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Objectives: This study aimed to compare the analgesic effect of single-dose spinal versus epidural analgesia for labor pain to verify if applying a single dose spinal analgesia is an efficient technique for labor pain management as an alternative for epidural analgesia. Methods: A total of 128 women in the active phase of labor were randomly allocated into two groups of spinal analgesia (n = 64) and epidural analgesia (n = 64). The latter received a bolus dose of 16 mL of 0.125% bupivacaine and 50 μg fentanyl and repeated 5 - 10 mL of bolus dose. The former received 2.5 mg hyperbaric bupivacaine plus 50μg fentanyl. Pain intensity was measured using the visual analog scale (VAS). The duration of analgesia, mode of delivery, the duration of labor, side effects, and maternal satisfaction were also compared. Results: There were no significant differences in the rate of cesarean section, duration of labor, postpartum hemorrhage, and the frequency of the fetal heart deceleration until 30 min after analgesia between the two groups. Measured pain after 30 (P = 0.0001) and 90 min (P = 0.01) was significantly lower in the spinal group than the epidural group. However, there was no significant difference between the spinal and epidural groups concerning the VAS scores at 150, 210, and 270 minutes. Maternal satisfaction was higher in the spinal group (P = 0.002). The mean duration of analgesia was longer in the spinal group than the epidural group (P = 0.0001). Conclusions: According to the findings, single-dose spinal analgesia, compared to epidural analgesia, is a safe, fast, and efficient technique for labor analgesia, which can be easily performed. In addition, it provides a high satisfaction level in the parturient.

In this study a data envelopment analysis was used to evaluate the technical and scale efficiencies of greenhouses regarding to energy use in carnation production Mahallat, Iran. The purpose of this study was to identify efficient and inefficient units and wasteful use of energy by the latter. In addition, we established the optimum level of energy from different inputs. Finally, the effect of energy use optimization on energy productivity and ratio was investigated. The results revealed that 35 % (7 farmers) and 55 % (11 farmers) out of farmers which considered for the analysis, were recognized as the technically and pure technically efficient farmers, respectively. Most greenhouses have wasteful use in diesel fuel and fertilizer consumption. The results represented that the average values of technical, pure technical and scale efficiency scores were 0.69, 0.82 and 0.813, accordingly. The results of ESTR calculations showed that if farmers 4, 6 and 13 operated efficiently, they would save energy consumption about 90 % without affecting the yield level.

The aim of this study was to determine energy consumption and the relationship between energy input and yield for potato production in Kaboud Rahang region of Hamadan state. The data used in this study are collected by questionnaire. The results revealed that nitrogen fertilizer (39%), diesel (21%), seed (14.9%), water (7.5%) and manure (6.4%) consumed the bulk of energy. In the surveyed farms, average yield and energy consumption were calculated as around 28613.7 kg/ha, 92296.3 MJ/ha, respectively. The results also showed that energy ratio, specific energy and energy productivity were 1.1, 3.2 MJ/kg and 0.3 kg/MJ, respectively. An econometric model was developed to estimate the impact of energy inputs on yield by using parametric methods. For this purpose, potato yield, an endogenous variable was assumed to be a function of energy inputs: fertilizer manure, chemical, machinery, human, water for irrigation, diesel and seed. The empirical results indicated that variables: fertilizer, chemical, seed and human were found statistically significant and contributed to yield. Among statistically significant exogenous variables, seed, water for irrigation, chemical, human and fertilizer were ranked in terms of elasticities.

In this paper a new spectrum sensing technique for multiple antenna cognitive radio network is proposed. While a large majority of the existing literature assume that the signal is corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise, this assumption is not always true in practice. In the present work, slow Rayleigh fading channel in the presence of impulsive noise is considered and BPSK modulation is employed. We use the enhanced energy detector in each antenna branch and exploit the combining with order statistics (COS) technique for detection. Simulation results show that our proposed technique has better performance than generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) detector.