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The collapse of the Soviet Union and shaping 15 independent republics had some consequences. First, the role and influence of Moscow in the former superpower was reduced, and on the other hand, the ground was provided for the presence and influence of the West in the areas that were considered part of the Soviet Union in the past, especially the Caucasus. The influence of the West in military, political and cultural dimensions was manifested by facts such as the expansion of NATO to the East and color revolutions in some independent republics of the Soviet Union. After disintegration of the Soviet Union, although Russia was the main inheritor of the Soviet military equipment and power, it did not gain anything from the culture and ideology of the Soviet era, and this was right at the time when the issue of soft power was emphasized at the global level. Since the late 1990s and especially after Putin came to power, the issue of using soft power in Russia's foreign policy became more important. Due to the importance of the South Caucasus republics in Russia's foreign policy, this region became one of the target points for the use of soft power. This region has important to the Russian authorities and there are significant connections between the Russian society and the societies of these countries. Also, existence of cultural and human commonalities between Russia and these countries makes it more susceptible to use soft power.Research Question: what is the status of soft power in Russia's foreign policy towards the South Caucasus republics?Research Hypothesis: Due to the penetration of Russian soft power resources such as language, extensive labor market, cultural commonalities and extensive energy resources, the importance of soft power in Russia's foreign policy towards the South Caucasus republics has increased, although Russia It faces challenges in using soft power.Methodology (and Theoretical Framework if there are): The method of this research is qualitative with a descriptive-analytical approach. Power in international relations has traditionally been defined and assessed in easily quantifiable ‘hard’ terms, often understood in the context of military and economic might. Hard power is deployed in the form of coercion: using force, the threat of force, economic sanctions, or inducements of payment. In contrast to the coercive nature of hard power, soft power describes the use of positive attraction and persuasion to achieve foreign policy objectives. In the early 1990s, the concept of soft power was first used by Joseph Nye. According to Nye, soft power is the ability to influence the behavior of others to achieve their goals by creating attractiveness and non-coercive means. Soft power is the capacity to influence other nations through the use of persuasion and attraction rather than coercion or force. Soft power is the product and outcome of positive portrayal, presenting a self-righteous image, gaining credibility from internal and global public opinion, and the power of indirectly influencing others with satisfaction and attraction. Today, this view to power versus hard power, military power and weapons is used in a way that is combined with coercion and physical violence.Nye identifies soft power as an important part of national power resources and emphasizes the necessity of using it in US foreign policy

after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia inherited the vast military power of the Soviet Union, but it did not inherit any of the communist culture and ideology from the Soviet Union, and this was just at a time when cultural power seemed to be more important than Cold war time. The negative feeling towards the communist ideology in many countries of the world in the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union made it difficult for the Russian authorities to use soft power to rebuild the image of Russia. Russia has sources of soft power such as a vast labor market, cultural commonality, linguistic affinity and rich energy resources to influence the South Caucasus republics. Although it seems that although the Russian authorities have realized the importance of soft power, in many situations and cases they present a wrong interpretation of this concept. Some domestic or foreign policies that are implemented without regard to the wishes of others are an important challenge for the use of soft power. According to Nye, the use of force outside of the accepted international norms and not observing the rules of democracy will seriously damage the effectiveness of soft power. Therefore, the previous and current unresolved disputes with Russia and some of its neighbors have had important negative effects on the soft power of Russia in the South Caucasus and especially in Georgia. The widespread use of military power, especially in Georgia, has affected Russia's credibility in the former Soviet republics and has led some of these countries' leaders to worry about relations with Russia. With these military interventions by Moscow, some politicians in the South Caucasus republics are worried that their susceptibility to Russia's soft power will provide the conditions for Russia's military intervention in their countries, so they resist the manifestations of Russia's soft power. Russia's socio-economic model has also created limitations for the use of Russian soft power in the post-Soviet era. Although Russia has the highest per capita income among the Commonwealth of Independent States, it is facing problems that it cannot solve easily. Among these problems, the high level of corruption is significant. According to the report of Transparency International, the level of corruption in Russia is higher than in many countries of  Commonwealth of Independent States.

The concept of soft power has a strong normative content, which is mainly based on the domestic political and social standards of the country, and if these standards are used at a high level, we can hope for their effectiveness outside the borders. It is not possible to present an attractive and positive image of a country without paying attention to solving internal problems. It seems that in order to make the use of soft power more effective, the Russians should present a more attractive and justified face to the world, especially to the people of the South Caucasus republics, by raising the level of standards such as fighting more corruption and increasing the level of economic well-being.It seems that due to the dominance of the balancers in the last decade and the prospect of holding power for the next decade, the position of soft power in Russia's foreign policy will be strengthened and a more positive face of this country will be presented to the world. Efforts to host cultural, artistic and sports events and to win the hosting of important events such as the World Cup in 2018, the successful holding of the 2013 Student Sports Olympics in Kazan and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi can be evaluated in this regard. Of course, due to the need for a relatively long time for the effects of the use of soft power to appear, one should wait for a longer period of time for the effects of the use of the type of power to appear.

Flow behavior through a gas turbine double-container fuel valve is numerically studied. Normally the gas fuel supply pressure of the gas turbine sites is over 20+ barg while the combustion chamber pressure is around 12 barg in base load operation and slightly more than atmospheric during start-up. Therefore, the flow control through this high range of pressure ratios is a very difficult and costly task with a single-container control valve. The double-container valve is an innovative design which consists of two parts, SRV (Stop Ratio Valve) followed by GCV (Gas Control Valve), in a compact unit. SRV maintains a significantly low pressure upstream of the GCV during gas turbine firing to establish flame and control fuel flow during acceleration. It opens the GCV to a position where it is much easier to control the flow through the valve. The same situation exists in base load operation when the turbine load is changing. The obtained results prove the special design of the valve to maintain linear characteristics of flow with stroke position in GCV. The results of the mass flow are given for various GCV stroke openings at various valve pressure ratios. Also, the range of pressure ratios for a proper operation of GCV is determined. SRV regulates the middle pressure between the two parts based on rotor speed. Therefore, a sensitive combination of globes position takes place during gas turbine operation.

Evaluation of groundwater hydro chemical characteristics is necessary for planning and water resources management in terms of quality. In the present study, a self-organizing map (SOM) clustering technique was used to recognize the homogeneous clusters of hydro chemical parameters in water resources (including well, spring and qanat) of Kerman province; then, the quality classification of groundwater samples was investigated for drinking and irrigation uses by employing SOM clusters. Patterns of water quality parameters were visualized by SOM planes, and similar patterns were observed for those parameters that were correlated with each other, indicating a same source. Based on the SOM results, the 729-groundwater samples in the study area were grouped into 4 clusters, such that the clusters 1, 2, 3, and 4 contained 73%, 6.2%, 6.7%, and 14.1% of groundwater samples, respectively. The increase order of electrical conductivity parameter in the clusters was as 1, 4, 3 and 2. The results of water quality index based on the entropy weighting (EWQI) showed that all of the samples with excellent and good quality (36.3% of samples) for drinking belonged to the cluster 1. According to the Wilcox diagram, 435-groundwater samples (81.7%) in the cluster 1 had the permitted quality for irrigation activities, and the other 285-groundwater samples were placed in all four clusters, indicating the unsuitable quality for irrigation. The Piper diagram also revealed that the dominant hydro chemical faces of cluster 1 were Na-Cl, Mixed Ca-Mg-Cl and Ca-HCO3, whereas the clusters 2, 3, and 4 had the Na-Cl face. This study, therefore, shows that the SOM approach can be successfully used to classify and characterize the groundwater in terms of hydrochemistry and water quality for drinking and irrigation purposes on a provincial scale.

This work proposes a direct sequence spread spectrum transmitter with high transmission range and efficiency for audio signals. It is shown that by choosing high process gain for spread spectrum signal the data could reach a range of 55km in the 2.4GHz ISM band. By employing a light modulation scheme, we have a relaxed SNR requirement for having a low bit error rate (BER) which translates to relaxed error vector magnitude (EVM) condition. Therefore a switching power amplfier (PA) is used in this work which improves the transmitter’s efficiency while by taking PAs nonidealities into account we extracted the new equations to find the conditions to improve the efficiency compared to conventional zero current and zero current switching conditions. The PA efficiency is equal to 79.5% while having 30dBm output power. The mixer alongside power amplifier used in this work provide a conversion gain of 9 dB while having 16 dBm output compression point. The  employed tunable quadrature oscillator has the ability to cancel phase and amplitude errors without comprimising the oscillator phase noise. The transmitter reaches an efficiency of 73.4% and an EVM of -32.75 dB.

The entrepreneurship in public and academic libraries could provide new opportunities for librarians to take advantage of it for the development and overall extension. The purpose of this research is a systematic review of entrepreneurship researches in order to identify the role of public and academic libraries in promoting and dissemination of entrepreneurship services. The method is a systematic review. So that related researches at 10 national and international databases during the period of 1987 to 2018 searched. 248 researches were retrieved which after the control and review of studies, 63 most relevant ones were used for this research. The findings showed that national studies were used quantities approach(31/74) and international research were used qualitative approach(68/22). The findings of research also revealed that “developing services and products”, “Entrepreneurship education”, “Networking and support the needs of entrepreneurs”,  “Outreach of campus services for users”, “Start- up institution and business enterprises”, “Setting up business enterprises”, “Fundraising and Budget”, “Creating an Entrepreneurial Culture using Innovation and Creativity” were most important factor in dissemination and promoting of entrepreneurship services in libraries. Generally, systematic review of the status of researches done in the field of entrepreneurship in libraries showed that, this area requires more research in libraries. So that the final product of these studies can be improve service quality in libraries and, consequently libraries would be profit commercial and economic benefits.

This study aimed to identify effective and barriers factors in the application of digital object identifier for the Persian periodicals content. This descriptive survey (Delphi) used a Researcher-made questionnaire on a sample of editors and editorial members of Persian scientific journals in the field of knowledge and information science (20 participants). The results showed that among 45 items that, 10 and 22 items were identified as effective factors and barriers, respectively, for application digital object identifiers. So that “providing descriptor metadata such as title” was the most effective factor with an mean of 4.60, and the barrier “lack of membership of Iran in the digital object identifier system for various reasons including academic sanctions” with an mean of 4.65 in the application of digital object identifier for Persian periodicals content. Conclusion Identification of effective factors and barriers regarding the application of digital object identifier for Persian periodicals content could help the authorities to resolve barriers for implementation of digital object identifier and to gain its benefits in Iran.

Human Action and behavior recognition have many applications in computer vision and researchers have been working on this area for many years. Two-player sport action recognition is one of the research gaps in this scope. In this research, free style wrestling actions have been considered and by providing a dataset, an algorithm was developed to recognize such actions and different experiments were implemented. The free graph produced from player’s skeletons is used for feature extraction. In each frame, a feature vector is built using2-dimensional polar histogram of the graph points and by different combination of these vectors the final feature vector is produced for a video sample. Two classifiers; SVM and KNN were used independently to classify the actions based on different feature vector combinations. The highest score for action recognition is around%90 when KNN is used.

Iran's electricity industry are looking for better ways and more efficient in generation, transmission and distribution of electrical power in recent years. The industry rules have changed to become more competitive. With uncertainty in market price, water inflow, the beneficiary's behavior, access to information and risk increasing, the profit maximization has been more difficult in electricity market for hydroelectric energy producers. In this situation, pursue a decision-making for optimum operating of power plants is one of the main producers concerns. For this purpose, time series data on average monthly during 2005–2015 was used and profit is forecasted for twenty-four months. For this study, energy data from Karun river hydropower plant karun1 was used. Firstly, Gómes-Maravall model was used to predict of electricity price and river inflow. Then, using an ARIMA model was estimated for operating and maintenance cost in the hydropower plant. In this research to study of hydropower plant profitability was used the system dynamics approach and multiple scenarios like: climate change and penalty costs scenarios.

The high nutritional and medicinal values and the increasing production anddemands, it is important to control the factors affecting the quality of pomegranate fruitduring storage. Regarding the understanding of how to store pomegranate fruit, it would bepossible to offer this product at local and international markets for a long duration with highquality. In this study, the effect of nano silicate-based polyethylene andpolypropylene on the storage life of pomegranate fruit (cultivar Malas-e-Saveh) has beenstudied in a completely randomized factorial design. The treated fruits were stored in commonstorage for two and four months period. Qualitative andquantitative characteristics of fruitswere measured using the standard methods of analysis. The results showed that the nano-based polyethylene and polypropylene couldmaintain the highest amount of moisture in the skin (75.72% and 73.14%, respectively) ascompared to the control (26.64%) at the end of storage period. These coating treatments also
maintained the highest amount of aril moisture (76.88%) as compared to the control(71.09%). After storage period, the nano-based polypropylene showed the highestconcentrations of phenolic compounds (883.54 mg GAE/100 ml), flavonoids (487.71 mg
GAE/100 ml) and anthocyanins (11.69 mg C3GE/100 ml) as compared to the control (649.76and 437.56 mg GAE/100 ml, and 7.9 mg C3GE/100 ml, respectively); although the normalcoating treatments showed less influence. Nano-based coating treatments also decreased the
changing rate of ascorbic acid but did not have any significant influence on pH and EC. The application of nano-based polyethylene and polypropylene treatments is
recommended to improve the keeping quality of pomegranate fruit during storage

This paper presents a novel multi-port DC/DC converter which is suitable to be used as the interface of hybrid renewable energy systems. The converter contains three unidirectional power flow ports which two of them are input ports and are connected to two independent energy sources while the third one is the output port that feeds a standalone load. Furthermore, the proposed converter contains a bidirectional power flow port to charge/discharge an energy storage system (battery). In addition to multi-port structure, high boost value of voltage gain is the other merit of the converter. Hybrid system is composed of fuel cell (FC), photovoltaic (PV) panels and a battery pack. Different operating states are discussed, and a control system based on decoupling networks is presented. The control system is able to seek and extract maximum power of PV panel, adjust generated power of FC, and handle charging and discharging modes of battery. In order to control operating modes of the proposed converter, a power management method is also presented. By the way, small signal model is presented for the converter.The bode diagram has been plotted from the small signal model. Then the controller it was designed from the bode diagram. The results of simulation by the PI controller are presented. Also, the simulation results by P&O algorithm for the converter has been evaluated. Several Simulation and experimental tests have been carried out to evaluate the analysis and feasibility of the aforementioned system. The results verify well performance of the converter and confirm the simulations and theoretical results.

Settling basins are one of the most essential structures for the separation of inflow sediments. This structure is established to enhance the water quality after the river-basins and water channels. Numerous studies have been conducted on the design of this structure and different methods have been provided to increase its efficiency. However, the use of simple settling basins with the minimum cost which can provide the ideal targets has been the focus of designers. In this study, the effect of flow-guiding plates and the angle between these and the inflow, and the impact of water depth in the basin on the trap efficiency of the settling basins were considered. For testing, 4 blades with specific length and angle were installed. This experiment was repeated for 3 different lengths and 3 angles. The results of the experiments showed that with the enhancement of the depth of water to 10 centimeters to 30 centimeters, while the basin had no flow-guiding plates, increased the trap efficiency of the basin by 4.9 percent. Also, by the use of flow-guiding plates in the suitable and best length and angle (in this study, the suitable size of blades was 22.5 centimeters and the best position was by the angle of 30 degrees); with the maximum of the water depth of 30 centimeters, the trap efficiency was increased by 13.3 percent. The sensitivity analysis done showed that the depth of water had the most effect on the trap efficiency of the basin and the changes in the lengths and angles of the blades position had the similar effects of the basin trap efficiency.

Intercropping is a sustainable practice to achieve higher production with the aim to limit external inputs. A field experiment was conducted at the research farm of the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Maragheh, Maragheh, Iran, during 2016 growing seasons with ten treatments to evaluate the yield, analyze the competition and insect’s assemblages in sunflower (as main plant)/soybean (as companion plant) intercropping. Treatments included sunflower sole cropping, soybean sole cropping, replacing intercropping sunflower with soybean (50:50, 34:66, 66:34, 40:60, 60:40, 25:75) and additive intercropping of two plants (100:50 and 100:100%). Results showed that the highest sunflower grain yield (275 g m-2) was obtained in sunflower monoculture that was not significantly different with intercropping ratios of 25:75 and 60:40. Also, the highest and lowest grain yield of soybean was achieved in soybean monoculture (130.1 g m-2) and ratio of 100:50 (48.5 g m-2), respectively. The highest land equivalent ratio, monetary advantage index and intercropping advantage value was obtained in intercropping ratio of 25:75. Moreover, in all cropping patterns the aggressivity (A) and crowding ratio (CR) values of sunflower were higher than soybean, indicating that sunflower was the dominant species.  Also, the highest density for herbivores was recorded in soybean monoculture and the families of Thripidae (37.60- 43.87%) and Cicadellidae (34.01-37.71%) had the most relative density. Furthermore, intercropping of sunflower with soybean increased pollinators and natural enemies’ abundance compared with monocultures. Overall, based on the ecological, agronomical and economical indices intercropping sunflower with soybean with ratio of 25:75 is a feasible alternative method to achieve similar production with respect to monocropping.

In this paper, the communications between follower agents in the leader-following tracking control of Multi-agent systems with multivariable single integrator dynamics, are reduced. A fully distributed control scheme is proposed in which a local non-combinational decision variable (DV) is continuously observed. If the norm of the DV’s measurement error violates a time-dependent threshold, an event is occurred and the DV is sampled, stored in a data store unit (DSU) and sent to a neighbor-to-neighbor low bandwidth communication network (CN). Also, the last sampled neighbors’ data received from the CN, are stored in the DSU. A control law computed from the last stored data, is fed to the agents’ dynamics. It is shown that under this control law and by using the proposed event-triggering mechanism, the follower agents’ tracking error remains bounded and the resultant closed-loop system does not exhibit Zeno behavior. The numerical simulation is included to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.

Interference fitting widely uses in industry. These joints manufacturing are always associated with limitations and high precision. To reduce manufacturing costs, it is essential to study the influence of form defects on the assembly strength. Standards are limited to simple cylindrical parts. But, variation in interference are common in manufacturing process of these parts. In this article, it has been tried to predict strength of interference joints successfully, by proposing of new definition of mean interference for parts with form defects. Then, strength of interference joints were calculated using traditional Lame approach and mean interference value. Also, real model of interference fit with form defects were analyzed by finite element method. Theoretical results were compared with experimental results for validation. Theoretical results correlate well with those obtained through experiments. Results show that for defected interference fit joints, mean interference can be considered as reliable criterion for evaluation of joint strength.

Under cyclic loading, the plastic zone becomes complicated during unloading. The energy-absorbing cyclic plastic zone is a stimulant for crack growth and can be a criterion for determining the damage around the fatigue crack tip. Presenting analytical models for determining the shape and size of the plastic zone often makes restrictive assumptions such as elastic-perfectly plastic response. In this research, the effects of non-linear kinematic hardening behavior of pure copper on the cyclic plastic reaction of the crack tip in different conditions were investigated. Chaboche nonlinear material model was used to determine the hardening parameters. According to the numerical results, the cyclic plastic zone around the crack tip was constant in the same load range but load ratio had a slight effect on this zone. Moreover, presence of the kinematic hardening in the cyclic loading caused reverse plastic zone to be predicted smaller than analytical model. According to the results, for materials such as pure copper with kinematic hardening behavior, the cyclic plastic zone increases with increase in the crack length. Therefore, the cyclic plastic zone, as well as other parameters in the fracture mechanics can be a proper criterion for fatigue crack growth studies.

Energy recovery from waste is a proper way to waste management and energy production from foods waste. Anaerobic digestion of the waste is a suitable way to produce clean energy. This study aimed to investigate the anaerobic digestion of food waste and methane production by thermal and thermo-chemical pretreatments at a temperature of thermophilic (55 ˚C) in the Batch Leach Bed Reactor with Down Flow reactor (LBR DF).
In the present study, the food waste collected from Restaurant of Bu-Ali Sina University and autoclaving and microwave pretreatment was performed before feeding LBR DF. In the thermal pretreatments, homogeneous mixture of food waste pretreated using autoclave and microwave. In the thermo-chemical pretreatments, initially, food waste pretreated using NaOH 5N for 60 minutes and then pretreated using autoclave and microwave. LBR DF was launched at thermophilic temperature and SCOD, TCOD, TS and VS values were measured before loading and at the end of tests. By using MATLAB software, the cumulative methane was fitted on modified Gompertz model and B0, Rm and values were determined for all experiments.
According to the results, the best results was in microwave along with NaOH 5N pretreatment that SCOD / TCOD value increased to the amount of 82.25%, methane production to the amount of 39.98 l, TSremoved and VSremoved to the amounts of 6.01% and 7.1% respectively. In addition, lowest of value and highest of Rm value was observed in microwave along with NaOH 5N pretreatment to the amounts of 3.38 (day) and 1.8 (l/day) respectively.
Generally, thermo-chemical pretreatment have the better performance than the thermal pretreatment and without pretreatment. Thermo-chemical pretreatment causes more damage the compounds of food waste and thereby increases the amount of SCOD / TCOD%, TSremoved, VSremoved and methane production.

In recent years, there has been an increasing attention in energy exchange among the various countries or areas. One of the methods for energy exchange, with coordinated by the area operators, is participation of producers and consumers in other area markets directly. In this paper, for multi-area power systems that there is a single market in each area (multiple markets structure), a mechanism for power exchange management is proposed. In the mentioned structure, the participation of external bus players in each market is possible. In the designed mechanism, the power exchange management is done by a proposed central coordinator entity. The coordinator performs the management of power exchange in an iterative decision-making process to maintain system security by using a technical approach. The simulation studies for a triple-market case in the standard three areas system (IEEERTS-96) are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.

This study aims to assess alignment of curriculum in Thinking and Research Course of 6th grade during 2013-2014.There research method was descriptive and a sample of 50 principals,100 teachers and 250 students were selected through random sampling. The corpus for this study included the Transformation Document, National Curriculum, the Thinking and Research Textbook and the Teacher’s Guide. The data was collected through content analysis, observation of implemented and achieved programs by questionnaires. The obtained data were analyzed by t-test, Chi-square, and Pearson correlation. The Results of the study indicated that there is a weak congruity and 37 percent the inappropriate design and there were problems during implementation including unfamiliarity with the theoretical foundation, negative attitude and lack of professional qualifications of teachers, inaccessibility of facilities and equipment and time for training. The highest level of congruity was observed in the achieved curriculum regarding knowledge section with the final exam scores; however, the portion of achievement to the theoretical and performance goals is low.

To determine the prevalence of different types of strabismus among patients presenting to Farabi hospital strabismus clinic from 2008 to 2014.
This retrospective cross-sectional study was conducted using the records of patients with strabismus. The data compiled included the type of strabismus, associated abnormalities, the type of amblyopia, and other ocular pathologic findings.
In this study, 1,174 strabismic patients were enrolled. Overall, 63.03% of all patients had esodeviation and exodeviation was encountered in 24.53% of patients. Accommodative esotropia was the most prevalent type of strabismus accounting for 25.04% of all strabismic patients. This type of strabismus was followed by intermittent exotropia, non-accommodative esotropia, and partially accommodative esotropia which were encountered in 12.09%, 11.24% and 10.39% of patients, respectively. Two hundred and thirty-six patients (20.1%) had other ocular pathologic findings in addition to strabismus which were inferior oblique overaction in the majority of cases (11.07%), followed by nystagmus (88 patients). Of the patients, 45% had no amblyopia, whereas 37% had combined type of amblyopia which was the most common type of amblyopia observed in this study.
Esotropia was two and half times more prevalent than exotropia and almost half of the strabismic patients suffered from amblyopia. The results of this study suggest that strabismus screening of children could be useful in the early detection and hence appropriate management of strabismus.

Plum as a climacteric fruit has high ethylene production and respiration rate at the ripening stage which is the reason for its short postharvest life. In order to evaluate the effect of oxalic acid treatment on postharvest storage life and maintain qualitative characteristics of plum fruit cv. Santa Rosa, an experiment was performed based on factorial in completely randomized design with two factors, oxalic acid concentration and storage time, in three replications.
Material and Plum fruits were harvested at the commercial harvest stage from a commercial orchard located in Golestan Province, Iran. On the same day, harvested fruits were transported to the laboratory and selected for the uniformity in size, shape and color. The selected fruit samples were distributed into four groups of 60 (each replicate contained 5 fruits). The selected fruits were immersed in oxalic acid solutions (0, 2, 4 and 6 mM) for 3 minutes and after removing the surface moisture at room temperature stored at 4 ◦C and 80 % relative humidity. The quantitative and qualitative traits of the fruit were evaluated every two week intervals during 42 days of storage. The obtained data were subjected to analysis of variance using SAS (9.1) software, and LSD values were calculated for the mean comparisons.
The results showed that oxalic acid had a significant effect on soluble solids content, titratable acidity, vitamin C, peel anthocyanins and browning index, whilst weight loss, soluble solids content, titratable acidity, vitamin C, fruit flavor index, pH, flesh and peel anthocyanins, total chlorophyll and chlorophyll a, b, total carotenoids, phenols and flavonoids, antioxidant activity, electrolyte leakage and browning index were significantly influenced by storage time. The increment of the oxalic acid concentration led to increase of soluble solids content by the late week 4 of storage. The highest (1.21%) and lowest (0.38%) titratable acidity was recorded for 6 mM oxalic acid in week 2 and 2 mM oxalic acid in week 6 of storage, respectively. At the end of the storage, 6 mM oxalic acid caused to preserve the maximum Vit C content (11.63 mg/100g) compared to control. Oxalic acid had no significance on total phenols and flavonoids; however, the interaction between storage time and oxalic acid had also a significant effect on soluble solids content, titratable acidity, vitamin C, fruit flavor index, peel anthocyanins, phenols, flavonoids and browning index. The weight loss reached 9.96% by late week 6. The electrolyte leakage percent and browning index increased during storage period and the minimum browning index without any significant difference was observed in 2 mM (41.11%) and 4 mM (43.89%) oxalic acid treatments.
In conclusion, oxalic acid significantly increased titratable acidity, vitamin C, plum peel anthocyanins and soluble solids compared to the control. The treated fruits had a lower browning index than the control. As a whole, regarding the results of this research, post-harvest application of 4 mM oxalic acid treatment could be used to maintain plum fruit qualitative properties and increase the time of storage.

Transient stability analysis (TSA) is one of the important issues in the power system operation. The common methods of TSA are typically based on offline simulations so that some preventive and corrective actions may be designed to be adopted in real time conditions. To reduce the risk of these actions, in this paper a new method of transient stability estimation is proposed in which both local and wide-area measurements are used. According to the proposed method, the coherent generator groups of the two-area power system are initially identified and then the system is simplified based on the single machine equivalent (SIME) method. Thereafter, the equal area (EA) criterion is used to estimate the system transient stability. The innovation of this paper is the calculation of the acceleration area of SIME system based on the acceleration areas calculated locally in generator buses. The proposed method is applied on a10-mchine 39-bus test system and its results are presented by further explanation of its technical advantages.

This research aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of the curricula for in-service training of primary school teachers in I.R. Iran to assess the fulfillment of curricular objectives. In this evaluative research, various methods including library research, comparative-qualitative content analysis, and descriptive survey method were utilized. The statistical population of the study comprised the National Curriculum, Document of Theoretical Foundations of Fundamental Reform in Education, sources related to curriculum planning and educational evaluation, primary schools teachers in Rafsanjan who had passed about ninety percent of teacher's in-service training courses (321 individuals), as well as trainers of teacher training courses (N= 21). Total population sampling was used for the documents, teachers as well as trainers and convenience sampling was used for specialized sources. Data collection tools included note-taking cards, a researcher-devised check-list, a semi-structured interview and two researcher-devised questionnaires whose validity and reliability were approved. Klein’s nine elements of curriculum (1991) served as the evaluation criteria for the in-service curricula and 106 indicators were extracted from the documents. Expert's opinions were regarded as the criteria for the desirability of the indicators and the criteria. Results of the evaluation were indicative of the relative desirability of the programs in the fulfillment of curricular objectives.

Food animals such as different rearing birds can transmit zoonotic enteropathogenic bacteria, which exist in their intestinal microbiota. This research was designed in order to molecular identification of Campylobacter, Arcobacter, as well as Salmonella in Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) reared in farms of Northern Iran.
Total of 100 cloacal samples were collected from 20 different quail farms. After extraction of total DNA, the samples subjected to molecular detection of the Campylobacter, Arcobacter, and Salmonella using polymerase chain reaction. By Chi-squared, all statistical analyses were performed by SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL (v. 18.0).
Totally, the prevalence rates of Campylobacter, Salmonella, and Arcobacter in samples were 95, 65, and 0%, respectively. The prevalence of Salmonella spp. in rural farms was significantly (p High occurrence of Campylobacter spp. and Salmonella spp. were found in rearing quail populations of Mazandaran province, Northern Iran. These enteropathogens can contaminate food products obtained from the birds indicating their public health importance.

Design and construction process of special kind of sputter ion pump is described briefly in this paper. In order to investigate the optimization of effective parameters in choosing and designing ILSF ion pumps, this pump has been designed and manufactured. By optimizing some parameters such as dimension and shape of penning cells, anode voltage, magnetic field and internal structure of pump, it is possible to significantly decrease the cost of construction and operation of synchrotron vacuum system. By using the results of simulations and calculations of electromagnetic field, plasma simulation or glow discharge, titanium sputtering, etc., critical parameters in design of internal structure of ion pump have been optimized. In the following configuration, the pumping has been started at 10-4 torr. The pressure goes down to 10-8, without saturation effect in low pressures

Sustainable development is a new field involving politics, culture, economy, trade and industry simultaneously, while supporting environment, coexistence with nature and equal human rights, and dealing with countries domestic and international affairs. Since in the field of clean environment, social skills development is an important element in creating a sustainable development, this paper compares the effectiveness of project and non-project-based E-learning on the development of social skills along with sustainable development of Arak Payam Noor University students. The 750 number of E-learning students of Arak Payame Noor University is the research population. Among whom 30 are selected using the purposive sampling method. The Matson et al standard questionnaire is used for data collection. The validity of Matson’s standard questionnaire was confirmed in past researches. The reliability coefficient is calculated by the Cronbach's alpha alpha method. The reliability coefficient is calculated equal 0.86 in this method. In this paper, project and non-project-based E-learning students are studied in two separate groups. The average of two groups is compared using the paired samples (Coupled) of T-test. The calculations show that the results of the sustainable development of social skills of project and non-project-based E-learning students are significantly different.