Prioritizing policy tools to support development of IoT technologies in Iran

The Internet of Things is a new perspective on the information technology industry that encompasses all technical, social and economic concepts. Identifying priority application areas for this technology is one of the key points for its effective use. Governments also have a variety of tools for policy-making to support the development of this technology. Therefore, knowing which tool has a higher priority for support is a very important point that can not only prevent the loss of resources but also improve the speed of development. In this research, using the opinion of experts and using the TOPSIS method, an attempt has been made to identify the priority of IoT application areas as well as the priority of government support policy tools in these areas. The results of this research have shown that the important areas in this field respectively are Smart cities, Factories and industries, Shipping, Healthcare, Supply chain management, Buildings and houses and finally Agriculture and animal husbandry. Also Government policy tools respectively, in order of priority, are Financial and Investment Incentives, Flexible regulatory, Tax Exemption, Deploying IOT applications in E-government, Standards and Accreditation, Technology Infrastructure, Macro Policies, Application Infrastructure, Cybersecurity Regulation, Privacy Regulation

A Reconsideration of the Number of the Prophet’s Wars

In hadith and historical sources, more than eighty wars, comprising ghazwas (the wars in which the Prophet was present) and sariyyas (the wars in which the Prophet was not present), have been attributed to the Prophet. Scholars of history have mentioned about twenty-seven ghazwas and more than fifty sariyyas, all of which took place during the ten years after the migration to Medina until the demise of the Prophet. Apart from the famous battles such as Badr, Uhud, Khandaq, Bani Qurayzah, Khaybar, Muta, Tabuk and Hunayn, many of these ghazwas and sariyyas are unknown except to some historians. This raises the question of why there must have been more than eighty wars in ten years, that is, almost one war every ninety days. This research tries to examine the real number of the Prophet's wars. The figure of eighty is greatly exaggerated.and was closer to twenty

Diffusion tensor tractograghy can affect treatment strategy to remove brain occupying mass lesions

Radical resection of a pathological lesion along with the preservation of eloquent cerebral tissue is the principle goal of neurosurgery. Brain lesions are usually diagnosed by conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), but this method is unable to describe the relationship between lesions and neighboring specific white matter (WM) tracts. Diffusion tensor tractograghy (DTT) is a new sophisticated imaging modality to reveal the neural fibers and their relationships with lesions. In the current study we assess that how diffusion tensor tractograghy can affect on treatment planning in patients afflicted by different types of brain lesions. In this prospective observational study, eight patients with brain mass lesion underwent conventional brain MRI pulse sequences and DTT imaging with 1.5 Tesla system using 64 independent diffusion encoding directions between December 2011 to January 2013.Acquired images were assessed by the neuroradiologist and neurosurgeon. Finally, the treatment strategies were compared using data before and after the tractograghy. The treatment strategy in six patients changed from radiotherapy into the craniotomy by using tractograghy data, in one patient changed from radio surgery to craniotomy and in one patient, neurosurgeon preferred to avoid operation. As we can infer from this study, based on the tractograghy results, the treatment technique may be changed, and the treatment plan could be devised with more accuracy and in case of surgery, may lead to less post-operative neurological deficits and better outcome results

Procalcitonin to guide taking blood cultures in the intensive care unit; a cluster-randomized controlled trial

Objectives: We aimed to study the safety and efficacy of procalcitonin in guiding blood cultures taking in critically ill patients with suspected infection. Methods: We performed a cluster-randomized, multi-centre, single-blinded, cross-over trial. Patients suspected of infection in whom taking blood for culture was indicated were included. The participating intensive care units were stratified and randomized by treatment regimen into a control group and a procalcitonin-guided group. All patients included in this trial followed the regimen that was allocated to the intensive care unit for that period. In both groups, blood was drawn at the same moment for a procalcitonin measurement and blood cultures. In the procalcitonin-guided group, blood cultures were sent to the department of medical microbiology when the procalcitonin was>0.25 ng/mL. The main outcome was safety, expressed as mortality at day 28 and day 90. Results: The control group included 288 patients and the procalcitonin-guided group included 276 patients. The 28- and 90-day mortality rates in the procalcitonin-guided group were 29% (80/276) and 38% (105/276), respectively. The mortality rates in the control group were 32% (92/288) at day 28 and 40% (115/288) at day 90. The intention-to-treat analysis showed hazard ratios of 0.85 (95% CI 0.62-1.17) and 0.89 (95% CI 0.67-1.17) for 28-day and 90-day mortality, respectively. The results were deemed non-inferior because the upper limit of the 95% CI was below the margin of 1.20. Conclusion: Applying procalcitonin to guide blood cultures in critically ill patients with suspected infection seems to be safe, but the benefits may be limited. Trial registration: . ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: ID . NCT01847079. Registered on 24 April 2013, retrospectively registered

Seroprevalence of Toxoplasma gondii in Military Personnel and their Families Referred to the Military Hospital in Tehran, Iran

Background: Toxoplasmosis is one of the world's most common infections in human and other warm-blooded vertebrates and has the most extensive universal spread. The purpose of this study is determining the seroprevalence of human Toxoplasma gondii infection, in the military personnel and their families referred to Baqiyatallah hospital, 2011-2015.Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional study, the serum of 3370 person contain 770 men and 2600 women attending the laboratories were selected and after completing the questionnaires and also by implementing Chemiluminescence method, these serums were examined for the presence of IgM and IgG immunoglobulins of the Toxoplasma gondii.Results: The results were analyzed using the chi-square test. They showed that there were no statistical relationships between the prevalence of IgG and gender in 2011, 2013, (P>0.05) but there were significant relationships between them in 2012, 2014 and 2015 (P<0.05), also there were no statistical relationships between the prevalence of IgM and gender in all years (P>0.05). The results showed that there were statistical relationships among IgG and age (P<0.01) but there was no statistical relationships between IgM and age in all cases (P>0.05).Conclusion: The results showed high prevalence of Toxoplasmosis in the military personnel and their families in Baqiyatallah hospital. The prevalence of IgG was somehow in the range and positive IgG titer was somewhat higher than what was reported in other studies in the North-West of the country; this could be partly due to the sensitivity and specificity of Chemiluminescence method compared to other methods of serology in diagnosis of Toxoplasmosis

The intensive care infection score - a novel marker for the prediction of infection and its severity

Background: The prediction of infection and its severity remains difficult in the critically ill. A novel, simple biomarker derived from five blood-cell derived parameters that characterize the innate immune response in routine blood samples, the intensive care infection score (ICIS), could be helpful in this respect. We therefore compared the predictive value of the ICIS with that of the white blood cell count (WBC), C-reactive protein (CRP) and procalcitonin (PCT) for infection and its severity in critically ill patients. Methods: We performed a multicenter, cluster-randomized, crossover study in critically ill patients between January 2013 and September 2014. Patients with a suspected infection for which blood cultures were taken by the attending intensivist were included. Blood was taken at the same time for WBC, ICIS, CRP and PCT measurements in the control study periods. Results of imaging and cultures were collected. Patients were divided into groups of increasing likelihood of infection and invasiveness: group 1 without infection or with possible infection irrespective of cultures, group 2 with probable or microbiologically proven local infection without blood stream infection (BSI) and group 3 with BSI irrespective of local infection. Septic shock was assessed. Results: In total, 301 patients were enrolled. CRP, PCT and ICIS were higher in groups 2 and 3 than group 1. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) for the prediction of infection was 0.70 for CRP, 0.71 for PCT and 0.73 for ICIS (P < 0.001). For the prediction of septic shock the AUROC was 0.73 for CRP, 0.85 for PCT and 0.76 for ICIS. These AUROC did not differ fro

Suppressing quantum errors by scaling a surface code logical qubit

Practical quantum computing will require error rates that are well below what is achievable with physical qubits. Quantum error correction offers a path to algorithmically-relevant error rates by encoding logical qubits within many physical qubits, where increasing the number of physical qubits enhances protection against physical errors. However, introducing more qubits also increases the number of error sources, so the density of errors must be sufficiently low in order for logical performance to improve with increasing code size. Here, we report the measurement of logical qubit performance scaling across multiple code sizes, and demonstrate that our system of superconducting qubits has sufficient performance to overcome the additional errors from increasing qubit number. We find our distance-5 surface code logical qubit modestly outperforms an ensemble of distance-3 logical qubits on average, both in terms of logical error probability over 25 cycles and logical error per cycle ($2.914\%\pm 0.016\%$ compared to $3.028\%\pm 0.023\%$). To investigate damaging, low-probability error sources, we run a distance-25 repetition code and observe a $1.7\times10^{-6}$ logical error per round floor set by a single high-energy event ($1.6\times10^{-7}$ when excluding this event). We are able to accurately model our experiment, and from this model we can extract error budgets that highlight the biggest challenges for future systems. These results mark the first experimental demonstration where quantum error correction begins to improve performance with increasing qubit number, illuminating the path to reaching the logical error rates required for computation.Comment: Main text: 6 pages, 4 figures. v2: Update author list, references, Fig. S12, Table I