Although much has been written about the Gulf conflict, comparatively little attention has been paid to the medical aspects of the conflict and to the overall balance between the costs and benefits. As the situation continues to evolve in Iraq it becomes clearer that some of the short term effects of the war given so much publicity will be overshadowed by the medium and long term adverse conseq...

The aim of this investigation was micropropagation of Quercus brantii L. via culture of terminal and lateral buds for mass production of this plant. The plant materials were collected from Fars province Iran in spring and summer seasons. After surface sterilization and the removal of phenol materials from the explants, they were transferred into different culture media containing different conc...

In this paper I present the prepositional system of Persian. I show that Persian prepositions can be divided into three classes (Class 1, Class 2a and Class 2b) which exhibit distinct syntactic behavior. Then I examine the question of the categorial status of Class 2 prepositions and demonstrate that they are not to be regarded as nouns. Finally I present the extended PP projection of Persian s...

In order to facilitate sentiment analysis of Persian text, we’ve designed and implemented an algorithm which aims to detect words with negative polarity. Currently most sentiment analysis algorithms depend mainly on polarity datasets. However, since negative prefixes in Persian are only attached to a semantically positive base (shaghagi, 2002), we have incorporated a negative prefix detection t...

This paper introduces PersPred, the first manually elaborated syntactic and semantic database for Persian Complex Predicates (CPs). Beside their theoretical interest, Persian CPs constitute an important challenge in Persian lexicography and for NLP. The first delivery, PersPred 11, contains 700 CPs, for which 22 fields of lexical, syntactic and semantic information are encoded. The semantic cla...

Because of the scarcity of observational data, existing estimates of the heat and water budgets of the Persian Gulf are rather uncertain. This uncertainty leaves open the fundamental question ofwhether this water body is a net heat source or a net heat sink to the atmosphere. Previous regional modeling studies either used specified surface fluxes to simulate the hydrodynamics of the Gulf or pre...

BACKGROUND During the 1990-1991 Gulf War, approximately 700,000 U.S. troops were deployed to the Persian Gulf theater of operations. Of that number, approximately 100,000 have presented medical complaints through various registry and examination programs. OBJECTIVES Widespread symptomatic illness without defining physical features has been reported among veterans of the 1991 Gulf War. We asce...

We assessed dietary preference of 14 captive Blue Jays (Cyanocitta cristata) for different food types under different conditions of availability. In four separate feeding trials, we provisioned jays with the following: Trial 1, two nuts each of white oak (Quercus alba), pin oak (Q. palustris), black oak (Q. velutina), northern red oak (Q. rubra), and shagbark hickory (Carya ovata); Trial 2, two...

Overstory and understory data were collected over a 15-year period (1996–2011) before and after seed tree logging in 1996 and an accidental wildfire in 2006 in a young developing mixed-oak forest in central Pennsylvania. The mature forest overstory was dominated by chestnut oak (Quercus montana) followed by northern red oak (Quercus rubra), black oak (Quercus velutina), scarlet oak (Quercus coc...

Oak decline is a chronic problem in Missouri Ozark forests. Red oak group species are most susceptible and decline is reportedly more severe on droughty, nutrient-poor sites. However, it was not clear whether greater decline severity was caused by poor site conditions or is simply due to the greater abundance of red oak group species found on poorer sites. We conducted this study to determine w...