Background: Several infectious lung diseases often develop in patients with Rheumatoid arthritis (RA), especially during immunosuppressive medication, including disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs). The present study aimed to determine the role of respiratory tract bacterial infection in RA activity. Methods: Blood and sputum samples were collected from 31 patients with RA and 12 healthy subjects as control. The bacterial isolates were isolated and identified in collected sputum by biochemical tests and Vitec 2 system. Results: In the present study, thirty-one patients with RA were compared with 12 healthy subjects. Eight patients with RA were not infected with pathogenic bacteria (RA-NIPB) (25.8%). Twenty-three RA patients wer

Irrigation scheduling techniques is one of the suggested solutions for water scarcity problem. The study aims to show the possibility of using practical and applicable irrigation scheduling program which was designed by Water Resources Department at the University of Baghdad by using Spreadsheet Formulas for Microsoft Excel program, version 2007, with some modification to generalize it and made it applicable to various climatic zone and different soil types, as a salvation for the shortage of irrigation water inside the irrigation projects. Irrigation projects which incidence of Tigris River basin will be taken as an applicable example. This program was based on water budgeting and programmed depending on scientific concepts which facili

Cement-based adhesive (CBA) is used as a bonding agent in Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) applications as an alternative to epoxy-based adhesive due to the drawbacks of the epoxy system under severe service conditions which negatively affect the bond between the CFRP and strengthened elements. This paper reports the results of, an investigation carried out to develop two types of CBA using magnetized water (MW) for mixing and curing. Two magnetic devices (MD-I and MD-II), with different magnetic field strengths (9000 and 6000 Gauss) respectively, were employed for water magnetization. Different water flows with different water circulation times in the magnetizer were used for each device. Compressive and splitting tensile strength te

Different ANN architectures of MLP have been trained by BP and used to analyze Landsat TM images. Two different approaches have been applied for training: an ordinary approach (for one hidden layer M-H1-L & two hidden layers M-H1-H2-L) and one-against-all strategy (for one hidden layer (M-H1-1)xL, & two hidden layers (M-H1-H2-1)xL). Classification accuracy up to 90% has been achieved using one-against-all strategy with two hidden layers architecture. The performance of one-against-all approach is slightly better than the ordinary approach

Conversation analysis has long been the concern of many linguists who work in the field of discourse analysis. In spite of the fact that there are many researches have been done in the field of short stories but up to the researcher knowledge the investigation of the selected short stories has not been studied yet. Hence, this paper aims at answering the following questions: what are the features of children’s short stories language and the differences between short stories of four years old and those of six years old.  Hence, the devices used by the story tellers in reciting the short stories should be observed. Thus, the researcher has consulted the models presented by Johnson and Fillmore (2010) to show tenses and sentence str