Background: Nursing interventions tailored to the smoking triggers in patients with non-communicable chronic diseases are essential. However, these interventions are scant due to the nature of factors associated with smoking cessation and the poor understanding of the effect of nurse-led intervention in Iraq.Purpose: This study aimed to determine the dominant smoking triggers and examine the effects of a tailored nursing intervention on smoking behavior in patients with non-communicable chronic diseases.Methods: Convenience samples of 128 patients with non-communicable chronic diseases, male and female patients, who were 18-70 years old, were recruited in this quasi-experimental, randomized comparative trial in the outpatient clinic in one major teaching hospital in Baghdad City, Iraq. The intervention included simple yet specific instructions that were given both orally and in written form to the study samples to enable them to manage their craving to smoke for 6 weeks. The smoking triggers were assessed using Why Do You Smoke questionnaire. Participants were randomly allocated to receive either the nurse-led intervention or standard care. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, independent sample t-tests, logistic regression, and two-sided tests.Results: Stress reduction was the dominant smoking trigger among subjects. The percentage of participants who were either able to completely quit smoking or reduce the number of smoked cigarettes per day (n=19, 29.7%; n=28, 43.8%, respectively) was greater in the study group than those in the control group (n=5, 5.8%; n=5, 5.8%, respectively). Study findings demonstrated significant differences in the inability to improve readiness to quit smoking between the intervention group and control group (p=0.000) at the sixth-week follow-up.Conclusion: The tailored nursing intervention was effective for a successful achievement of smoking reduction and cessation among patients with non-communicable chronic diseases, and a potential to equip nurses in clinical settings to support patients to achieve this is recommended.
This study investigated the ability of using crushed glass solid wastes in water filtration by using a pilot plant, constructed in Al-Wathba water treatment plant in Baghdad. Different depths and different grain sizes of crushed glass were used as mono and dual media with sand and porcelaniate in the filtration process. The mathematical model by Tufenkji and Elimelech was used to evaluate the initial collection efficiency η of these filters. The results indicated that the collection efficiency varied inversely with the filtration rate. For the mono media filters the theoretical ηth values were more than the practical values ηprac calculated from the experimental work. In the glass filter ηprac was obtained by multiplying ηth by a facto
... Show MoreWith the growth of mobile phones, short message service (SMS) became an essential text communication service. However, the low cost and ease use of SMS led to an increase in SMS Spam. In this paper, the characteristics of SMS spam has studied and a set of features has introduced to get rid of SMS spam. In addition, the problem of SMS spam detection was addressed as a clustering analysis that requires a metaheuristic algorithm to find the clustering structures. Three differential evolution variants viz DE/rand/1, jDE/rand/1, jDE/best/1, are adopted for solving the SMS spam problem. Experimental results illustrate that the jDE/best/1 produces best results over other variants in terms of accuracy, false-positive rate and false-negative
... Show MoreThis research aims to know the intellectual picture the displaced people formed about aid organizations and determine whether they were positive or negative, the researchers used survey tool as standard to study the society represented by displaced people living in Baghdad camps from Shiites, Sunnis, Shabak, Turkmen, Christians, and Ezidis.
The researcher reached to important results and the most important thing he found is that displaced people living in camps included in this survey hold a positive opinion about organizations working to meet their demands but they complain about the shortfall in the health care side.
The research also found that displaced people from (Shabak, Turkmen, and Ezidi) minorities see that internati
Estimating multivariate location and scatter with both affine equivariance and positive break down has always been difficult. Awell-known estimator which satisfies both properties is the Minimum volume Ellipsoid Estimator (MVE) Computing the exact (MVE) is often not feasible, so one usually resorts to an approximate Algorithm. In the regression setup, algorithm for positive-break down estimators like Least Median of squares typically recomputed the intercept at each step, to improve the result. This approach is called intercept adjustment. In this paper we show that a similar technique, called location adjustment, Can be applied to the (MVE). For this purpose we use the Minimum Volume Ball (MVB). In order
... Show MoreThis study investigated the ability of using crushed glass solid wastes in water filtration by using a pilot plant, constructed in Al-Wathba water treatment plant in Baghdad. Different depths and different grain sizes of crushed glass were used as mono and dual media with sand and porcelaniate in the filtration process. The mathematical model by Tufenkji and Elimelech was used to evaluate the initial collection efficiency η of these filters. The results indicated that the collection efficiency varied inversely with the filtration rate. For the mono media filters the theoretical ηth values were more than the practical values ηprac calculated from
the experimental work. In the glass filter ηprac was obtained by multiplying ηth by a
With the continuous progress of image retrieval technology, the speed of searching for the required image from a large amount of image data has become an important issue. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been used in image retrieval. However, many image retrieval systems based on CNNs have poor ability to express image features. Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is a method of finding desired images from image databases. However, CBIR suffers from lower accuracy in retrieving images from large-scale image databases. In this paper, the proposed system is an improvement of the convolutional neural network for greater accuracy and a machine learning tool that can be used for automatic image retrieval. It includes two phases
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