Suchergebnisse

The agricultural sector in rural areas is seriously affected by climate change, affecting agricultural production and farming communities. This paper investigates rural households' vulnerability to floods in the seven agricultural-based regions of Pol-e Dokhtar, south of Lorestan Province, Iran. The primary data for the vulnerability indicators were collected from 322 households. Three main components of vulnerability, including exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity, were measured using the obtained data. The weighting of indicators was done by the MSF method and using MATLAB software. The results showed that the social and economic characteristics of households affect their vulnerability to floods. The Jayder, Mamolan, and Afrineh regions, which were more exposed to floods, had less capacity for adaptation. The results showed that the most vulnerable communities could be described by characteristics such as low levels of agricultural insurance, limited access to credit, low levels of income diversification, high levels of unemployment, low levels of social capital, higher dependency ratios, and poor infrastructure. This research showed that diversified livelihoods have a significant effect on reducing farmers' sensitivity to floods. The study proposes policy implications to increase resilience and reduce farmers' vulnerability to floods. The government and other development partners should prioritize the most vulnerable areas by improving their access to finance and providing the technical assistance required for increasing their coping capacity.

Introduction: Considering the unexpected events that may occur in disasters, breastfeeding and risks of the artificial feeding need more investigations in such severe conditions. To review the literature regarding to the status of breastfeeding practices during and after disasters.We conducted a narrative review to support and investigate breastfeeding in austere conditions of disasters. Furthermore, the consequences of depriving infants from breast milk were studied.
Methods: The electronic databases of PubMed, Scopus, and Science Direct were explored and English articles published in 2000-2014 over breastfeeding in disasters were extracted and reviewed.
Results: According to the findings, despite the frequent emphasizes on breastfeeding, natural and manmade disasters are strong contributors to its disruption. Uncontrolled distribution of the artificial milk should be avoided, since it is associated with lower rate of breastfeeding. Artificially-fed infants are more prone to diarrheal diseases and malnutrition, particularly in disaster situations, which healthy water is not available for preparing the artificial milk.
Conclusion: Healthcare workers should encourage mothers to continue lactation in austere conditions of disasters and monitor distribution of the artificial formula strictly.

Photo-assisted peroxi-coagulation (PPC) was investigated for treatment of high TDS (total dissolved solids) wastewater. The most important characteristics of the studied wastewater were high TDS of around 16428 mg L–1 and BOD5/COD ratio of 0.07. Effective operating parameters, including initial pH values of 3–8, reaction time of 60–240 min, electrode distance values of 2–6 cm, and voltage values of 0.5–3 V were investigated in batch mode experiments. Optimum conditions were obtained at pH = 3, voltage = 1.5 V, electrode distance = 2 cm, and reaction time = 420 min, corresponding to 89.44 % COD removal, which meets the Iran environmental discharge legislation (COD = 100 mg L–1). Kinetic analysis showed that pseudo first-order kinetic model was best fitted (R2 = 0.97). GC mass chromatograms before and after treatment showed degradation of complex compounds to more simple constituents. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

In any form of communication it is vital that both parties can understand the same language, if they cannot a translator is required. Currently mobile users engage the service of a third party provider to translate an SMS text into a different language. The existing services have a number of drawbacks e.g. high cost to the user, not user friendly, they reduce the message space, and are inefficient. To communicate with a foreign person the sender must know the recipients preferred language and device display capability. What is needed is a service where a sender can send message in their native language without regard for the target tongue. We show that a mobile operator can provide a transparent service where the text message is automatically converted to the recipients preferred language. In comparison to the existing system, our implementation is efficient and cost effective and has large implications for commerce, language learning and person-to-person communication. A large number of services such as health care management, education, emergency notification, news, weather, and traffic reports and commerce applications can be delivered to vast mobile populations who are not able to enjoy the benefit of these services due to language barriers.