Geography and Development
Year:2011 | Volume:8 | Issue:20|Papers Count:12

Digital gap in rural areas is one of the important development challenges in the third millennium. Now, a lot of developing countries are seeking to benefit from communication and information technologies to reduce and finally remove the digital gap.Providing services by the use of communication and information technologies to the villagers is one of the strategies which are also being put in the work order of the people involved in rural development of the country to reduce and eliminate the digital gap.It is noteworthy that, presentation of technology is the necessary but not sufficient condition for the use and application of technology. Once the target technology being accepted by the users, the financings performed in the field of technology will have the required productivity. With respect to the importance of this issue, in this study, firstly the effective factors in the acceptance of the services for rural communication and technology information offices in thirteen factors have been identified and then have been reviewed by descriptive-survey approach. The main tool for the present research is questionnaire and statistical society of this research are academic experts and professionals of technology information in governmental organizations involved in rural affairs of Sistan and Baluchestan, which have been selected by random sampling method. Data analysis and review have been conducted by the method of comparing the average of factors by “t “test method and the use of “Spss” software, version 11.5 to study and review the equality of the effects of the under study factors by the use of single factor within case variance analysis and ranking effective factors by TOPSIS technique (one of multi attributes decision making technologies).The researches show that all the studied factors in this research, are effective on the acceptance of the services of rural communication and information technology but the findings show that the effect of each effective factor on acceptance of the services of rural communication and information technology by the villagers are not equal, Therefore ranking the factors and their influential amount and priority have been determined.

Land degradation is a phenomenon which for different reasons is extending and growing throughout the world. Sistan plain was also affected by this phenomenon, so that has changed to a serious problem for industry, connecting roads and social & economical activities of the area’s population, therefore, the necessity of combating with this phenomenon and identifying the effective factors on it, is clear. The aim of this study is to evaluate the current status and prediction of the future status for land degradation in Niyatak Sistan area based on expanded method of estimating desertification rate (Land degradation) in Iran. For this purpose, the existing working units in the area were prepared by geo morphology method as a basic map for giving value to the considered factors and indices. Then with giving value to evaluating indices of wind erosion and aggregate their related scores at each working units and in accordance with the base tables, land degradation for different uses were determined. Finally, through using Arc view 3.2 software, the maps related to the present and future status of the said utilizations were drawn.The results showed that in this method of the current land degradation, are ranked in three classes of medium, high and severe. Based on the obtained results, the degradation was more than the standard limit and includes the classes of medium (Ш), high (IV) and severe (V). Medium, high and severe classes include %59.3 %31.2 and %9.5 percent of the whole area of the region respectively. Future status of the region showed that in the future Niyatak region will be placed in three classes of low, medium and high intensity rate of land degradation.

With the increase of changes and transformations during the last year of the second millennium frequent appearance of new issues and problems in the global community, relying on prediction based planning methods was not sufficient for fulfillment of macro management requirements of the countries and the heavy shadow of uncertainties and emergence of non-continuous and strange events has transformed the situation in a  way that predicting future in the world with high changes seems difficult for the programmers. Inability in accurate prediction of the future and also the complexities due to increasing changes led the researchers to benefit from the capabilities of the new science of future study approach and include the future fore sighting in the planning activities. It seems that, with respect to unsuccessful urban and regional planning at construction stage, use of fore sighting and changing the approach from prediction to foresight in urban and regional planning is an unavoidable necessity. Therefore, this paper tries while introducing foresight and future study approach through criticizing the existing planning process, introduces the new planning process and reviews the necessity for using fore sight approach.In this paper, two processes from the view point of some indices including macro approach, process form, trend of thought and world views, mission, performance and method have comparatively been compared.

Informal settlements have been one of the outcomes and prominent characteristics of today’s urbanization in developing countries including Iran. During the last century, various approaches were selected and implemented by planning systems in different countries for solving or decreasing the dimensions of this problem. From ignorance up to empowerment covers a range of polices and measures which have been considered with respect to the geographical and historical condition.These polices have been promoted under the effect of schools, political and implementation systems or international organizations and have been experienced more or less in these countries. In Iran in Kermanshah city, as one of the major provincial centers, having the problem of informal settlement, over the past decades, different measures and approaches have been experienced for solving this problem. Today, after decades of urban planning system efforts, informal settlement has remained as one of the main problems of urban management. In the newest experience, Iran’s Urban Planning system has tried to decrease or control the dimensions of this problem by empowerments and improvement programs. But still there are short comings in this area which prevents the achievement of integrated urban development.

Historical city of Zahedan-Kohne is located at km20 of south east of Zabol, and at the north part of Zahak basin in Sistan. This city is comprised of 5 (five) separate parts named Ghale, Arg Aval or Arg Zirin, Arg Dovom or Arg foroudin, Sharestan and Rabath. Historical city of Zahedan-e-kohne at its life and prosperity time was considered as one of the largest cities of Iran, and was the centre of Sistan in the centuries of 5 up to 9 Hejri Gamari, but there is no accurate information about the exact area of this important city of Sistan because the existing man made features and monuments have been destroyed with passing the time and intervention of different natural and human factors, but the total area of Ghale,Arg and Sharestan reaches to 3,248,272 m2.  The results of field studies n this city which are performed during 2002-2007 by the writers of  this study , clearly confirms that designers, city developers and architectures of historical city of Zahedan-e-Kohne before constructing the city and the buildings inside it, have dominated firstly on the natural geography of the area through performing scientific and professional studies, and considering all the related aspects have established a city which had comfort and peace for his residents due to having all climatic provisions and environmental adaptation.

One of the natural disasters which affects on Khuzestan province for its geographical location and its vicinity with large zones of desert areas is the undesirable phenomenon of dust. This research has been performed after extracting 50 recognized dust systems and dividing them in to two periods of cold and hot periods of the year during statistical period of (1996-2005) by using combined maps of geo potential height, elevation 500 Hecto Pascal, medium pressure of sea elevation, wind vector maps, isospeed lines and air flow at two levels of 500 Hecto pascal and medium level of the sea at range 0 up to 50 northern degree and 0 up to 70 eastern degree and satellite photos for two recognized dust systems.The results of this research shows that in the cold period of the year, migratory systems of westerlies (west winds) and polar front jet stream (PFJ) and in the hot period of the year, thermal low pressures of the earth surface are the main important factors in creation and formation of the said phenomenon in Khuzestan province. When deep pressure decrease occurs at the west part of the studied area in the deserts of neighboring countries and the wind speed reaches to jet stream wind, in case of availability of the environmental conditions, causes instability on the earth surface which produces dust and transfers it to Khuzestan province. Also In the hot periods of the year, thermal low pressures of the earth surface, especially Fars Gulf  low pressure through sucking the air of surrounding deserts (Arabian Peninsula) is one the main factors of dust creation.Moving path of dust waves and manner of drop axis settlement and low pressure centers of the earth surface and also the used satellite photos show that the main sources of the entered dust in to Khuzestan province include southern desert of Iraq, North part of Arabian, south east of Syria and partly north of Africa desert.

One of the most necessary information required by the managers and custodians of natural resources are land use maps. Satellite data, for owning characteristics such as presenting on time and digit information, variable forms and process ability have a great role in providing land use maps. In the other hand, during the recent years, advanced classification methods including artificial neural networks, fuzzy sets and intelligent systems are widely used for classification of satellite photos. The main objective of this research would be comparing the two different methods of classification for land use by the use of ASTER photos. For this reason, by using ASTER satellite photos and two supervised classified algorithms including maximum likelihood and artificial neural network, the land use map was prepared. In classification with neural network algorithm, a Perceptron network with a hidden layer, 14 input neurons ‘9 middle neurons and 6 output neurons have been used for classification by neural network algorithm, in which the number of input neurons are the same number of ASTER satellite photo bands and the number of output neurons are the same number of classes for land use map. For network training, back propagation algorithm has been used. The results obtained from accuracy evaluation of these two methods by the use of Kappa coefficient showed that neural network algorithm with coefficient 0.86 in comparing with  maximum likelihood algorithm with coefficient 0.69 was more accurate. The results of this study show that traditional classification algorithms like statistical methods for its low flexibility and its different parametric types like maximum likelihood methods for their depending on Gaussian model cannot provide optimized results in case of abnormality of educational data, while the reason of success of artificial neural network algorithm in remote sensing is that it is able to integrate data with different resources.

The main objective of this study is finding a proper model for predicting the yield of dry farmed wheat with the use of climate parameters in the province. For predicting the yield of dry farmed wheat, neural networks have been used. Firstly, the yield data of wheat during statistical period of 1995-2003 from information bank of Ministry of Agriculture for each township was prepared separately and then meteorological statistics from the existing stations in these townships were extracted from information bank of Iran’s Meteorological organization for similar statistical period. 7 years of the existing statistic were considered for model training and two years were considered for the test file. To adopt the best model, it was required to determine the best input matrix of meteorology data. For this purpose, the first input matrix containing 9 initial meteorological parameters which finally through calculating the error amount of the model, the best composition was obtained when the parameters of precipitation, temperature, number of days with heat and cold stress, transpiration, evaporation and number of rainy days have been included in the input matrix.The results showed that, the first factor has the highest role in determining the yield of dry farm wheat in East Azarbaijan province. The second effective factor on the yield of dry wheat is the amount of evaporation and transpiration. To evaluate the accuracy of model based on the predicted yield, the index for compliance rate (d) was calculated, and the results showed that the accuracy rate is 0.82.

Increasing growth of population in the recent years and consequently increasing and changing consumption patterns has increased the pressure on natural environment and its resources. Since, renewing of some of these resources takes hundreds of years and some are also non-renewable, continuing this process declines the natural environment to supply the population needs and will have a descending trend with passing the time. On the other hand, all the consumption needs of settlement centers are not compatible with the existing ecological power in them, for this reason, for supplying these needs, supporting region is required. With respect to the concept of sustainable development, limited capacity of land resources and also basic needs of the population, determining the amount of using and extent of supporting lands required for optimum planning with foresight approach seems necessary. Here, recognition and analysis of ecological foot print concept and its measurement methods as tools for measuring the stability of human activities has a great importance.The aim of this research would be identifying the concepts, measuring method, application and ultimately analysis and evaluation of ecological foot prints. Method of gathering information would be as documentary and through using articles and researches conducted in different countries. The findings indicate that despite the limitations and difficulties of calculating ecological foot print and estimation of supporting lands, this method can be an appropriate frame work for measuring and evaluating the environmental impacts along with sustainable development.

Urbanism and urban development along with rapid population increasing and development of industrial activities with uncontrolled use of fossil fuels have severely increased the pollutions which in short term, its effects is clear on different deceases and in long term speeds up some climatic changes and its environmental impacts, including change of desirable time periods from comfortable climate point of view. In this study, by the use of 50 year climate data (1957-2006) and relative humidity of Yazd station and also using EVANZ comfortable climate model, the favorable months for human physiology comfort in 5 periods of 10 years were determined and linear trend of these changes for the next 10 years which would be year 2016, has been predicted. The results of this study show that the warming tread in Yazd station is increasing and most of the months have a warming trend. So that it is expected in the near future, those cold months will have more comfortable situations for physiological welfare and comfortable of human and mutually in the warm months, heat tension will have a determined increase.