Background Given the young structure of Iran’s population and the fact that extramarital sexual relationships are both prohibited by legislation and shunned by society and religion, examining condom use practices among Iranian youth is highly important. The aim of this study was to explore condom use and its correlates among Iranian...

We show the soundness of automated con­ trol of machine vision systems based on in­ cremental creation and evaluation of a par­ ticular family of influence diagrams that rep­ resent hypotheses of imagery interpretation and possible subsequent processing decisions. In our approach, model-based machine vi­ sion techniques are integrated with hierarchi­ cal Bayesian inference to provide a framewor...

In this paper, a systematic approach is presented for optimal design of tunnel support lining using two-dimensional finite element analysis models of soil-structure interaction developed in ABAQUS software and the Modified Colliding Bodies Optimization (MCBO) algorithm implemented in MATLAB environment. This approach is then employed to study the influence of variable geometrical and geo-mechan...

Many multichannel retailers are now offering customers the option to place their orders online and then pick them up from the retailers’ physical stores. As a relatively new type of multichannel retail service, the factors that influence consumers to use “online order/in-store pickup” (OOIP) remains largely unknown. This study uses the Behavioral Reasoning Theory to examine the factors that inf...

To facilitate interactive design, the solutions to configuration problems can be compiled into a decision diagram. We develop three heuristics for reducing the time and space required to do this. These heuristics are based on the distinctive clustered and hierarchical structure of the constraint graphs of configuration problems. The first heuristic attempts to limit the growth in the size of th...

This study tests the hypothesis of linguistic relativity along two lines of research: a) how L2 learners of Chinese and English, respectively, syntactically package semantic components for caused motion (cause, manner, path) in an experimental situation in which they are asked to describe video clips showing caused motion events to an imagery addressee, and b) how monolingual native speakers of...

Purpose: This paper seeks to answer two research questions which are " What are key factors which influence Chinese to adopt mobile technology? " and " Do these key factors differ from factors which are identified from Western context? " Design/methodology: The findings from a pilot study with 45 in-depth interviews are used to develop questionnaires and test across 800 residents from the three...

This paper exposes the results of our participation in INEX’06. Two runs were submitted to the Ad Hoc Thorough track obtained with Garnata, our Information Retrieval system for structured documents. We have implemented two different models based on Influence Diagrams, the SID and CID models. The result of this first participation has been very poor. In the paper, we describe the models, the sys...

Influence diagrams serve as a powerful tool for modelling symmetric decision problems. When solving an influence diagram we de­ termine a set of strategies for the decisions involved. A strategy for a decision variable is in principle a function over its past. How­ ever, some of the past may be irrelevant for the decision, and for computational reasons it is important not to deal with redundant...

Bayes belief networks and influence diagrams are tools for constructing coherent probabilistic representations of uncertain expert opinion. The construction of such a network with about 30 nodes is used to illustrate a variety of techniques which can facilitate the process of structuring and quantifying uncertain relationships. These include some generalizations of the "noisy OR gate" concept. ...