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Background and Objectives: The increase in the human population and the growth in water consumption on one hand, and the rise in sewage production on the other hand, have led to the expansion of environmental pollution threats. The objectives of the present study include launching a pilot project for the localization of knowledge in the design of artificial wetlands in accordance with the quantitative and qualitative conditions of domestic sewage in Iran (specifically, the dormitory of the University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources in Sari) and investigating the possibility of replacing wetland systems with conventional domestic sewage treatment systems in the country. Materials and Methods: This study was conducted at the University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources in Sari, involving the construction of six artificial wetlands, each with a length of 3 meters, width of 2 meters, and a height of 1.5 meters, using reinforced concrete. One of the ponds was excluded from the system due to leakage. Inside the ponds, artificial filters at different depths (1 meter: d1 and 1 meter and 30 centimeters: d2) and plant filters (Phragmites australis: p1 and Arundo donax: p2) were filled and planted. D10 and the coefficient of unifo rmity (CU) of the substrate materials were obtained as 2 millimeters and 3.625, respectively, from the grain size analysis. The hydraulic conductivity and porosity of the substrate were 2.523 cm/s and 39.2%, respectively. The specific surface area (SSA) of the substrate materials was calculated as 1.336 m²/kg (2245 m²/m³ of substrate materials). The effluent from the septic tank of the dormitory's baffled septic tank was injected onto the beds after a settling and dilution stage using a pump. In the initial loading, the beds were submerged below the surface, and a three-day retention time was allowed for the first sampling. Quality parameters of the wastewater, including biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand (COD), total suspended solids (TSS), fecal coliform (FC), and total coliform (TC), were monitored to assess the performance of the treatment system. Results: Although the injected wastewater was diluted up to 25%, a significant removal efficiency of 51 to 55, 41 to 79, 74 to 89, 70 to 95.3, and 78 to 95 percent was achieved for BOD, COD, TSS, FC, and TC, respectively, in different treatments. Among the treatments, the weakest performance was associated with treatment P1D2, while the best purification performance was observed in treatment P2D1. This indicates the dominance of the physical characteristics of the systems at the beginning of the startup period on the purification performance. However, the initial performance of the treatment system was very promising and the removal of some parameters such as TSS and FC was at the average level of a full-fledged wetland treatment system. Conclusion: This wastewater treatment technology is recommended for all managers and experts in the country's wastewater industry, especially in rural areas with inexpensive land and a population of fewer than 5000 people. These conditions encompass all towns, universities, military barracks, and military facilities as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying the optimal azimuth and inclination for wellbore drilling in sandy formations can be considered a valuable aid in reducing sand production risks, lost time, and decreasing drilling costs in the petroleum industry. Therefore, a numerical systematic approach was provided to predict sand production in wellbore SDX-5, drilled in a deep-water sandstone reservoir in the Shah-Deniz gas field (South Caspian Basin), which has never been done previously. Additionally, this systematic approach uses geomechanical and geodynamical criteria, along with petrophysical information (density and sonic log) and tectonic characteristics of the study area, which are influenced by the active tectonic stresses of the Apsheron-Balkhan zone. The subsurface data sources employed are more eco-friendly, available, and continuous than experimental tests. The computations conducted achieved azimuth, inclination, polar, and depth profile plots for the Lower Balakhany Formation. The calculations reveal that the optimum azimuth for the wellbore drilling trajectories is parallel to SHmax and oblique drilling to near horizontal is the result of optimum inclination. Polar plots showed optimum azimuth, inclination, and effect of wellbore trajectory on critical collapse pressure and collapse drawdown pressure with pressure values simultaneously, which identify safer alternatives for achieving higher petroleum production rates without sanding. Depth profile plots provide a simultaneous overview of the values of critical collapse pressure, critical sanding pressure for instantaneous drawdown, and optimum wellbore production pressure during drilling and production operations. Moreover, optimum reservoir fluid production (maximum discharge) rates can be identified and imposed as upper limits to prevent sand production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the basic objectives of sustainable agriculture is the efficient use of available inputs and resources. Hence, energy use was evaluated in the present study for the cultivation and the greenhouse gas emissions in the main horticultural crops and paddy in Tajan. The required data were collected through relying on subjective and objective methods such as questionnaries and field data recorded in Tajan plain in the period of 2020–2022. The maximum input energy was reported 64,867.5 MJ/ha for the cultivation of rice, and the minimum amount of input energy belonging to pear cultivation was 30,982.95 MJ/ha. Similarly, the highest amount of output energy was recorded 86,401 MJ/ha for the cultivation of rice crops, and the lowest amount of output energy was 30,400 MJ/ha in the cultivation of pomegranate. The results taken from the GHG index and the global warming potential indicated that the products including paddy (2726.19 kg CO2/ha), apple (2681.6 kg CO2/ha) and citrus (2545.3 kg CO2/ha) had the highest impact on pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Subsequently, according to the data regarding the cultivation percentage of each crop, it was found out that paddy crop had the largest share of potential impact on global warming (72,789,535.76 kg CO2) in Tajan plain. Therefore, the production of products with incredibly high water consumption as well as great use of chemical fertilizers and old high-working hour machines have greater share in energy consumption and global heating potential in comparison to the other indices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A polygonal curve is simplified to reduce its number of vertices, while maintaining similarity to its original shape. Numerous results have been published for vertex-restricted simplification, in which the vertices of the simplified curve are a subset of the vertices of the input curve. In curve-restricted simplification, i.e. when the vertices of the simplified curve are allowed to be placed on the edges of the input curve, the number of vertices may be much more reduced. In this paper, we present algorithms for computing curve-restricted simplifications of polygonal curves under the local Hausdorff distance measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A stay region of a moving object is a region in which it spends a significant amount of time. Given the location of an object through a certain time interval, i.e. its trajectory, our goal is to find its stay regions. We consider axis-parallel square stay regions of fixed side length, which contain the longest continuous portion of the trajectory. We present an algorithm for answering time-windowed stay region queries, to find a stay region in any given time interval. The algorithm has an approximation factor of 1=2 and answers each query with the time complexity Oðlog nÞ, in which n is the number of vertices of the input trajectory. The time complexity of the preprocessing step of the algorithm is OðnÞ. We also present two approximation algorithms for finding stay regions of whole trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare Mill.) is a medicinal species which has not been examined as a ratoon crop. Ratooning lessens the production intensity, but the ratooned fennel seed yield and physiological processes may differ with stand age, irrigation regime, and genotype. Eleven fennel genotypes were, thus, subjected to either limited or sufficient water supply for 6 years. For each year, the crop was harvested in early autumn to measure seed yield, yield components, dry mass, and essential oil. Besides, some physiological characteristics relevant to seed yield were studied in certain years. Results indicated a biphasic behavior in seed and essential oil yields of the majority of genotypes with maximum seed yields (ranging from 2514 to 2635 kg ha−1 in different genotypes) being obtained from the well-watered plants mainly in the 4th year of harvest. Taking the period of 6 years and the two irrigation regimes together, genotypes Yazd, Kashan, and Shiraz showed a better productive performance. Meaningful positive associations were found between the seed yield and such yield components as seeds/plant and certain physiological attributes, i.e., proline and total soluble carbohydrates concentrations, water potential, relative water content, and superoxide dismutase, catalase, and ascorbate peroxidase activities. Maximum seed yields (ranging from 1605 to 1704 kg ha−1) and essential oil yields (ranging from 33.3 to 45.5 kg ha−1) of plants grown under water-limited conditions were found in genotypes that benefited more from osmoregulative and antioxidative roles of proline and the antioxidative enzymes (i.e., Shiraz, Yazd, and Kashan) and, hence, were able to withstand better against water limitation. Considering such physiological capabilities, agronomic performance, and minimum stand age effects, we discovered for the first time that certain fennel genotypes could be proposed as potential resources for growing fennel as an alternative ratooned crop for low production intensity and sustainable cropping in arid climates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fastest known algorithms for finding the exact value of the diameter of general graphs are no faster than the algorithms that compute all-pairs shortest paths. An extension of the problem of computing graph diameter is enumerating pairs of vertices in a graph, ordered decreasingly by their distance. In this paper, we investigate this problem with the presence of memory constraints. We also show how our result can help the computation of graph Hyperbolicity, by lowering the memory complexity of computing the ordered list of far-apart vertex pairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the problem of finding hotspots, i.e. regions, in which a moving entity spends a significant amount of time, for polygonal trajectories. The fastest exact algorithm, due to Gudmundsson, van Kreveld, and Staals (2013) finds an axis-parallel square hotspot of fixed side length in O(n2) for a trajectory with n edges. Limiting ourselves to the case in which the entity moves in a direction parallel either to the x or to the y-axis, we present an approximation algorithm with the time complexity O(n log3n) and approximation factor 1/2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study aimed to explore the effects of peer interaction on self-efficacy in vocabulary learning. The participants of the study included 64 EFL students in two intact classes at Takhti high school and Pardis language institute in Hamedan, Iran who were conveniently sampled to take part in the study. They aged 15-17 and were randomly positioned into one experimental and one control group. The participants were assigned as the experimental group and as control group 32 each. the experimental group received the intervention including peer interaction for example Word Expert Cards (Richek & McTague, 2008) while those in the control group had time to learn vocabularies and deepen their learningindividuallyand researcher monitored and told them to memorize or paraphrase the vocabularies themselves individually All the participants completed a self-efficacy questionnaire on vocabulary learning. The participants completed a questionnaire on self-efficacy learning twice, once before the treatment as the pretest and a second time after the treatment as the posttest. The data thus obtained were then analyzed through measuring the Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) to examine the trajectories of change in the participants' self-efficacy over the treatment. The results indicated a significant increase in the self-efficacy indexes of the experimental group compared with the control group. The findings from the current study provide empirical evidence suggesting that through peer interaction it could be possible to enhance self-efficacy, which in turn may contribute to the development of language skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a discussion about the inclusion of video game based pragmatic competence instruction as a facilitative tool to develop interlanguage pragmatic competence of Iranian EFL learners' acquisition of speech acts of apology and request. The question this article is intended to answer includes: whether using video game as a facilitative tool for developing interlanguage pragmatic competence have any effect on EFL learners' acquisition of speech acts of apology and request or not. To answer this question, 40 Iranian intermediate EFL learners were selected via administering the Oxford Placement Test (OPT). Following the Jianda Liu pragmatic competence test (2004) that made test of apology and request speech acts were administered as the pre-test before the targeted speech acts were instructed to them for 8 sessions. The post-test of apology and request speech acts were then administered and data were analyzed via calculating ANCOVA and Mann-Whitney U test. The results indicated that the video game-based instructed EFL classroom showed positive progress in acquisition of apology and request speech acts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study attempted to investigate the relationship between Iranian EFL teachers' critical thinking skills, their Emotional Quotient (EQ) and their students' engagement in the task. To that end, 20 EFL high school teachers completed "Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal" (Form A) and the "Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory". Furthermore, 600 male and female learners, the students of the teacher participants at the time, participated in the study by answering the Persian version of "Tinio High School Survey on Student Engagement". The findings of the study indicated that there was a significant relationship between teachers' critical thinking skills and their students' engagement in the task. However, the results did not show any meaningful relationship between teachers' EQ and their students' engagement in the task and also between teachers' critical thinking skills and their EQ, although the results pointed to a high degree of correlation between 'intrapersonal aspects of teachers' EQ' and 'students' behavioral engagement'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the issues in communicative language teaching (CLT) domain is pragmatic knowledge. One of the issues that has gained significance in pragmatic studies is the relationship among pragmatic knowledge, gender, and language proficiency. A few studies have investigated the effect of gender on pragmatics knowledge and the relationship between language proficiency and pragmatic knowledge; on the other hand, few of these studies have been corpus based. In this study, the relationship among the Iranian EFL students' gender, language proficiency, and comprehension of speech acts (apologizing and requesting) were examined. Then the findings were compared with the international corpus collections of the speech acts. To that end, 30 male and 30 female EFL students from Islamic Azad university of Hamadan were selected through quota sampling. Two kinds of tests, IELTS test and Discourse Completion Task (DCT) test, were administered to measure the students' language proficiency and speech acts knowledge. The results of data analysis showed that in pragmatics test, the female students outperformed the male students and in language proficiency test male students outperformed female ones. Therefore, the results of this study implied that gender affects the students' pragmatic knowledge and there is no relationship between pragmatic knowledge and language proficiency knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The measurement of saturated water content (SWC) is necessary in the estimation of soil water retention and unsaturated hydraulic conductivity curves. In several studies, pedotransfer functions (PTFs) were developed to predict SWC. Among them, evolutionary polynomial regression (EPR) is one that can operate on large quantities of data in order to capture nonlinear and complex interactions between the variables of the system. In this study, the evolutionary data-mining technique was used to derive new PTFs and different methods were evaluated, such as the soil porosity method, Rosetta method, and others, for the estimation of SWC. For this purpose, 270 soil samples (3:1 ratio for development and validation) from three data sets were used. Among 190 PTFs provided by EPR, one equation with the highest accuracy and the least number of inputs was selected. The EPR predictions were compared with the experimental results as well as the PTFs proposed in previous studies. Comparison of the statistical indicators showed that the ‘proposed PTF’ and ‘porosity method’ are the best and worst methods for the prediction of SWC, respectively. Also, good predictions were achieved from the proposed approaches by the groups of Scheinost, Vereecken, and Williams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Different techniques have been proposed for the treatment of gingival recession. The majority of current procedures use autogenous soft.tissue grafts, which are associated with morbidity at the donor sites. Acellular dermal matrix (ADM) Alloderm is an alternative donor material presented to reduce related morbidity and provide more volume of the donor tissue. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of an ADM allograft for root coverage and to compare it with a connective tissue graft (CTG), when used with a double papillary flap. Materials and Methods: Sixteen patients with bilateral class I or II gingival recessions were selected. A total of 32 recessions were treated and randomly assigned into the test and contralateral recessions into the control group. In the control group, the exposed root surfaces were treated by the placement of a CTG in combination with a double papillary flap; and in the test group, an ADM allograft was used as a substitute for palatal donor tissue. Probing depth, clinical attachment level, width of keratinized tissue (KT), recession height and width were measured before, and after 2 weeks and 6 months of surgery. Results: There were no statistically significant differences between the test and control groups in terms of recession reduction, clinical attachment gain, and reduction in probing depth. The control group had a statistically significant increased area of KT after 6 months compared to the test group. Conclusion: ADM allograft can be considered as a substitute for palatal donor tissue in root coverage procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given a multiset of colors as the query and a list-colored graph, i.e., an undirected graph with a set of colors assigned to each of its vertices, in the NP-hard list-colored graph motif problem the goal is to find the largest connected subgraph such that one can select a color from the set of colors assigned to each of its vertices to obtain a subset of the query. This problem was introduced to find functional motifs in biological networks. We present a branch-and-bound algorithm named RANGI for finding and enumerating list-colored graph motifs. As our experimental results show, RANGI's pruning methods and heuristics make it quite fast in practice compared to the algorithms presented in the literature. We also present a parallel version of RANGI that achieves acceptable scalability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents an accurate and easy-to-implement algorithm for estimating the parameters of the asymmetric Gaussian chirplet model (AGCM) used for modeling echoes measured in ultrasonic nondestructive testing (NDT) of materials. The proposed algorithm is a combination of particle swarm optimization (PSO) and Levenberg–Marquardt (LM) algorithms. PSO does not need an accurate initial guess and quickly converges to a reasonable output while LM needs a good initial guess in order to provide an accurate output. In the combined algorithm, PSO is run first to provide a rough estimate of the output and this result is consequently inputted to the LM algorithm for more accurate estimation of parameters. To apply the algorithm to signals with multiple echoes, the space alternating generalized expectation maximization (SAGE) is used. The proposed combined algorithm is robust and accurate. To examine the performance of the proposed algorithm, it is applied to a number of simulated echoes having various signal to noise ratios. The combined algorithm is also applied to a number of experimental ultrasonic signals. The results corroborate the accuracy and reliability of the proposed combined algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]