there is a negative and significant relationship between social trust and tax evasion. Also, the findings showed that the relationship between social trust and tax evasion is higher among female payers than male ones. In addition, they showed that the relationship between social trust and tax avoidance by payers without financial literacy is stronger than those having financial literacy.Keywords: financial literacy, payers’ gender, social trust and tax evasio