An Enquiry Into the Role and Importance of Ethics in Scientific Research

In this essay the importance of spirituality (or ethics) in the life of a research scientist is explored. The following four questions are considered: a) Why should the problem be studied? What are the benefits? and For whom? b) How should we approach this problem? c) What if the results of this investigation contradict other theories? What should we do in case of disagreements? and, d) What are the consequences of this study? Who or what is going to be harmed? What are the effects on the environment?

     

Can Scientific Writing Be Creative?

In this essay, I will look at the relationship between Creativity and Spirituality in the field of writing in general, and in scientific writing in particular. A few issues such as why we write and different kinds of writing will also be briefly discussed. In general, creativity is related to a special way of SEEING, or insight, as mentioned in many spiritual traditions. Therefore, with regard to Creativity as the term is used in this essay, a certain level of spirituality is implicitly assumed.     

Effective factors on accuracy of principal diagnosis coding based on International Classification of Diseases,the 10th revision (ICD-10)

Quality of diagnostic data depends on accurate coding. The purpose of this study was to assess the accuracy of principal diagnosis coding and its effective factors. To achieve this aim, three hundred and seventy medical records were randomly selected and recoded blindly (as gold standard). The effects of possible factors on accuracy of coding which was gathered through observation method were analyzed by Chi-square (χ²), Fisher exact test, odds ratio (OR), and confidence interval 95% for OR.     

Serum Level of Some Minerals during Three Trimesters of Pregnancy in Iranian Women and Their Newborns: A Longitudinal Study

Concentrations of various trace elements are altered during pregnancy with changes in the mother’s physiology and the requirements of growing fetus. The aim of the present longitudinal study was to learn the changes of micronutrients Iron (Fe), Calcium (Ca), zinc (Zn) Magnesium (Mg) and copper (Cu) of pregnant woman and their relations with newborns levels. Serum levels of iron, calcium, zinc, magnesium and copper of 162 pregnant women and their newborns were determined by an inductively couple plasma mass spectrometer (ICP/MS). The results showed that majority (41 %) of pregnant women were in age group 26–36 years 55 % had high school and diploma levels of education and the total income ranged between 3 and 5 Rials million per month There was significant difference in iron levels during first, second and third trimesters, 76.0 ± 17.8, 63.5 ± 15.2 and 70.1 ± 14.4 μg/dl respectively. Significant difference was shown in zinc levels 79.5 ± 15, 74.5 ± 16.1, and 65.3 ± 14.9 μg/dl during three trimesters. Copper levels during pregnancy were significantly different (130.9 ± 43.5, 172.0 ± 38.94, 193.2 ± 28.5 μg/dl. The serum levels of calcium and magnesium during pregnancy were constant (Ca: 8.96 ± 0.48, 8.86 ± 0.47, 8.91 ± 0.42 mg/dl and Mg: 2.10 ± 0.21, 2.08 ± 0.28, 2.09 ± 0.29 mg/dl). Results showed that 13 % of pregnant women had hypocalcaemia and hypomagnesaemia. Thirty eight percent and 42 % of pregnant women had iron and zinc deficiency respectively. In this study, unlike zinc, no pregnant women were found deficient in serum copper levels. Calcium, iron, zinc, copper and magnesium levels in the newborn’s cord blood were 8.93 ± 0.43, 106.0 ± 26.1, 85.35 ± 16.6, 57.04 ± 13.8 and 1.99 ± 0.27 mg/dl respectively. In the present study the levels of iron and zinc in cord blood were higher than the levels of iron and zinc in maternal serum. The mean level of copper in cord blood serum in the current study was lower than maternal values. The mean serum calcium and magnesium in the serum cord blood and in the serum of the pregnant women were similar.     

Us and Them: Religious Education and the Role of Proper Communication in Conflict Prevention

The importance of proper language, in the context of multicultural education, and how it can be of help in conflict prevention is discussed. A brief discussion of what a model does and how a scientific model is constructed is provided. A circular model is developed where it is proposed that thought, language, and action, as the three most important fields of human activity, are mutually affecting each other. The element of right (proper) speech in Buddhism is extended to include right writing, or in short, right communication.     

Observer design for a class of nonlinear fractional-order systems with unknown input

A full order fractional-order observer is designed for a class of Lipschitz continuous-time nonlinear fractional-order systems with unknown input. Sufficient conditions of existence for the designed observer and stability of state estimation error system are developed by reconstructing state and using general quadratic Lyapunov function. By applying fractional-order extension of Lyapunov direct method, the stability of the fractional-order state estimation error system is analyzed. Due to the conditions involving a nonlinear matrix inequality, a new sufficient condition with linear matrix inequality (LMI) is reformulated, which makes the full order fractional-order observer implemented easily by using Matlab LMI toolbox. Examples are taken to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach by numerical simulations.     

Reduction of models of interacting lumped and distributed systems using bond graphs and repeated modal decomposition

Previous works have shown the usefulness of bond graphs for modeling and simulation of interacting lumped and distributed systems. Frequently, when damping is included in the model, the overall system is “stiff”, possessing widely disparate characteristic times. This makes simulation difficult and time consuming.Bond graphs are used here to represent the interacting lumped and modal dynamics of a system while treating the damping as an external forcing onto the system. By performing a second modal decomposition, a second bond graph model can be formulated where the damping can now be physically represented. The result is a total system model in which the characteristic times can be controlled through elimination of high frequency modes.     

Improved krill herd algorithm based sliding mode MPPT controller for variable step size P&O method in PV system under simultaneous change of irradiance and temperature

In recent years, Photovoltaic (PV) systems have been received great attention all over the words as they are sustainable, unlimited and environmentally friendly energy. However, it is required for the PV system to apply a tracking controller to guarantee efficient operation by extracting the maximum power, which named maximum power point tracking (MPPT) method. Due to the simple structure, the conventional perturb and observe (P&O) MPPT algorithm is very popular in the literature. Nevertheless, conventional methods show inaccurate performance, particularly when high variations occur in irradiance, resulting in fluctuations around the MPP. To deal with these challenges, a novel technique on the basis of the variable-step size of P&O MPPT and sliding mode controller (SMC) adjusted by the θ-modified krill herd (θ-MKH) algorithm is presented. The θ-MKH algorithm is utilized to fine-tune the optimal SMC parameters to drive the variable step of the classical P&O algorithm. Simulations are prepared to compare the performance of the suggested scheme with conventional methods by considering simultaneous fast changes of irradiance and temperature. The results show that the suggested scheme have proper performance in both transient and steady-state, particularly under quickly varying climate circumstances.     

On the question of authority and the various responses to new ideas: A (possible) buddhist perspective

The primary objective of this paper is to study the various possible responses to a new theory or perspective, whether this new theory is in science, philosophy, or religion. The response will depend on how one defines authority and truth. A brief discussion on certain aspects of Eastern spirituality is given. I rely on the philosophical aspect of Buddhism, as a basis to further my presentation. Specifically, the search for truth and certainty based on personal experience are discussed. The example of the Buddha as an archetypical teacher whose authority was based on his personal experience is also presented.     

PERSON: Personalized information retrieval evaluation based on citation networks

Despite the importance of personalization in information retrieval, there is a big lack of standard datasets and methodologies for evaluating personalized information retrieval (PIR) systems, due to the costly process of producing such datasets. Subsequently, a group of evaluation frameworks (EFs) have been proposed that use surrogates of the PIR evaluation problem, instead of addressing it directly, to make PIR evaluation more feasible. We call this group of EFs, indirect evaluation frameworks. Indirect frameworks are designed to be more flexible than the classic (direct) ones and much cheaper to be employed. However, since there are many different settings and methods for PIR, e.g., social-network-based vs. profile-based PIR, and each needs some special kind of data to do the personalization based on, not all the evaluation frameworks are applicable to all the PIR methods. In this paper, we first review and categorize the frameworks that have already been introduced for evaluating PIR. We further propose a novel indirect EF based on citation networks (called PERSON), which allows repeatable, large-scale, and low-cost PIR experiments. It is also more information-rich compared to the existing EFs and can be employed in many different scenarios. The fundamental idea behind PERSON is that in each document (paper) d, the cited documents are generally related to d from the perspective of d’s author(s). To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed EF, we use a large collection of scientific papers. We conduct several sets of experiments and demonstrate that PERSON is a reliable and valid EF. In the experiments, we show that PERSON is consistent with the traditional Cranfield-based evaluation in comparing non-personalized IR methods. In addition, we show that PERSON can correctly capture the improvements made by personalization. We also demonstrate that its results are highly correlated with those of another salient EF. Our experiments on some issues about the validity of PERSON also show its validity. It is also shown that PERSON is robust w.r.t. its parameter settings.