PRESIDENTIAL-CONGRESSIONAL RELATIONS IN US FOREIGN POLICY DECISION-MAKING: A THEORETICAL TREATISE

The present paper aims to offer a conceptual exploration of the Presidential-Congressional relations in the US foreign policy decision-making. The US foreign policy decision-making arguably takes place within a functional synthesization of compromised bureaucratic rationality on the one hand, and the ideological, partisan and institutional interests and tendencies of individuals in possession of power on the other. In such a setting, the argument being put forth is that the Presidency is generally situated and equipped reasonably the best to deal with foreign affairs while the gamut of the Congressional authority in foreign policy varies based on the type of decisions made, playing a key role in distribution of resources to achieve particular objectives. In other words, the process of US foreign policy decision-making occasionally lacks the essential structural efficiency to prevent the executive branch from circumventing the Constitution. An executive branch operating in secrecy without legislative accountability is undoubtedly dangerous; therefore, a host of specialized means and preventive measures are required to be taken and practiced in order to avoid such danger and help keep US political structure in checks and balances. Attempt is made to contextualize this argument within a) the domain of decision-making theoretical models presented by G. Allison, and then b) rather practical discussions on requirements of foreign policy proposed by L. Hamilton followed by, c) a brief overview on actual developments affecting power relations in US foreign policy after the Cold War

Addressing Semantic Interoperability, Privacy and Security Concerns in Electronic Health Records

The use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) in healthcare has the potential of reducing medical errors, minimizing healthcare cost and significantly improving the healthcare service quality. However, there is a barrier in healthcare data and information exchange between various healthcare systems due to the lack of interoperability. Also, with the implementation of EHR system, there are security and privacy concerns in the storage and transferring data entities.  The healthcare interoperability problem remains an issue of further research and this paper proposes a semantic interoperability framework for solving  this problem by allowing healthcare stakeholders and organizations (doctors, clinics, hospitals)using various healthcare standards to exchange data and its semantics, which can be understood by both machines and humans. Moreover, the proposed framework takes into consideration the security aspects in the semantic interoperability framework by utilizing data encryption and other technologies to secure the communication for the EHR information while ensuring real time data availability.                                                                                                  Keywords:. Semantic interoperability; Interoperability standards; Electronic Health records(EHR); Artifical Intelligence Techniques. Natural Language Processing (NLP), Word2Vec, skip gram, CBO

Perception of musical emotion in the students with cognitive and acquired hearing loss

Objective Hearing loss can affect the perception of emotional reaction to the music. The present study investigated whether the students with Cognitive hearing loss exposed to the deaf culture, percept the same emotion from the music as students with acquired hearing loss. Materials & Methods Participants were divided into two groups; 30 students with bilaterally Cognitive moderate to severe hearing loss that were selected from deaf schools located in Tehran, Iran and 30 students with an acquired hearing loss with the same degree of hearing loss selected from Amiralam Hospital, Tehran, Iran and compared with the group of 30 age and gender-matched normal hearing subjects served our control in 2012. The musical stimuli consisted of three different sequences of music, (sadness, happiness, and fear) each with the duration of 60 sec. The students were asked to point to the lists of words that best matched with their emotions. Results Emotional perception of sadness, happiness, and fear in congenital hearing loss children was significantly poorly than acquired hearing loss and normal hearing group (P<0.001). There was no significant difference in the emotional perception of sadness, happiness, and fear among the group of acquired hearing loss and normal hearing group (P=0.75), (P=1) and (P=0.16), respectively. Conclusion Neural plasticity induced by hearing assistant devises may be affected by the time when a hearing aid was first fitted and how the auditory system responds to the reintroduction of certain sounds via amplification. Therefore, children who experienced auditory input of different sound patterns in their early childhood will show more perceptual flexibility in different situations than the children with congenital hearing loss and culture. © 2018, Iranian Child Neurology Society. All rights reserved

Perception of musical emotion in the students with cognitive and acquired hearing loss

Objective Hearing loss can affect the perception of emotional reaction to the music. The present study investigated whether the students with Cognitive hearing loss exposed to the deaf culture, percept the same emotion from the music as students with acquired hearing loss. Materials & Methods Participants were divided into two groups; 30 students with bilaterally Cognitive moderate to severe hearing loss that were selected from deaf schools located in Tehran, Iran and 30 students with an acquired hearing loss with the same degree of hearing loss selected from Amiralam Hospital, Tehran, Iran and compared with the group of 30 age and gender-matched normal hearing subjects served our control in 2012. The musical stimuli consisted of three different sequences of music, (sadness, happiness, and fear) each with the duration of 60 sec. The students were asked to point to the lists of words that best matched with their emotions. Results Emotional perception of sadness, happiness, and fear in congenital hearing loss children was significantly poorly than acquired hearing loss and normal hearing group (P<0.001). There was no significant difference in the emotional perception of sadness, happiness, and fear among the group of acquired hearing loss and normal hearing group (P=0.75), (P=1) and (P=0.16), respectively. Conclusion Neural plasticity induced by hearing assistant devises may be affected by the time when a hearing aid was first fitted and how the auditory system responds to the reintroduction of certain sounds via amplification. Therefore, children who experienced auditory input of different sound patterns in their early childhood will show more perceptual flexibility in different situations than the children with congenital hearing loss and culture. © 2018, Iranian Child Neurology Society. All rights reserved

Stem cell-based approach for the treatment of Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative brain disorder which is around 1.5 times more common in men than in women. Currently, drug medications, surgery, and lifestyle changes are common approaches to PD, while all of them focused on reducing the symptoms. Therefore, regenerative medicine based on stem cell (SC) therapies has raised a promising hope. Various types of SCs have been used in basic and experimental studies relevant to PD, including embryonic pluripotential stem cells, mesenchymal (MSCs) and induced pluripotent SCs (iPSCs). MSCs have several advantages over other counterparts. They are easily accessible which can be obtained from various tissues such as bone marrow, adipose tissue, peripheral blood, etc. with avoiding ethical problems. Therefore, MSCs is attractive clinically because there are no related ethical and immunological concerns . Further studies are needed to answer some crucial questions about the different issues in SC therapy. Accordingly, SC-based therapy for PD also needed more complementary evaluation in both basic and clinical study areas

Leanness assessment in an auto parts manufacturer

This study applies main Lean Manufacturing (LM) techniques to investigate the accordance of an auto parts manufacturer from Iranian automotive industry. Although the concept of LM has been successfully applied in previous studies, concurrent investigation of its requirements is less examined, especially in developing countries. In addition, the majority of previous studies have applied qualitative leanness assessment tools to investigate LM implementation while it is necessary to focus on both qualitative and quantitate techniques. In this regard, this study has applied seven wastes of LM, Value Stream Mapping (VSM) and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) to investigate the accordance of an auto parts manufacture with LM requirements. According to the obtained results, this manufacturer is moderately in accordance with LM philosophy

The Main Targets of Okadaic Acid Toxin in Human Intestinal Caco-2 Cells: An Investigation of Biological Systems

Background: Okadaic acid (OA) is a toxin of polluted shellfish. Consuming the contaminated shellfish is accompanied by diarrhea and paralytic and amnesic disorders. There is a correlation between diarrhea and the consumed OA. Determining the critical targeted genes by OA was the aim of this study. Methods: The transcriptomic data about the effect of OA on human intestinal caco-2 cells were extracted from gene expression omnibus (GEO) and evaluated via the GEO2R program. The significant differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were included in a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network and the central nodes were enriched via gene ontology to find the crucial affected biological terms. Results: Among the 178 significant DEGs plus 50 added first neighbors, four hub-bottleneck genes (ALB, FOS, JUN, and MYC) were determined. Twenty-eight critical biological terms were identified as the dysregulated individuals in response to the presence of OA. “ERK1/2-activator protein-1 (AP-1) complex binds KDM6B promoter” was highlighted as the major class of biological terms. Conclusion: It can be concluded that down-regulation of ALB as a potent central gene leads to impairment of blood homeostasis in the presence of OA. Up-regulation of the other three central genes (JUN, FOS, and MYC) grossly affects the vital pathways in the human body

VectorDisk: a microfluidic platform integrating diagnostic markers for evidence-based mosquito control

Effective mosquito monitoring relies on the accurate identification and characterization of the target population. Since this process requires specialist knowledge and equipment that is not widely available, automated field-deployable systems are highly desirable. We present a centrifugal microfluidic cartridge, the VectorDisk, which integrates TaqMan PCR assays in two feasibility studies, aiming to assess multiplexing capability, specificity, and reproducibility in detecting disk-integrated vector-related assays. In the first study, pools of 10 mosquitoes were used as samples. We tested 18 disks with 27 DNA and RNA assays each, using a combination of multiple microfluidic chambers and detection wavelengths (geometric and color multiplexing) to identify mosquito and malaria parasite species as well as insecticide resistance mechanisms. In the second study, purified nucleic acids served as samples to test arboviral and malaria infective mosquito assays. Nine disks were tested with 14 assays each. No false positive results were detected on any of the disks. The coe cient of variation in reproducibility tests was <10%. The modular nature of the platform, the easy adaptation of the primer/probe panels, the cold chain independence, the rapid (2-3 h) analysis, and the assay multiplexing capacity are key features, rendering the VectorDisk a potential candidate for automated vector analysis