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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to address the significant challenge of optimizing the placement of digital television signal booster towers to ensure quality coverage and equitable access to high-quality media services in today’s digital landscape. This paper introduces a novel multi-criteria decision-making method, named Evaluation based on Distance from Ideal Solution (EDIS), inspired by the EDAS method, aimed at enhancing decision-making processes in this context.Methodology: The EDIS method is utilized for the optimal placement of digital television signal booster towers. The method considers various cost and benefit criteria, including annual maintenance cost, tower price, signal sensitivity and boosting power, unmet quality standards, operator complexity level, and interference resistance, to determine the most suitable locations for tower placement.Findings: The application of the EDIS method to a real-world case study demonstrates significant improvements in decision-making accuracy and efficiency over existing methods, offering enhanced support for optimal decision-making in the placement of digital television signal booster towers.Originality/Value: The proposed EDIS method presents a novel multi-criteria decision-making tool that combines innovative features with advanced optimization capabilities. It contributes significant scientific value to the field by providing an effective solution for optimizing the location of digital television signal booster towers, thereby enhancing decision-making processes in this domain.

Gender stereotype threat is a sociocultural variable that has received significant attention over the past two decades. We explored whether presenting a task as a practical and challenging activity would reduce the negative impact of implicit activation of gender stereotype threat on motor learning in adolescent girls. Forty-five adolescent girls (M[subscript age] ± SD: 13.24 ± 1.06) participated in the study and were asked to throw a tennis ball toward a circular target using their nondominant hand. They were asked to perform five throws as an initial assessment and then were randomly assigned to three groups: IS/CH (i.e., implicit stereotype threat activation and framing the task as a challenge), IS/TH (i.e., implicit stereotype threat activation and framing the task as a threat), and the control (with no instructions). In the IS/CH and IS/TH groups, the participants performed the acquisition phase (five blocks of 10 trials) in the presence of a male evaluator. We used verbal instructions to frame the task as a practical and challenging activity (i.e., learning this task might be a big help in physical education classes in school because it improves throwing skills, and it will help improve control over the nondominant arm which is important in daily activities) and/or threat (i.e., show how good you are on this type of task, and based on your scores, we will be able to measure your natural ability at throwing tasks) before the acquisition phase. One day after the acquisition phase, participants were asked to participate in the retention (10 throws) and transfer tests (10 throws from a distance of 6.5 m). Our findings demonstrated that participants in the control group were able to achieve more effective learning compared with participants in the IS/TH and IS/CH groups. Possible reasons for these results were discussed.

Aim and Background: Students with learning disabilities are at a lower level in terms of emotional development and social adjustment compared to normal students. Therefore, the present study was conducted with the aim of investigating the effectiveness of therapeutic intervention and life skills training on social adjustment of students with dictation disorder. Methods and Materials: The current research was a semi-experiment with a pre-test-post-test design with a control group. The statistical population of this research included all the male and female students of the elementary third, fourth and fifth grades of the 3rd district of Tehran city in the academic year of 2021-2022 who were suffering from dictation disorder 20 students were selected using available sampling and randomly assigned to two experimental (10 people) and control (10 pepole) groups. The instrument of this study included Falah Chai's written test (1995), Wechsler intelligence scale for children fourth edition (1947), and Sinha and Singh adjustment questionnaire (1993). The experimental group received the training on life skills and treatment of dictation disorder during 8 sessions, but the control group did not receive any intervention. Analysis of multivariate covariance test was used to analyze the research data All statistical operations of the research were considered using SPSS version 24 software with a significance level of P

Effect modification (EM) may cause bias in network meta-analysis (NMA). Existing population adjustment NMA methods use individual patient data to adjust for EM but disregard available subgroup information from aggregated data in the evidence network. Additionally, these methods often rely on the shared effect modification (SEM) assumption. In this paper, we propose Network Meta-Interpolation (NMI): a method using subgroup analyses to adjust for EM that does not assume SEM. NMI balances effect modifiers across studies by turning treatment effect (TE) estimates at the subgroup- and study level into TE and standard errors at EM values common to all studies. In an extensive simulation study, we simulate two evidence networks consisting of four treatments, and assess the impact of departure from the SEM assumption, variable EM correlation across trials, trial sample size and network size. NMI was compared to standard NMA, network meta-regression (NMR) and Multilevel NMR (ML-NMR) in terms of estimation accuracy and credible interval (CrI) coverage. In the base case non-SEM dataset, NMI achieved the highest estimation accuracy with root mean squared error (RMSE) of 0.228, followed by standard NMA (0.241), ML-NMR (0.447) and NMR (0.541). In the SEM dataset, NMI was again the most accurate method with RMSE of 0.222, followed by ML-NMR (0.255). CrI coverage followed a similar pattern. NMI's dominance in terms of estimation accuracy and CrI coverage appeared to be consistent across all scenarios. NMI represents an effective option for NMA in the presence of study imbalance and available subgroup data.

Author(s): Atefeh Rezaei [sup.1] [sup.2] , Fatemeh Soltanifar [sup.2] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.412502.0, 0000 0001 0686 4748, Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University, , Tehran, Iran (2) [...], Risk-taking is one of the most serious threats to adolescents' well-being. Risky behaviors can lead to social, economic, and personal problems with long-term negative consequences. The significant role of the family in protecting adolescents against involvement in risky behaviors has been shown in the previous studies. This cross-sectional study aims to examine the mediating effect of decision-making styles and emotion dysregulation on the association between poor family functioning and risky behaviors. Two hundred high school students (M.sub.age= 15.23) were selected through a stratified random sampling method. The proposed model was tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The result revealed a significant correlation between the overall healthy function of the family and adolescents' risky behaviors. In addition, the rational and spontaneous decision-making styles mediated this association significantly. In contrast to our expectation, the result of this study did not support the mediating role of emotion dysregulation in the relationship between poor family functioning and risk behavior. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of adolescent risk-taking for designing effective and beneficial interventions.

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to provide a hybrid and improved version of one of the Multi-Attribute Decision-Making (MADM) methods, which is a more useful tool for decision support due to the constructive interaction with the decision-maker.Methodology: For this purpose, a linear programming problem with weight restriction and discrimination intensity functions was used to present the improved WASPAS method, and thus, when the explicit weight for the indicators was not taken from the decision maker, it was possible to rank the options.Findings: The results of comparing the use of the proposed method with the WASPAS method showed that this method has a good capability for use in multi-criteria decision making problems and in this particular issue, the results of using this method showed that in the context of the Covid-19 epidemic, the supportive leadership style had the highest rank among the leadership styles, followed by the transactional leadership, participatory, transformational and was placed authoritative.Originality/Value: In this study, the improved WASPAS method was presented to determine the priority and weight of criteria in solving MADM problems and to determine the organizational leadership style in the Covid-19 pandemic.

Purpose: The purpose of this research was to identify the relationship between media diplomacy and dimensions of the tourism industry from the viewpoints of experts and media proprietors. Methodology: To achieve the mentioned purpose, this research was conducted through quantitative approach using statistical regression tests. The statistical population included official experts and media proprietors. The sample size consisted of 250 individuals, and the sampling method was non-probability and purposive. Findings: Based on the results, six indicators of the tourism industry including foreign investment, health tourism content creation, urban symbols branding, soft power, feeling of security and urban identity have been counted. The results of data analysis show that most dimensions of the media diplomacy influence the tourism industry. Originality: This research develops the existing literature in the field of tourism by presenting a media diplomacy evaluation model based on the indicators of the tourism industry and helps to identify the characteristics of media diplomacy effectiveness. Implications: Rrecommendations of the current research include the preparation of tourism re-education texts on the bases of media indicators, the establishment of a tourism university and related fields such as tourism journalism, and the development of tourism knowledge of tourism officials and planners based on media approaches.

The multi-generation systems with simultaneous production of power by renewable energy, in addition to polymer electrolyte membrane electrolyzer and fuel cell (PEMFC-PEMEC) energy storage, have become more and more popular over the past few years. The fresh water provision for PEMECs in such systems is taken into account as one of the main challenges for them, where conventional desalination technologies such as reverse osmosis (RO) and mechanical vapor compression (MVC) impose high electricity consumption and costs. Taking this point into consideration, as a novelty, solar still (ST) desalination is applied as an alternative to RO and MVC for better techno-economic justifiability. The comparison, made for a residential building complex in Hawaii in the US as the case study demonstrated much higher technical and economic benefits when using ST compared with both MVC and RO. The photovoltaic (PV) installed capacity decreased by 11.6 and 7.3 kW compared with MVC and RO, while the size of the electrolyzer declined by 9.44 and 6.13%, and the hydrogen storage tank became 522.1 and 319.3 m3 smaller, respectively. Thanks to the considerable drop in the purchase price of components, the payback period (PBP) dropped by 3.109 years compared with MVC and 2.801 years compared with RO, which is significant. Moreover, the conducted parametric study implied the high technical and economic viability of the system with ST for a wide range of building loads, including high values.