With the steady development of online education and online learning environments, possibilities to support social interactions between students have advanced significantly. This study examined the relationship between indicators of social presence and academic performance. Social presence is defined as students' ability to engage socially with an online learning community. The results of a mult...

this study aims at investigating the effectiveness of utilizing barley as a flushing ration with an energizing source and soybean meal-based diets as a flushing ration with a protein source the sexual and breeding behaviors in ghezel sheep. to this end, 36 three and half-year old ewes (51±1.5 kilograms) with the record of giving birth to two lambs and 6 three-year old (89±2.5 kilograms) rams we...

Digital preservation is too big a challenge for any institution or solution supplier to confront on its own. The success of any long-term digital repository will depend upon multiple “open” services provided by a wide range of service providers. No company or organisation in the world is able to provide the preservation solution for all known formats, object types, or policies. Viable approache...

This paper presents an analysis of the cognitive component of nursing assessment, complimenting the growth in knowledge of other important aspects of assessment. The purpose of the paper is to provide a framework for understanding how nurses structure assessment problems and the types of judgements they make. The thrust of the analysis is based on a comparison between nursing assessment and med...

A softcopy quality ruler method was implemented for the International Imaging Industry Association (I3A) Camera Phone Image Quality (CPIQ) Initiative. This work extends ISO 20462 Part 3 by virtue of creating reference digital images of known subjective image quality, complimenting the hardcopy Standard Reference Stimuli (SRS). The softcopy ruler method was developed using images from a Canon EO...

A significant decline in immune function is characteristic of aging. Along with the involution of the thymus and associated impaired architecture, which contributes to profound loss of naive T cell production, there are also significant declines in B cell development and the progenitors that support lymphopoiesis. These collectively lead to a reduced peripheral immune repertoire, increase in op...

A large number of both natural and synthetic polymers have been studied for powible application in drug delivery. The great advantage of synthetic polymers is their advantageous properties and wide choice availability. Two promising synthetic polymers which have been developed for biomedical applications are polyvinylpyrolidone and polyethylene glycol acrylate based hydrogels. Both of them are ...

With the advent of web services standards and a serviceoriented Grid architecture, it is foreseeable that competing as well as complimenting computational services will proliferate. Current efforts in standardising service interface focuses on how one can execute these services in terms of their syntactic descriptions. Their capabilities and relations with other service types are only articulat...

Compliments and Praise as an Expression of Linguistic Courtesy in the Private Correspondence Henryk Sienkiewicz This article presents a linguistic, stylistic functional analysis almost 200 compliments which paid to his closest family mem­bers letters. The study indicates that complimenting, although not very frequent, is important act linguistic courtesy epistolary conversation. As discussed, p...