Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive disorder that affects cognitive brain functions and starts many years before its clinical manifestations. A biomarker that provides a quantitative measure of changes in the brain due to AD in the early stages would be useful for early diagnosis of AD, but this would involve dealing with large numbers of people because up to 50% of dementia sufferers do not receive formal diagnosis. Thus, there is a need for accurate, low-cost, and easy to use biomarkers that could be used to detect AD in its early stages. Potentially, electroencephalogram (EEG) based biomarkers can play a vital role in early diagnosis of AD as they can fulfill these needs. This is a cross-sectional study that aims to demon

The efficiency of internal combustion engines (ICE) is usually about thirty percent of the total energy of the fuel. The residual energy is lost in the exhaust gas, the lubrication, and the cooling water in the radiators. Recently much of the researcher’s efforts have focused on taking advantage of wasted energy of the exhaust gas. Using a thermoelectric generator (TEG) is one of the promising ways. However, TEG depends entirely on the temperature difference, which may be offered by the exhaust muffler. An experimental test has been conducted to study the thermal performance of a different muffler internal design. The researchers resort to the use of lost energy in an ICE using TEG, which is one of the ways to take adv

Position control of servo motor systems is a challenging task because of inevitable factors such as uncertainties, nonlinearities, parametric variations, and external perturbations. In this article, to alleviate the above issues, a practical adaptive fast terminal sliding mode control (PAFTSMC) is proposed for better tracking performance of the servo motor system by using a state observer and bidirectional adaptive law. First, a smooth-tangent-hyperbolic-function-based practical fast terminal sliding mode control (PFTSM) surface is designed to ensure not only fast finite time tracking error convergence but also chattering reduction. Second, the PAFTSMC is proposed for the servo motor, in which a two-way adaptive law is designed to further s

The research aims to characterize the strategic plan of the Educational Professional Development Center, to reveal the most important training needs for teachers from this center, to reveal the extent to which this center meets those needs, and to identify the differences between teacher responses about the degree of importance, availability of those needs according to variables of sex, specialization, and years of experience. This descriptive study adopted a questionnaire applied to (256) teachers in the K.S.A. The results of the study showed that all training needs ranged in the degree of importance from large to very large and that the most important were the skills associated with communicating with members of the learning community.

In this paper, a mathematical model was built for the supply chain to reduce production, inventory, and transportation in Baghdad Company for Soft Drink. The linear programming method was used to solve this mathematical model. We reduced the cost of production by reduced the daily work hours, the company do not need the overtime hours to work at the same levels of production, and the costs of storage in the company's warehouses and agents' stores have been reduced by making use of the stock correctly, which guarantees reducing costs and preserving products from damage. The units transferred from the company were equal to the units demanded by the agents. The company's mathematical model also achieved profits by (84,663,769) by re

This paper addresses the use of adaptive sliding mode control for the servo actuator system with friction. The adaptive sliding mode control has several advantages over traditional sliding mode control method. Firstly, the magnitude of control effort is reduced to the minimal admissible level defined by the conditions for the sliding mode to exist. Secondly, the upper bounds of uncertainties are not required to be known in advance. Therefore, adaptive sliding mode control method can be effectively implemented. The numerical simulation via MATLAB 2014a for servo actuator system with friction is investigated to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed robust adaptive sliding mode control scheme. The results clarify, after

Wastewater projects are one of the most important infrastructure projects, which require developing strategic plans to manage these projects. Most of the wastewater projects in Iraq don’t have a maintenance plan. This research aims to prepare the maintenance management plan (MMP) for wastewater projects. The objective of the research is to predict the cost and time of maintenance projects by building a model using ANN. The research sample included (15) completed projects in Wasit Governorate, where the researcher was able to obtain the data of these projects through the historical information of the Wasit Sewage Directorate. In this research artificial neural networks (ANN) technique was used to build two models (cost

Ondansetron HCl (OND) is a potent antiemetic drug used for control of nausea and vomiting associated with cancer chemotherapy. It exhibits only 60 – 70 % of oral bioavailability due to first pass metabolism and has a relative short half-life of 3-5 hours. Poor bioavailability not only leads to the frequent dosing but also shows very poor patient adherence. Hence, in the present study an approach has been made to develop OND nanoparticles using eudragit^® RS100 and eudragit^® RL100 polymer to control release of OND for transdermal delivery and to improve patient compliance.

Six formulas of OND nanoparticles were prepared using nanoprecipitation technique. The particles sizes and zeta potential were measured