A geographical analysis of the rural economy in the margins of the Dasht-E-Kawir, central Iran: a case study of the Abuzaid-Abad area

In this research a geographical analysis has been made of the rural economy in the margin of Dasht-e-Kawir Central Iran. In this region, as in all rural, areas, two groups of factors affect the rural economy; physical and socio-economic. Severe physical conditions, e.g. arid zone climate, shortage of water, saline soils and limitation of cultivable land, have restricted the agricultural development in the region. The main objective in the study of the physical conditions, is to recognize the areas capability for agricultural development and the influence of environmental conditions on the socio-economic factors. The severity of physical factors has encouraged the development of the craft industry in the area in general, and in the Abuzaid- Abad in particular. Thus over 50% of the rural income is derived from the carpet making industry, in which women provide the labour. However, the rural economy in the area can not be assessed without examining the impact of the physical upon the socio-economic factors. In this study the two groups of factors have been investigated separately. In attempting to help the agricultural development, to increase the villagers' income and to improve rural welfare in the region, the complete set of factors must be analysed to identify the N strongest correlation between them which is relevant to the above purposes. In chapters one to four the physical factors have been discussed. Chapters five to ten are concerned with socio economic and technical factors. In chapter eleven the rural income has been described. The conclusions summarise the most significant general findings of this study besides suggesting some further research for the future

Characterization of Rate Region in Interference Channels with Constrained Power

In this paper, an $n$-user Gaussian interference channel, where the power of the transmitters are subject to some upper-bounds is studied. We obtain a closed-form expression for the rate region of such a channel based on the Perron-Frobenius theorem. While the boundary of the rate region for the case of unconstrained power is a well-established result, this is the first result for the case of constrained power. We extend this result to the time-varying channels and obtain a closed-form solution for the rate region of such channels.Comment: 21 Pages, The Conference Version is Submitted to IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT2007

Optimizing Employment and learning system using big data and knowledge management based on deduction graph

In recent years, big data has usefully been deployed by organizations with the aim of getting a better prediction for the future. Moreover, knowledge management systems are being used by organizations to identify and create knowledge. Here, the output from analysis of big data and a knowledge management system are used to develop a new model with the goal of minimizing the cost of implementing new recognized processes including staff training, transferring and employment costs. Strategies are proposed from big data analysis and new processes are defined accordingly. The company requires various skills to execute the proposed processes. Organization\u2019s current experts and their skills are known through a pre-established knowledge management system. After a gap analysis, managers can make decisions about the expert arrangement, training programs and employment to bridge the gap and accomplish their goals. Finally, deduction graph is used to analyze the model

Gender Differential in the Association of Body Mass Index and Abdominal Obesity with Prehypertension and Hypertension in Iranian Adults

*Objective:* The aim of this study was to determine the gender differential in the relationship of body mass index (BMI) and abdominal obesity with blood pressure (BP) and prevalence of hypertension (HTN) and prehypertension (Pre-HTN) among the adult population of Iran.

*Design:* A nationwide cross-sectional survey was conducted from December 2004 to February 2005. The selection was conducted by stratified probability cluster sampling through household family members in Iran.

*Subjects and Measurements:* Weight, height, waist circumference (WC), and systolic and diastolic BP of 45,082 men and 44,322 women aged 15-65 (mean 39.2) were measured. 

*Results:* The prevalence of HTN was 25.2% in men and 24.8% in women; and 50.1% of men and 39.1% of women were pre-hypertensive. WC and BMI were strongly associated with BP in both genders. Multivariate analysis revealed that both WC and BMI had the stronger association with HTN and Pre-HTN in men than women. Compared to men and women with normal weight, the multivariate-adjusted odds ratio (OR) (95% confidence interval) of HTN was 5.75 (5.13, 6.44) for men and 4.29 (3.95, 4.66) for women with BMI ≥ 30. The multivariate OR of prevalence HTN in men with abdominal obesity compared with men without was 3.76 (3.41, 4.22) and in women, 2.92 (2.73, 3.13).

*Conclusion:* These data indicate that both BMI and WC had the stronger association with HTN and Pre-HTN in men than women. 
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Effects of lead on the development of Drosophila melanogaster

Background and Purpose: Lead as a heavy metal and environmental pollutant causes sperm abnormalities, organogenesis, morphogenesis disorders and miscarriage. There are some similarities between mammals and Drosophila melanogaster. The present study is to investigate the lead-ion effects on some developmental aspects of Drosophila as a model. Materials and Methods: Five pairs of three-day flies were added to the culture containing different concentrations of lead-ion to mate and lay eggs. Transformation rate of larvae to pupa, pupa to adult, the required time for insect development and morphometric changes as well as eggs hatching rate for insects that developed in culture containing lead-ion were studied. Results: Culture-medium lead-ion (20-300 mg/L) increased larvae and pupae periods, but decreased the conversion rate of larvae to pupa, pupa to adult and eggs hatching. It also decreased the growth rate of larvae length/ width, pupa length/width and adult length. The results show that eggs length/width did not change. Conclusion: Factors such as the lead-ion interference with enzymes performances were involved in metamorphosis, reducing the mitochondrial cristae and ATP synthesis. In addition, the negative effect of lead on the production of growth hormones, metabolic enzymes and genes expression are the suggesting aspects for future study

Compiling the Target Village Indicators for Tourism Development in Iran and Their Evaluation (Case study: Semnan Province Villages)

Rural development can be regarded as the process of empowerment and promotion of life in the context of quality of life and the environment, efficiency and economic self-sufficiency and the maintenance and improvement of environmental quality in rural areas (Zmanipoor, 1994). There are some approaches applying tourism as a strategy for rural areas. These approaches, according to the increasing destruction of villages and agriculture, are trying to offer new strategies to revitalize rural areas by creating complementary activities or transform these areas due to their natural and human resources and the only way to rehabilitate the villages is to offer partial programs and strategies to utilize natural and human resources and could make income and increase the level of welfare of the people’s lives in rural areas (Holland & Dixey, 2003). From the 70s of the twentieth century, tourism activities in rural areas have been increased dramatically in all parts of the developed countries around the world which played a key role on development of rural areas that were lagging in terms of social and economic aspects (Perales, 2002). Therefore, industry experts acknowledge that developing rural tourism will not be possible without reorganizing and extensive rural areas on the basis of scientific and comprehensive planning. In this study, it was tried to evaluate the indices using Hierarchical analysis model of AHP by reviewing the tourism condition and determining the effective indices on determining the target villages of tourism and determine its role in developing villages. In order to test theses indices the target villages of tourism in Semnan Province was evaluates and prioritized

A Collection of Novel Algorithms for Wetland Classification with SAR and Optical Data

Wetlands are valuable natural resources that provide many benefits to the environment, and thus, mapping wetlands is crucially important. We have developed land cover and wetland classification algorithms that have general applicability to different geographical locations. We also want a high level of classification accuracy (i.e., more than 90%). Over that past 2 years, we have been developing an operational wetland classification approach aimed at a Newfoundland/Labrador province-wide wetland inventory. We have developed and published several algorithms to classify wetlands using multi-source data (i.e., polarimetric SAR and multi-spectral optical imagery), object-based image analysis, and advanced machine-learning tools. The algorithms have been tested and verified on many large pilot sites across the province and provided overall and class-based accuracies of about 90%. The developed methods have general applicability to other Canadian provinces (with field validation data) allowing the creation of a nation-wide wetland inventory system

Evident Sclerotic Skip Metastasis in Plain Radiograph in Juvenile Femoral Osteosarcoma: A Case Report of a 15-Year-Old Boy

Background: Osteosarcoma (OS) is an uncommon bone cancer presented by tissue swelling and nonspecific bone pain. In case of distant metastasis, this malignancy commonly invades the lungs. Skip metastasis is an uncommon type of invasion originating from the malignant bone to adjoining bone tissues detected by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with high accuracy. Skip metastasis is an uncommon finding in plain radiography of osteosarcoma cases.Case presentation: In the current study, we have reported a case of juvenile osteosarcoma with multi-focal skip metastasis, detected by simple plain radiography at first assessments. Further imaging and pathology assessment confirmed skip lesions in the background of high-grade chondroblastic osteosarcoma. Despite the recommendations, the patient and his legal guardian did not consent for further follow up and treatment.Discussion and conclusion: Skip metastases are rarely diagnosed by plain radiography in OS cases. This condition is usually diagnosed by magnetic resonance imaging. Here, we reported a neglected and late-diagnosed case of osteosarcoma with skip lesions in a young boy, simply detected by X-ray. The following article concentrates on the importance of detecting these metastases for their correlation with patient’s survival, and describes different imaging modalities for finding them

EchoGLAD: Hierarchical Graph Neural Networks for Left Ventricle Landmark Detection on Echocardiograms

The functional assessment of the left ventricle chamber of the heart requires detecting four landmark locations and measuring the internal dimension of the left ventricle and the approximate mass of the surrounding muscle. The key challenge of automating this task with machine learning is the sparsity of clinical labels, i.e., only a few landmark pixels in a high-dimensional image are annotated, leading many prior works to heavily rely on isotropic label smoothing. However, such a label smoothing strategy ignores the anatomical information of the image and induces some bias. To address this challenge, we introduce an echocardiogram-based, hierarchical graph neural network (GNN) for left ventricle landmark detection (EchoGLAD). Our main contributions are: 1) a hierarchical graph representation learning framework for multi-resolution landmark detection via GNNs; 2) induced hierarchical supervision at different levels of granularity using a multi-level loss. We evaluate our model on a public and a private dataset under the in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. For the ID setting, we achieve the state-of-the-art mean absolute errors (MAEs) of 1.46 mm and 1.86 mm on the two datasets. Our model also shows better OOD generalization than prior works with a testing MAE of 4.3 mm.Comment: To be published in MICCAI 202

Evaluate the Therapeutic Effect of Allicin (L-cysteine) on Clinical Presentation and Prognosis in Patients with COVID-19

The antiviral effectiveness of allicin (L-cysteine) has been shown by numerous studies in both levels of clinical and animals. The aim of this study was to evaluate the therapeutic effect of allicin (L-cysteine) on clinical presentation and prognosis. In the current study, 66 patients with COVID-19 based on clinical, radiological presentations and RT-PCR results, were enrolled in two groups of placebo and allicin. In the both allicin (L-cysteine) and placebo groups (n=33 in each group), the capsules were prescribed two times a day for two weeks. Clinical signs and symptoms, blood parameters and chest CT scan were evaluated before and two weeks after treatment. The results showed that allicin (L-cysteine) could significantly impact on improvement of signs and symptoms of COVID-19 after two weeks of treatment in comparison to placebo. Allicin (L-cysteine) not only improve the clinical signs, but also ameliorate the lab and radiological data, which suggest a therapeutic effect for this agent in COVID-19. Our data suggest the therapeutic effect of allicin (L-cysteine) on COVID-19 through improvement of clinical symptoms and acceleration of the healing process