Background: Land-use effects on grassland flora are difficult to predict due poor understanding of species losses caused by transformation.Objectives: To determine changes in diversity and composition comparing transformed with untransformed grassland.Methods: Floristics paired plots were sampled within 18 sites (representing agricultural urban land-uses) neighbouring grassland.Results: Endemic...

The yield loss simulation (YLS) and the MACROS LIQ.CSM models were used to simulate the effect of stem borer damage at a detillering rate of 5, 15, 30, 60% at vegetative, panicle initiation and grain filing stages, on yield of rice cultivar?s Ratna. This stem borer damage during vegetative and panicle initiation stages was not simulated appropriately by both the models. Relatively MACROS simul...

Background: The burden of obesity and diet-related chronic diseases is increasing in Iran, and prevention and treatment strategies are needed to address this problem. The aim of this study was to determine the outcome, cost, safety and cost-consequence of non-invasive weight loss interventions in Iran.   Methods: We performed a systematic review to compare non-invasive interventions (cr...

The purpose of this research was to introduce and describe a model for Fire Quantitative Risk Assessment of in petroleum Storage Tanks. A novel model was designed to determine the risk of a fire occurrence using of Loss Causation and Swiss cheese models. Then, based on FTA, model and its integration with our initial proposed model, the final model was obtained for fire hazard determination in h...

Spurred in part by the rising economic costs of natural disasters, there has been a dramatic increase in efforts aimed at estimating the direct and indirect losses caused by earthquakes. For example, in 1997 the journal Earthquake Spectra devoted a special issue to loss estimation. Papers appearing in that publication ranged from cost-benefit analyses of structural rehabilitation strategies (D’...

With the increasing interest in optical burst switching (OBS) networks, the performance assessment of this kind of networks became of particular concern. Recently, some authors suggested that burst loss was not a reliable performance assessment metric for OBS networks. Refuting this claim, this paper presents simulation results obtained for a ring network, using real tributary IPv4 packets as s...

This chapter summarizes the recent literature on risk adjustment, synthesizing the theoretical and empirical literatures, emphasizing areas of current research and policy interest. The paper relates optimal risk adjustment to the previous theory and empirical work. The empirical estimation section covers choice of an objective function, different types of information that can be used, conceptua...

PURPOSE The aim of this study is to investigate the factors related to dietary lapse occurrence in a community sample of dieters. METHODS An ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methodology, via mobile phone-based diaries, was employed to record dietary lapse occurrences in a group of dieters (N = 80; M age  = 41.21 ± 15.60 years; M BMI = 30.78 ± 7.26) over 7 days. RESULTS Analyses indicat...

Traditionally, the pricing of terrorism risk has been discovered from the balance of supply and demand in the insurance market, rather than evaluated from actuarial principles. Risk selection through the use of site security surveys has helped reduce the number of inferior risks, and systematic portfolio risk aggregation has limited the Probable Maximum Loss from any attack scenario. With such ...