BACKGROUND Measuring the impacts of oral conditions on quality of life is an important part of oral health needs assessment. For this purpose a variety of oral health-related quality of life instruments have been developed. To use a scale in a new context or with a different groups of people, it is necessary to re-establish its psychometric properties. The objectives of this study are to develo...

The Dynamics of Immigrant Welfare and Labor Market Behavior This paper analyzes transitions into and out of 3 different labor market states, social assistance, unemployment and employment. We estimate a dynamic multinomial logit model, controlling for endogenous initial condition and unobserved heterogeneity, using a large representative Swedish panel data set, LINDA, for the years 1990 to 1996...

Verbatim sentence recall is widely used to test the language competence of native and non-native speakers since it involves comprehension and production of connected speech. However, we assume that, to maintain surface information, sentence recall relies particularly on attentional resources, which differentially affects native and non-native speakers. Since even in near-natives language proces...

1. One line of thinking is that highly successful plant invaders achieve dominance in recipient communities via competitive superiority over natives. In contrast, it has been proposed that exotic species attain dominance not by competitive prowess but due to their colonizing abilities after disturbance. Interestingly, there have been relatively few attempts to quantify competitive effects of in...

Russian ( Acipenser gueldenstaedtii), Persian ( A. persicus) and Siberian ( A. baerii) sturgeons are closely related 'Ponto-Caspian' species. Investigation of their population structure is an important problem, the solution of which determines measures for conservation of these species. According to previous studies, 'baerii-like' mitotypes were found in the Caspian Sea among 35% of Russian stu...

This study was conducted at the Bukhara breeding centre (Ouzbekistan, Central Asia) on Persian gazelles (Gazella subgutturosa subgutturosa) and at Thumammah (Saudi Arabia) on sand gazelles (Gazella subgutturosa marica). Plasma prolactin (PRL) and progesterone were determined in groups of females. Because these females were under two different photoperiods (20 degrees N in Saudi Arabia and 40 de...

In this paper, we address the shortage of evaluation benchmarks on Persian (Farsi) language by creating and making available a new benchmark for English to Persian Cross Lingual Word Sense Disambiguation (CL-WSD). In creating the benchmark, we follow the format of the SemEval 2013 CL-WSD task, such that the introduced tools of the task can also be applied on the benchmark. In fact, the new benc...

BACKGROUND Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a gastrointestinal disease that is accompanied by pain, diarrhea, constipation and abdominal bloating. Hence, IBS has a major effect on patients' quality of life. OBJECTIVES The present study aimed to examine validity and reliability of the Persian version of the IBS-QOL questionnaire in Iran. PATIENTS AND METHODS The original 34 items of the IBS...

Uncovering urban mobility patterns is crucial for further predicting and controlling spatially embedded events. In this article, we analyze millions of geographical check-ins crawled from a Chinese leading location-based social networking service, Jiepang.com, which contains demographical information and thus allows the group-specific studies. We found distinguishable mobility patterns of nativ...