Medical podcasting in Iran; pilot, implementation and attitude evaluation

Podcasting has become a popular means of transferring knowledge in higher education through making lecture contents available to students at their convenience. Accessing courses on media players provides students with enhanced learning opportunities. Development of teaching methods able to cope with ever-changing nature of medicine is crucial to train the millennium students. Pharmacology education in Tehran University of Medical Sciences has been based on lectures so far; our aim was to implement a pilot study to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of offering the course contents as podcasts as well as evaluating whether such program can be feasible in our educational program. 46% of students downloaded the podcast according to our download center. 48% favored usage of both internet and DVD-ROM concurrently. Overall 96% of students perceived that podcasting had a positive impact on their learning in pharmacology course. Our results indicate that most of attendants proposed the positive yields of podcasting despite low usage of it, mainly as a pre-class preparing tool.publisher versio

Pressure vessel design simulation: Implementing of multi-swarm particle swarm optimization

The new era knowledge of optimization algorithm is massively boosted recently. Among several optimization models, multi-swarm approach has been proposed most recently for balancing the exploration and exploitation capability through the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. The proposed multi-swarm model which is called Meeting Room Approach (MRA), is tested and evaluated based on solving normal and large-scale problems. In the current research, the feasibility of the proposed Multi-Swarm Particle Swarm Optimization (MPSO) is adopted to simulate mechanical engineering problem namely pressure vessel design (PVD). The results indicated the potential of the proposed MPSO model on simulating the PVD problem with optimum solution over the standalone PSO. Further, the current study results authenticated against other famous meta-heuristics. Overall, MPSO reported an excellent optimization solution with fast convergence learning process

Advances in Network Accessibility and Reconstruction after Major Earthquakes

International audienc