Quality variations are introduced in the circular model of differentiated products. Two main game structures are analyzed. The three-stage game has entry in the first stage, location in the second, and quality and price choice in the third. The four-stage game replaces the quality and price subgame of the three-stage game with two stages, quality choice followed by price choice. It is found tha...

Objectives: The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between religious coping and quality of life of mothers of children with hearing deficiency.  Methods: In this study, 55 mothers of children with hearing deficiency referred to Isfahan Cochlear Implant Center, from June to August 2012, were selected through applying census method. The participants answered the questionn...

The debate concerning the possible degradation in human sperm quality began in the 1970s, was revived at the beginning of the 1990s and has continued to mobilize the scientific community ever since. After the meta-analysis by Carlsen et al. (1992) showing a decline in human semen quality over the last 50 years, several groups investigated the sperm characteristics of more or less homogeneous gr...

Surface water samples of baseflow were collected from 20 headwater sub-watersheds which were classified into three types of watersheds (natural, urban and agricultural) in the flood, dry and transition seasons during three consecutive years (2010-2012) within a coastal watershed of Southeast China. Integrating spatial statistics with multivariate statistical techniques, river water quality vari...

We sought to extend earlier work by examining whether there are ordinary variations in human maternal caregiving behavior (MCB) that are related to stress reactivity in infants. We observed 185 mother-infant dyads and used standard coding systems to identify variations in caregiving behavior. We then created two extreme groups and found that infants receiving low-quality MCB showed more fearful...

in this article, finite element method and ale formulation were used to numerically simulate impact of low-velocity specific projectiles with water surface. for the simulation, ls-dyna finite element code was used. material models which were used to express behavior of air and water included null material model. for the projectile, plastic-kinematics material model was applied. mie-gruneisen eq...

The phenomenon of practice variation draws attention to the need for better management of clinical decision making as a means of ensuring quality. Different policies to address variations, including guidelines and measures of appropriateness, have had little demonstrable impact on variation itself or on the underlying quality problems. Variations in rates of interventions raise questions about ...

Mandarin Chinese is one of the well studied tone languages, and related contextual tonal variations as a function of prosody have attracted many researchers’ interest. Change of voice quality, which is not phonemic in Mandarin, is also subject to prosody. The focus of this study will be the effects of prosodic structure, focus in particular, on voice quality in Mandarin Chinese, and the results...

HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) has become a popular solution for multimedia delivery nowadays. Because of throughput variations, video quality fluctuates during a streaming session. Therefore, a main challenge in HAS is how to evaluate the overall video quality of a session. In this paper, we explore the impacts of quality values and quality variations in HAS. We propose to use the histogram of ...