Deep beams are used in wide construction fields such as water tanks, foundations, and girders in multi-story buildings to provide certain areas free of columns. In practice it is quite often occurring to create web opening in deep beams to supply convenient passage of ventilation ducts, cable channels, gas and water pipes. Experimental studies of ten 10 deep beams were carried out, where two of them are control specimens without openings and eight with large web openings in the shear spans. The variables that have been adopted are the ratio of the shear span to the overall depth of the member cross-section, location and dimensions of the opening. Test results showed that there was a decrease in the load carrying capacity of deep bea

It is commonly known that Euler-Bernoulli’s thin beam theorem is not applicable whenever a nonlinear distribution of strain/stress occurs, such as in deep beams, or the stress distribution is discontinuous. In order to design the members experiencing such distorted stress regions, the Strut-and-Tie Model (STM) could be utilized. In this paper, experimental investigation of STM technique for three identical small-scale deep beams was conducted. The beams were simply supported and loaded statically with a concentrated load at the mid span of the beams. These deep beams had two symmetrical openings near the application point of loading. Both the deep beam, where the stress distribution cannot be assumed linear, and the ex

Social interaction is the platform that enables people to connect and practice language. Active listening stimulates them to understand the language they are speaking. The problem of the study highlights that less attention to listening among speaking, reading, and writing skills causes the weakness of collaborative learning. This paper contributes to characterizing the effectiveness of collaborative learning in developing learner’s listening skills. It aims to underscore the role of target language learners as members of the learning groups and of the teacher in the collaborative learning process. 130 Iraqi EFL teachers from different colleges at the University of Baghdad participated in this study. The scores in the statistical data wer

Idioms are a very important part of the English language: you are told that if you want to go far (succeed) you should pull your socks up (make a serious effort to improve your behaviour, the quality of your work, etc.) and use your grey matter (brain).1 Learning and translating idioms have always been very difficult for foreign language learners. The present paper explores some of the reasons why English idiomatic expressions are difficult to learn and translate. It is not the aim of this paper to attempt a comprehensive survey of the vast amount of material that has appeared on idioms in Adams and Kuder (1984), Alexander (1984), Dixon (1983), Kirkpatrick (2001), Langlotz (2006), McCarthy and O'Dell (2002), and Wray (2002), among others

The majority of Arab EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners struggle with speaking English fluency. Iraqi students struggle to speak English confidently due to mispronunciation, grammatical errors, short and long pauses while speaking or feeling confused in normal conversations. Collaborative learning is crucial to enhance student’s speaking skills in the long run. This study aims to state the importance of collaborative learning as a teaching method to EFL learners in the meantime. In this quantitative and qualitative study, specific focus is taken on some of Barros’s views of collaborative learning as a teamwork and some of Pattanpichet’s speaking achievements under four categories: academic benefits, social benefits,

Given the importance of possessing the digital competence (DC) required by the technological age, whether for teachers or students and even communities and governments, educational institutions in most countries have sought to benefit from modern technologies brought about by the technological revolution in developing learning and teaching and using modern technologies in providing educational services to learners. Since university students will have the doors to work opened in all fields, the research aims to know their level of DC in artificial intelligence (AI) applications and systems utilizing machine learning (ML) techniques. The descriptive approach was used, as the research community consisted of students from the University

Hierarchical temporal memory (HTM) is a biomimetic sequence memory algorithm that holds promise for invariant representations of spatial and spatio-temporal inputs. This article presents a comprehensive neuromemristive crossbar architecture for the spatial pooler (SP) and the sparse distributed representation classifier, which are fundamental to the algorithm. There are several unique features in the proposed architecture that tightly link with the HTM algorithm. A memristor that is suitable for emulating the HTM synapses is identified and a new Z-window function is proposed. The architecture exploits the concept of synthetic synapses to enable potential synapses in the HTM. The crossbar for the SP avoids dark spots caused by unutil

 This study investigated three aims for the extent of effectiveness of the two systems in educational development of educators. To achieve this, statistical analysis was performed between the two groups that consisted of (26) participants of the electronic teaching method and (38) participants who underwent teaching by the conventional electronic lecture. The results indicated the effectiveness of the “electronic teaching method” and the “electronic lecture method” for learning of the participants in educational development. Also, it indicated the level of equivalence from the aspect of effectiveness of the two methods and at a confidence level of (0.05). This study reached several conclusions, recommendations, and suggestio