Sense of Power Among Older People in Iran

Power is a resource for living that is present in all individuals, and has a positively uplifting effect on one's quality of life. In a grounded theory approach, we searched for factors influencing the sense of power, which exist in elders' interactions in their environment. These factors were awareness of personal changes, coping, role taking, perceived satisfaction, independence, and being in control. Self-management was at the core of all these factors. Educational interventions by health care professionals based on the elders' needs for empowerment comprise a major part of wellness approaches.     

The role of extracurricular activities in active citizenship education

There have been multiple trends of building democratic citizens through formal education, and in the European context the trials have been dramatically increased with the Europeanization process since the 1980s. In line with this trend, an in-depth qualitative case study was carried out in a private primary school in Turkey to shed light on the role of school-based extra-curricular activities as a contemporary trend in building active citizenship values and competencies in students. Qualitative data were collected through multiple data collection tools as observation field notes, interviews, and document analysis to achieve triangulation and trustworthiness. Much of the findings were compatible with EURYDICE Report (2005) on citizenship education, and yielded six themes, called the six blossoms of extra-curricular activities in citizenship education: namely, active citizenship perception; social accountability; intercultural awareness; awareness of democracy and human rights; thinking and research skills; and interaction and interpersonal skills.     

中国柯尔克孜族文学中的小说创作

对中国柯尔克孜族当代文学、特别是新时期阶段中的小说创作的发展过程、所取得的成就和存在的一些问题,进行了比较详细的研讨.     

Jones,Christopher (2015) Networked learning. Springer (Berlin) isbn 978‐3‐319‐01934‐5 249 pp £90 boards (ebook £72) http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319019338

This book is largely about how people connect with each other and with digital technologies, and how this affects their learning. It reviews existing literature on networked learning and describes the role of universities and academics in that approach. Jones's book targets anyone interested in learning technology, and— if you are in that group—I recommend that you borrow a copy for a while. Mohammad Ali Salmani Nodoushan     

Hydrodynamics of a self-actuated bacterial carpet using microscale particle image velocimetry

Microorganisms can effectively generate propulsive force at the microscale where viscous forces overwhelmingly dominate inertia forces; bacteria achieve this task through flagellar motion. When swarming bacteria, cultured on agar plates, are blotted onto the surface of a microfabricated structure, a monolayer of bacteria forms what is termed a “bacterial carpet,” which generates strong flows due to the combined motion of their freely rotating flagella. Furthermore, when the bacterial carpet coated microstructure is released into a low Reynolds number fluidic environment, the propulsive force of the bacterial carpet is able to give the microstructure motility. In our previous investigations, we demonstrated motion control of these bacteria powered microbiorobots (MBRs). Without any external stimuli, MBRs display natural rotational and translational movements on their own; this MBR self-actuation is due to the coordination of flagella. Here, we investigate the flow fields generated by bacterial carpets, and compare this flow to the flow fields observed in the bulk fluid at a series of locations above the bacterial carpet. Using microscale particle image velocimetry, we characterize the flow fields generated from the bacterial carpets of MBRs in an effort to understand their propulsive flow, as well as the resulting pattern of flagella driven self-actuated motion. Comparing the velocities between the bacterial carpets on fixed and untethered MBRs, it was found that flow velocities near the surface of the microstructure were strongest, and at distances far above, the surface flow velocities were much smaller.     

Type-2 fuzzy consensus control of nonlinear multi-agent systems: An LMI approach

This paper considers a class of nonlinear fractional-order multi-agent systems (FOMASs) with time-varying delay and unknown dynamics, and a new robust adaptive control technique is proposed for cooperative control. The unknown nonlinearities of the systems are online approximated by the introduced recurrent general type-2 fuzzy neural network (RGT2FNN). The unknown nonlinear functions are estimated, simultaneously with the control process. In other words, at each sample time the parameters of the proposed RGT2FNNs are updated and then the control signals are generated. In addition to the unknown dynamics, the orders of the fractional systems are also supposed to be unknown. The biogeography-based optimization algorithm (BBO) is extended to estimate the unknown parameters of RGT2FNN and fractional-orders. A LMI based compensator is introduced to guarantee the robustness of the proposed control system. The excellent performance and effectiveness of the suggested method is verified by several simulation examples and it is compared with the other methods. It is confirmed that the introduced cooperative controller results in a desirable performance in the presence of time-varying delay, unknown dynamics, and unknown fractional-orders.