The East Mediterranean region suffers from high levels of air pollution which has a negative impact on pregnancy outcomes. This work systematically reviews the epidemiological evidence on maternal exposure to air pollution and adverse pregnancy outcomes in the region. Relevant papers and reports published between 2000 and 2014 were searched. Combinations of search terms including countries, exp...

this survey was performed on 45 oncology nurses in three hospitals, and cancer institute in tehran. the purpose of this study was investigating the stressors during the care of cancer patients and its importance from the oncology nurses’ view. data gathering tool was a questionnaire with 42 questions, according to research specific goals and had two parts. first part included demographic charac...

UME is the notion that a user should receive informative adapted content anytime and anywhere. Personalization of videos, which adapts their content according to user preferences, is a vital aspect of achieving the UME vision. User preferences can be translated into several types of constraints that must be considered by the adaptation process, including semantic constraints directly related to...

Forests play a major role in both climate change mitigation and adaptation, but few policies, if any, integrate these two aspects. Using Indonesia and Vietnam as case studies, we identify challenges at the national level but opportunities at the local level. Although both countries demonstrate political commitment to integrating adaptation and mitigation in their development plans, guidelines f...

Future flood risk in Europe is likely to increase due to a combination of climatic and socio-economic drivers. Effective adaptation strategies need to be implemented to limit the impact of river flooding on population and assets. This research builds upon a recently developed flood risk assessment framework at European scale to explore the benefits of adaptation against extreme floods. The effe...

The paradigms of transformational planning, case-based planning, and plan debugging all involve a process known as plan adaptation | modifying or repairing an old plan so it solves a new problem. In this paper we provide a domain-independent algorithm for plan adaptation, demonstrate that it is sound, complete, and systematic, and compare it to other adaptation algorithms in the literature. Our...

Climate change is likely to have significant implications for human health, particularly through alterations of the incidence, prevalence, and distribution of infectious diseases. In the context of these risks, governments in high income nations have begun developing strategies to reduce potential climate change impacts and increase health system resilience (i.e., adaptation). In this paper, we...

The basal ganglia are involved in establishing motor plans for a wide range of behaviors. Parkinson's disease (PD) is a manifestation of basal ganglia dysfunction associated with a deficit in sensorimotor integration and difficulty in acquiring new motor sequences, thereby affecting motor learning. Previous studies of sensorimotor integration and sensorimotor adaptation in PD have focused on li...

The initial stages of spinodal decomposition were studied by subjecting a critical blend of model polyolefins to a pressure quench and monitoring the evolution by time-resolved small angle neutron scattering. Contrary to the predictions of the widely accepted Cahn-Hilliard-Cook theory, we demonstrate that coarsening of the phase-separated structure begins immediately after the quench and occurs...

This paper presents a theoretical model for studying the dynamics of ordering in alloys which exhibit modulated phases. The model is different from the standard time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau description of the evolution of a non-conserved order parameter and resembles the Swift-Hohenberg model. The early-stage growth kinetics is analyzed and compared to the Cahn-Hilliard theory of continuous o...