Psychological and social aspects of infertility and infertility treatment: the Persian experience

This pioneering investigation is based on a longitudinal research, expanding over a 3 year period, exploring the Psychological and Social aspects of infertility and infertility treatment on Persian (henceforth referred to as Iranian) infertile couples attending infertility clinics in Tehran. In phase 1 of the investigation an 85-item questionnaire in Farsi (Persian) was developed and validated, based on a four point Likert-type scale measuring the following factors: Psychological Distress, Social Extroversion, Marital Satisfaction, Attitudes Towards Modem Medicine and Religious Beliefs. In phase 2 of the investigation, lasting over a period of two years, the above 85-item questionnaire was administered at three time phases, namely: initial assessment (when patients first attended the clinic for the purpose of diagnosis of their problem), during In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) treatment (24 hours before egg collection), and a week after an unsuccessful treatment cycle. The same questionnaire was also administered to fertile couples (the control group) attending the clinics for routine and non-fertility related treatment at three time phases (about three weeks between each administration). The data from the patient group (n = 37 couples) and control group (n = 10 couples), together with data obtained from the general population (n = 197) i.e. those who responded to the items for the purpose of validating the questionnaire (norms), was subjected to statistical analysis. In comparison to norms and control group, infertile patients were more psychologically distressed. This finding is true for both men and women investigated. The degree of this psychological distress, however, is significantly greater for women than for men. Standard Multiple Regression Analyses of the infertile patients' data showed that the main predictors of psychological distress were gender, marital satisfaction, attitudes towards modem medicine, and religious beliefs. F or female patients, marital satisfaction was a significant predictor of their psychological distress. Marital satisfaction was the main contributing factor to the socially withdrawn behaviour of the patients. In phase 3 of the investigation, a year after data collection, examination of patients' notes showed that 7 out of the 37 infertile couples eventually had successful IVF with a term pregnancy. Results of a Stepwise Regression Analysis showed that the degree of psychological distress was the main predictor of pregnancy. In particular, couples who eventually conceived scored lower on psychological distress measures than those who did not. These findings are discussed in line with comparable reported literature on a mainly Western population, and implications of the findings for future research and counselling of infertile patients are outlined

An empirical study of evolution of inheritance in Java OSS

Previous studies of Object-Oriented (OO) software have reported avoidance of the inheritance mechanism and cast doubt on the wisdom of ‘deep’ inheritance levels. From an evolutionary perspective, the picture is unclear - we still know relatively little about how, over time, changes tend to be applied by developers. Our conjecture is that an inheritance hierarchy will tend to grow ‘breadth-wise’ rather than ‘depth-wise’. This claim is made on the basis that developers will avoid extending depth in favour of breadth because of the inherent complexity of having to understand the functionality of superclasses. Thus the goal of our study is to investigate this empirically. We conduct an empirical study of seven Java Open-Source Systems (OSSs) over a series of releases to observe the nature and location of changes within the inheritance hierarchies. Results show a strong tendency for classes to be added at levels one and two of the hierarchy (rather than anywhere else). Over 96% of classes added over the course of the versions of all systems were at level 1 or level 2. The results suggest that changes cluster in the shallow levels of a hierarchy; this is relevant for developers since it indicates where remedial activities such as refactoring should be focused

Schwarzschild Black Hole in Noncommutative Spaces

We study the effects of noncommutative spaces on the horizon, the area spectrum and Hawking temperature of a Schwarzschild black hole. The results show deviations from the usual horizon, area spectrum and the Hawking temperature. The deviations depend on the parameter of space-space noncommutativity.Comment: 4 pages, accepted for publication in Gen.Rel.Gra

Determination of Tungsten Target Parameters for Transmission X-ray Tube: A Simulation Study Using Geant4

AbstractTransmission X-ray tubes based on carbon nanotube have attracted significant attention recently. In most of these tubes, tungsten is used as the target material. In this article, the well-known simulator Geant4 was used to obtain some of the tungsten target parameters. The optimal thickness for maximum production of usable X-rays when the target is exposed to electron beams of different energies was obtained. The linear variation of optimal thickness of the target for different electron energies was also obtained. The data obtained in this study can be used to design X-ray tubes. A beryllium window was considered for the X-ray tube. The X-ray energy spectra at the moment of production and after passing through the target and window for different electron energies in the 30–110 keV range were also obtained. The results obtained show that with a specific thickness, the target material itself can act as filter, which enables generation of X-rays with a limited energy

Catalytic Ozonation of Phenolic Wastewater: Identification and Toxicity of Intermediates

A new strategy in catalytic ozonation removal method for degradation and detoxification of phenol from industrial wastewater was investigated. Magnetic carbon nanocomposite, as a novel catalyst, was synthesized and then used in the catalytic ozonation process (COP) and the effects of operational conditions such as initial pH, reaction time, and initial concentration of phenol on the degradation efficiency and the toxicity assay have been investigated. The results showed that the highest catalytic potential was achieved at optimal neutral pH and the removal efficiency of phenol and COD is 98.5% and 69.8%, respectively. First-order modeling demonstrated that the reactions were dependent on the initial concentration of phenol, with kinetic constants varying from 0.038 min−1 ([phenol]o = 1500mg/L) to 1.273 min−1 ([phenol]o = 50mg/L). Bioassay analysis showed that phenol was highly toxic to Daphnia magna (LC50 96 h = 5.6mg/L). Comparison of toxicity units (TU) of row wastewater (36.01) and the treated effluent showed that TU value, after slightly increasing in the first steps of ozonation for construction of more toxic intermediates, severely reduced at the end of reaction (2.23).Thus, COP was able to effectively remove the toxicity of intermediates which were formed during the chemical oxidation of phenolic wastewaters

Chance constrained robust downlink beamforming in multicell networks

We introduce a downlink robust optimization approach that minimizes a combination of total transmit power by a multiple antenna base station (BS) within a cell and the resulting aggregate inter-cell interference (ICI) power on the users of the other cells. This optimization is constrained to assure that a set of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) targets are met at user terminals with certain outage probabilities. The outages are due to the uncertainties that naturally emerge in the estimation of channel covariance matrices between a BS and its intra-cell local users as well as the other users of the other cells. We model these uncertainties using random matrices, analyze their statistical behaviour and formulate a tractable probabilistic approach to the design of optimal robust downlink beamforming vectors. The proposed approach reformulates the original intractable non-convex problem in a semidefinite programming (SDP) form with linear matrix inequality (LMI) constraints. The resulting SDP formulation is convex and numerically tractable under the standard rank relaxation. We compare the proposed chance-constrained approach against two different robust design schemes as well as the worst-case robustness. The simulation results confirm better power efficiency and higher resilience against channel uncertainties of the proposed approach in realistic scenarios

Baždarno polje U(1) u 6d prostoru-vremenu s nekomutativnim dimenzijama: pristup koherentnih stanja

We consider the U(1) gauge field defined over a six dimensional space-time with extra dimensions compactified on a noncommutative toroidal orbifold, within the context of coherent state approach to the noncommutative spaces. We demonstrate that the fuzzines of extra dimensions can lead to the cancelation of the part of electrostatic interaction mediated by the massive KK modes.Razmatramo baždarno polje U(1) definirano u šest-dimenzijskom prostoru-vremenu s dodatnim dimenzijama i zbijeno u nekomutativnom toroidnom staznom umotu, u svezi pristupa s koherentnim stanjima nekomunitativnim prostorima. Pokazujemo da neodređenost dodatnih dimenzija može voditi poništenju dijela elektrostatskog međudjelovanja koje prenose masivni KK modovi