introduction the major threat to habitability of a region may be degradation of arid lands, particularly in developing countries where many people depend upon restricted resources for their livelihood. although land degradation process in arid regions (desertification) is not new or site specific, the environmental awareness in a world board scale has extended and generated a wider public inter...

Introduction: Landfill siting is a difficult, complex, and protracted process, which requires evaluating different criteria. A suitable site should be located to dispose the municipal solid wastes hygienically (sanitary landfill), which is one of the fundamental subjects related to the environmental stability of the human settlements. The aim was to select a suitable waste disposal area using f...

accurate knowledge of spatial distribution of soil physical and chemical properties is needed for suitable management and proper use of rangelands in masileh plain, qom, iran. in present study, for the spatial modeling of chemical and physical parameters such as sodium (na), calcium (ca), soluble potassium (k), magnesium (mg), electrical conductivity (ec), saturation percentage (sp%), silt, cla...

A new notion is introduced of matrix order indices which relate the matrix norm and its trace. These indices can be defined for any given matrix. They are especially important for matrices describing many-body systems, equilibrium as well as nonequilibrium, for which the indices present a quantitative measure of the level of ordering. They characterize not only the long-range order, but also mi...

AIM To assess the extent to which a multivariate approach to modeling interrelated hematological indices provides more informative results than the traditional approach of modeling each index separately. MATERIALS & METHODS The effects of demographics and lifestyle on ten hematological indices collected from a Dutch population-based sample (n = 3278) were studied, jointly using multivariate d...

Research in human development often relies on composites, that is, composed variables such as indices. Their composite nature renders these inaccessible to conventional factor-centric psychometric validation techniques confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). In the context of research, there is currently no appropriate technique available for assessing composites with same degree rigor comparable k...

The present study compared simple thermal indices and the indices derived from energy budget models in the northwest of Iran. For this purpose, the air temperature, solar radiation, relative humidity, cloud, cover and wind speed of 13 meteorological stations in the northwest of Iran during the  the period of 1986 to 2007 were selected for comparison. The results which were extracted using Biokl...

The ornamental and medicinal saffron with high economic value encompasses a great share of non-oil exports in Iran. As a result, identification of suitable areas for saffron cultivation in Ardabil province located in northwestern part of Iran necessitate effective planning for expanding cultivation and production of this product. Given the effect of various environmental factors on growth and y...

The methods of nonbronchoscopic lung lavage used for collection of samples of epithelial lining fluid (ELF) in intubated patients are poorly standardized and incompletely validated. In infants with lung disease requiring ventilatory support, we evaluated two techniques of small volume saline lavage for the collection of a specimen suitable for pulmonary surfactant analysis. We aimed to compare ...