Water pipe smoking (WPS) has been a traditional habit in the Middle Eastern Society for hundreds of years. The WPS users have a false sense of safety due to its casual use in social gatherings. It was estimated that about 70% of WPS users believe it to be a safe alternative to cigarette smoking.1 Further, the use of flavored tobacco has led to its growing popularity, especially among youngsters.

The Water Framework Directive (WFD) requires Member States to ensure that all waters meet ‘good status’ and to publish river basin management plans that include programs of cost-effective measures. VITO supported the policy makers in Flanders (Belgium) with the preparation of the first generation of river basin management plans and more specifically with the assessment of the costs and effects ...

the main purpose of this study was to analyze the problems of water user associations (wuas) in the irrigation management transfer (imt) process. the study is based upon a descriptive-correlational research method. the statistical population of the study consisted of 2500 farmers in wuas. a sample of 262 farmers was selected using “random sampling” method. data were collected through questionna...

Spreadsheet engineering adapts the lessons of software engineering to spreadsheets, providing eight principles as a framework for organizing spreadsheet programming recommendations. Spreadsheets raise issues inadequately addressed by software engineering. Spreadsheets are a powerful modeling language, allowing strategic rapid model change, and enabling exploratory modeling. Spreadsheets users l...

Panicle size has a high correlation with grain yield in rice. There is a bottleneck to identify the additional quantitative trait loci (QTL) for panicle size due to the conventional traits used for QTL mapping. To identify more genetic loci for panicle size, a panicle developmental trait (LNTB, the length from panicle neck-knot to the first primary branch in the rachis) related to panicle size ...

Web 2.0 users engage in collaborative activities. Many 2.0 websites allow their users to associate words (a.k.a. tags) with the users’ own and with other users’ content. The result is an additional layer with descriptions of web resources. The created associations between tag sets and web resources are used to facilitate social navigation, individual resource re-finding, defining communities of...

A Virtual Organization (VO) consists of some real organizations with common interests, which aims to provide inter organizational associations to reach some common goals by sharing their resources with each other. Providing security mechanisms, and especially a suitable access control mechanism, which enforces the defined security policy is a necessary requirement in VOs. Since VO is a complex ...