مطالب

The forward-looking information disclosure presents the information that enables the beneficiaries to evaluate a company's future that might involve financial forecasts and uncertainty. This affects the company's performance and decreases the stock return volatility. The present research aims at integrated modeling of the causes and consequences of forward-looking information disclosure. This study is an applied descriptive correlational research. The sample included 93 companies listed on the Tehran stock exchange from 2013 to 2019. The impact of all the causes of forward-looking information disclosure and its consequences was extracted by applying the structural equation modeling method. The consequences include capital cost and informational asymmetry, and the causes of forward-looking information disclosure include macroeconomic features, financial performance, ownership structure, board characteristics, structural properties, and audit. In short, according to the obtained results, the forward-looking information disclosure significantly positively affects the capital cost. On the contrary, it has no significant influence on informational asymmetry. Further, the results of testing the model revealed that the variables of ownership structure and financial performance positively influence forward-looking information disclosure. In addition, the impact of macroeconomic characteristics is negative, and there is no relationship between the forward-looking information disclosure with the audit, structural features, and the board's characteristics

The application of machine learning technologies for cancer detection purposes are rising due to their ever-increasing accuracy. Melanoma is one of the most common types of skin cancer. Detection of melanoma in the early stages can significantly prevent illness and fetal death. The application of innovative machine learning technology is highly relevant and valuable due to medical practitioners' difficulty in early-stage diagnoses. This paper provides an open-source tutorial on the performance of an algorithm that helps to diagnose melanoma by extracting features from dermatoscopic images and their classification. First, we used a Dull-Razor preprocessing method to remove extra details such as hair. Next, histogram adjustments and lighting thresholds were used to increase the contrast and select lesion boundaries. After using a threshold, a binary-classified version of image was obtained, and the boundary of the lesion was determined. As a result, the features from skin tissue were extracted. Finally, a comparative study was conducted between three methods which are Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN). The results show that ANN could achieve better accuracy (83.5%). In order to mitigate the biases in existing studies, the source code of this research is available at hadi-naghavipour.com/ml to serve aspiring researchers for improvement, correction and learning and provide a guideline for technology manager practitioners.

This paper examines the liberal society that Popper lauds, that aims to be truly open, and discusses why another, more communitarian kind of society, particularly societies in Africa, may also reflect the quest for intellectual openness that is Popper’s ideal. Moreover, this paper avers reasons why Popper should be comfortable with such a liberal-communitarian mix. The inter-subjectivity in his critical rationalism is a balance of an explicit individualism, and an implicit social element (Afisi, 2016a). Popper is indeed an author of such a balance. For a society to be truly open requires the careful recognition and protection of individual freedom. However, the extent to which individuals are free to perform actions that they desire without external constraints, and the level of their individuality in relation to others when performing such actions, remain a contentious issue between liberals and more communitarian thinkers. Popper’s critical rationalism provides the necessary impetus to this contention through his view of freedom that I contend can best be viewed as carefully balanced, a view which combines individuality with a social element that upholds community values necessary for openness of society. With this combination, Popper’s politics of liberalism provides an effective model of how a truly open society can be achieved. The values inherent to Popper’s liberalism including those concerning intellectual openness, individual freedom, mutual respect, measured self-respect, welfarism, humanitarianism, accountability, critical debates and feedback from the citizens, together concern the conditions for a society to be truly open. There are many competing thoughts as to what openness might be in Popper’s philosophy. The present study of Popper does not presume to address them all. The focus here is specifically on using Popper’s idea of critical rationalism to balance relations between liberal politics of individual rights and freedom, and communitarian politics of the common good, as it relates to situations about how socio-economic and political conditions in Africa societies should be structured. While I contend that Popper’s works in political philosophy focused centrally on Western political tradition, and not about Africa in its strict sense, significant lessons can be distilled from Popper that can offer suggestions on social reforms in Africa. This paper explores Popper’s project of the open society across the plurality and differences of societies, so that his liberal ideas of individual freedom are not undermined, and the progress of the communitarian idea of the common good, that Africa societies are built upon, is also well enhanced. Liberal individualism and community values inherent to communitarianism are both well accommodated within Popper’s critical rationalism.

One of the issues that mos t cities across the world are faced with is natural disas ters. Natural hazards and their devas tating effects remain on the ground, especially in recent years, the countries have been about to reduce the damage caused to it to plan and manage their events. Adminis trative units could have an important role as one of the elements before, during, and after the crisis. In this s tudy, connective s tatus and building accessibility in the offices of region 5 in Isfahan were s tudied, including Telecommunication Organizations, Fire S tations, Electricity Companies, municipalities, Education Minis try, and Gas Companies. Heretofore, there was no study of the connective s tatus and accessibility of the office buildings in Esfahan. This research is a descriptive and analytical survey. The required information was evaluated and weighed by six indices, including the questionnaire, field collecting method, and A.H.P. measures. The results indicated that among administrative centers in terms of the degree of connectivity and accessibility, adminis trative codes 6 and 17, with weights of 0.03% and 0.031% were the mos t accessible, and adminis trative codes 14, 8, 9, 10, and 11 with weights of 0.07%, 0.067% were the mos t inaccessible.