Financial intermediation in Iran's banking system is negatively affected at least in two ways. First, there are many similarities between financial intermediation and usurious activities in the common interpretation of interest-free banking law. This encourages the banks to participate in various commercial activities. Second, the price setting policies of the central bank makes investment more...

We want to compare the efficacy and safety of vaginal versus sublingual misoprostol for cervical ripening and induction of labor. This randomized clinical trial was performed on 140 women with medical or obstetric indications for labor induction. The patients were randomly divided into two groups: vaginal and sublingual administration of misoprostol. In first group, 25 µg misoprostol was placed...

Background: Hyperbilirubinemia is one of the most important complications encountered in neonatal units. It has been proposed that phototherapy yields oxidative stress. Therefore, this study was undertaken to survey the levels of antioxidant and oxidative stress in the serum of neonates before and after phototherapy. Methods: This study was performed on thirty-five healthy, late preterm (>35 w...

This paper presents results for the Japanese/English cross-language information retrieval task on the NACSIS Test Collection. Two automatic dictionary-based query translation techniques were tried with four variants of the queries. The results indicate that longer queries outperform the required description-only queries and that use of the rst translation in the edict dictionary is comparable w...

Experimental studies have observed Long Term synaptic Potentiation (LTP) when a presynaptic neuron fires shortly before a postsynaptic neuron, and Long Term Depression (LTD) when the presynaptic neuron fires shortly after, a phenomenon known as Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP). When a neuron is presented successively with discrete volleys of input spikes STDP has been shown to learn 'ea...

A new behavioral training approach has been found significantly to improve visual function; the results further attest to the high degree of plasticity in sensory systems.

Memory systems select from environmental stimuli those to encode permanently. Repeated stimuli separated by timed spaces without stimuli can initiate Long-Term Potentiation (LTP) and long-term memory (LTM) encoding. These processes occur in time scales of minutes, and have been demonstrated in many species. This study reports on using a specific timed pattern of three repeated stimuli separated...

BACKGROUND The age-related deterioration of physiological capacities such as muscle strength and balance is associated with increased dependence. Understanding the contribution of physical fitness components to functional performance facilitates the development of adequate exercise interventions aiming at preservation of function and independence of older people. The aim of the study was to inv...