Neuromuscular disorders constitute a significant proportion of neurologic complaints. However, it has not been very long since they came into focus in Iran. The first specialized meeting on muscle and nerve disorders was held in Isfahan, 2010. The second gathering took place soon after in Tehran 2011 as a joint program with French experts.1 Kerman was the third place to contribute to neuromuscu...

OBJECTIVE The Geriatric Anxiety Scale (GAS) is a new self-report screening measure designed for older adults. Due to the burgeoning Iranian population of older adults and the need for validated, culturally-appropriate screening measures for anxiety in Iran, the purposes of the present study were to translate the GAS into Persian and to explore its preliminary psychometric properties. METHOD I...

UNLABELLED We provide the first reference values for bone mineral content and bone mineral density according to age and sex in Iranian children and adolescents. The prevalence of hypovitaminosis D was high, and levels of physical activity were low in our sample. Multiple regression analyses showed age, BMI, and Tanner stage to be the main indicators of bone mineral apparent density. PURPOSE N...

There are few detailed carbon (C) budgets of mangrove forests, yet these are important for understanding C sequestration in mangrove forests, how they support the productivity of the coast and their vulnerability to environmental change. Here, we develop C budgets for mangroves on the islands of Twin Cays, Belize. We consider seaward fringing forests and interior scrub forests that have been fe...

Primary tropical forests are renowned for their high biodiversity and carbon storage, and considerable research has documented both species and carbon losses with deforestation and agricultural land uses. Economic drivers are now leading to the abandonment of agricultural lands, and the area in secondary forests is increasing. We know little about how long it takes for these ecosystems to achie...

Lack of hunting and predators and proximity to human communities make suburban forests prone to high deer abundance and non-native plant invasions. I investigated these likely drivers of community structure in the herb layers of six suburban forests in one region of New Jersey, USA. In 223 plots I assessed the herb layer response to 2.5 years with or without deer fencing and the early stage of ...

In this paper we study random forests through their connection with a new framework of adaptive nearest neighbor methods. We first introduce a concept of potential nearest neighbors (k-PNN’s) and show that random forests can be seen as adaptively weighted k-PNN methods. Various aspects of random forests are then studied from this perspective. We investigate the effect of terminal node sizes and...

The world's forests influence climate through physical, chemical, and biological processes that affect planetary energetics, the hydrologic cycle, and atmospheric composition. These complex and nonlinear forest-atmosphere interactions can dampen or amplify anthropogenic climate change. Tropical, temperate, and boreal reforestation and afforestation attenuate global warming through carbon seques...

Random forests are known to be good for data mining of classification tasks, because random forests are robust for datasets having insufficient information possibly with some errors. But applying random forests blindly may not produce good results, and a dataset in the domain of rotogravure printing is one of such datasets. Hence, in this paper, some best classification accuracy based on clever...