Male reproductive health has deteriorated considerably in the last few decades. Nutritional, socioeconomic, lifestyle and environmental factors (among others) have been attributed to compromising male reproductive health. In recent years, a large volume of evidence has accumulated that suggests that the trend of decreasing male fertility (in terms of sperm count, quality and other changes in ma...

background: growth failure in children less than five years old can lead to the serious complications such as increased mortality, learning difficulties or physical disability. the aim of this study was to investigate the non-organic factors affecting the growth trend in less than two years children living in zanjan, iran.   methods: this longitudinal study was conducted on a sample of 3566 chi...

The problem of trend estimation in econometrics has had a long history, and the techniques which can be deployed have been evolving gradually over many years. The forces of evolution have been twofold. On one hand is the gradual improvement in statistical and computational techniques which has been accompanied by improvements in the processing power of computers and in the accessibility of soft...

THEWORK OF DIVERSITY IN LIBRARIES BEGINS at the crossroad where superiority, inaction, and denial become intolerable. Yet in working toward true diversity, we work without the familiar construct of a mainstream. We respond to, or ignore, repetitive critique of being too exclusive or not inclusive enough. We decide whether it is appropriate to quantify the existence of a people or to trust what ...

The problem of estimating underlying trends in time series data arises in a variety of disciplines. In this paper we propose a variation on Hodrick-Prescott (H-P) filtering, a widely used method for trend estimation. The proposed l1 trend filtering method substitutes a sum of absolute values (i.e., an l1-norm) for the sum of squares used in H-P filtering to penalize variations in the estimated ...

The study traces the likely route of the movement of fertility through the demographic transition. The information is critical for construction of population projections as well as for monitoring and evaluating action programmes The original P/F ratio method and modified versions, one through the intermediary of relational Gompertz model , for analysing birth history data, are employed in asses...

A model with leisure production and endogenous retirement is used to explain the declining labor force participation rates of elderly males. The model is calibrated to cross-sectional data on the labor force participation rates of elderly US males by age, their median drop in market consumption and leisure good expenditure share in the year 2000. Running the calibrated model for the period 1850...

The calcium binding sites of Bakers' Yeast Transketolase (TK) was elucidated by estimating the pKa values of the functional groups that bind to calcium. These pKa's were found to be 6.25 and 7.2 relating to the pKa's of the two immidazol moieties of histidine residues on the enzyme. The rate of the binding of calcium to the enzyme was obtained separately as a function of pH. Maximum values ...

Mixed-model assembly lines are increasingly accepted in many industrial environments to meet the growing trend of greater product variability, diversification of customer demands, and shorter life cycles. In this research, a new mathematical model is presented considering balancing a mixed-model U-line and human-related issues, simultaneously. The objective function consists of two separate com...