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The purpose of the present study was to examine the interrelationships between the perception of social and teaching presences and the satisfaction of basic psychological needs, persistence, intrinsic motivation, and negative emotions of Iraqi EFL learners in online courses. To this end, 200 intermediate Iraqi university students studying English were recruited to participate in the study. Then they were asked to complete self-report questionnaires on their perception of social and teaching presence, satisfaction of basic psychological needs, intention to persist, intrinsic motivation, and negative emotions. SEM analysis showed that the students’ perceptions of social and teaching presence had a positive relation with their satisfaction of basic psychological needs, persistence, and intrinsic motivation. The results, however, showed that there was a negative relationship between the students’ perceptions of social and teaching presences and boredom, anxiety, and shame.  The results imply that providing opportunities for students to interact effectively with their instructors and peers in online classes in a socially supportive environment can lead to positive outcomes. The implications of the study are discussed, and suggestions for further research are proposed.

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Pomegranate is an important Iranian-native fruit, with many varieties cultivated. Although the volume of data on the importance of pomegranates in human nutrition has increased tremendously in the last years, the physical properties of the pomegranate fruit during fruit maturity have not yet been studied in detail. Thus, the present study aimed to evaluate changes in physical characteristics of six pomegranate fruits in three different stages from fruit set to ripening. Physical characteristics of pomegranate fruit including length to diameter ratio of fruit and calyx, peel and aril percentage, juice weight and percentage in a whole fruit in ‘Aghaye’ (A), ‘Faroogh’ (F), ‘Rabbab-e-Fars’ (RF), ‘Shahvare’ (S), ‘Shirin-e-Bihaste’ (SB) and ‘Shirin-e-Mohali’ (SM) were investigated. Different topologies of the artificial neural network were examined. Among different structures, a multilayer feed forward neural network based on 15 neurons in the single hidden layer with transfer function of tangent hyperbolic both in hidden layer and output layer and Levenberg-Marquardt learning rule was found to be the best model for predicting the physical characteristics of pomegranate fruit from the different cultivars. Results indicated that artificial neural network provides a prediction method with high accuracy. The correlation coefficients in the prediction of these physical characteristics were higher than 0.89.

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Increasing information about color kinetic changes has made the improvement of color parameters possible. Analysis of the color kinetics data allows for undesirable changes to be minimized and optimizes the color retention in food products. Imaging and image processing operation were performed to extract color parameters in the color space L*a*b. Image J software was applied to analysis the images, and changing the color space was done using a two-stage method. The temperature sensitivity of rate constants was evaluated using Arrhenius equation. Results showed that the increase of ΔE during time at the beginning of frying was fast and then has been slower. The activation energy was determined 44.80 kJ/mol. Statistical analyses showed that frying time and frying temperature and also interaction of them had significant effects on total color changes of the meat cubes. Color measurement was carried out successfully using image processing as a non-destructive and simple method in evaluation of ostrich meat crust color and the results of machine vision system correlated with the visual observations. Kinetic of formation or deterioration of color during deep fat frying was well modeled using a first-order kinetic equation.

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This study was performed on the physical stability, rheological and sensory properties of low-fat pasteurized cream with 20% fat content in the presence of carrageenan, tragacanth and their mixtures at a constant concentration of 0.3% (w/w) and comparison with cream samples without hydrocolloids as a control. Physical stability, rheological properties, color and sensory evaluation were analyzed. Rheological parameters confirmed that all samples had a shear-thinning behavior. The results showed that the addition of hydrocolloids significantly increases the physical stability and consistency coefficient, which leads to better quality of final products. In addition, the sensory properties showed high acceptability of samples containing tragacanth. Based on the obtained results, the sample containing a mixture of 0.2% tragacanth and 0.1% carrageenan had a much greater effect on the mentioned properties, especially sensory properties, and will have a good potential for use in cream formulations.

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The aim of this study was to investigate the functional yogurt containing olive oil (0%, 3%, and 6%) and celery seed powder (0%, 1.5%, and 3%) and The effect of each experimental treatment 1, 7, and 14 days after production on physicochemical properties. According to the obtained results, the formulation of functional yogurt using different concentrations of olive oil and celery seed powder caused a significant difference (P ˂ 0.05) in physicochemical properties affected by the amount of olive oil and celery seed powder over storage time. So that storage time was directly related to acidity and watering and had an inverse effect on pH. While the amount of celery seed powder was directly related to lean dry matter, protein and hydration. Also, the percentage of olive oil with fat had a direct effect and had an adverse effect on hydration and samples containing olive oil had a higher acidity index than the control sample. Regarding the analysis of fatty acids, by adding olive herbal oil to the control sample, the amount of short and medium chain fatty acids such as 14:­0, 16:­0, 12:­0, 10:­0, 8:­0, 6:­0 showed a significant decrease. But the amounts of fatty acids 18:­1 and 18:­2 increased significantly. The results of this study showed that by using different concentrations of olive oil and celery seed powder in the formulation of functional yogurt, physicochemical properties with different properties can be created, each of which can be considered according to the definition of the desired product properties.