Millions of pilgrims and visitors from numerous parts of the world flock to Karbala (one of the most prominent ideological and religious places in central Iraq) each year to visit the holy shrines in Karbala due to their sanctity. Many improvements have been made to the Two Holy Shrines (THS), the Shrines of Imam Husayn and Imam Abbas, and the area between them (ATHS), due to the high temperatures in this region and to improve pedestrian thermal comfort. Studies on improving outdoor thermal comfort in Karbala are scarce. Hence, this research aims to look into historical and current architectural changes and how they affect thermal comfort. On the hottest summer day, the ENVI-met software program was used to simulate the building des

Background: The final stage of endodontic therapy is complete obturation of the root canal system to provide as perfect as possible at the cementodentinal junction of the apical foramen. The purpose of this in vitro study was to evaluate the sealing ability of injection molded thermoplasticized gutta percha and lateral condensation techniques with and without the use of sealers. Materials and Methods: Forty freshly extracted adult human maxillary central incisors with complete formed apices were utilized in this study. The teeth were randomly divided into four groups for evaluation of the apical seal. Group (1) lateral condensation gutta percha technique without sealer, (2) lateral condensation gutta percha technique with sealer, (3) Inject

As a result of the significance of image compression in reducing the volume of data, the requirement for this compression permanently necessary; therefore, will be transferred more quickly using the communication channels and kept in less space in memory. In this study, an efficient compression system is suggested; it depends on using transform coding (Discrete Cosine Transform or bi-orthogonal (tap-9/7) wavelet transform) and LZW compression technique. The suggested scheme was applied to color and gray models then the transform coding is applied to decompose each color and gray sub-band individually. The quantization process is performed followed by LZW coding to compress the images. The suggested system was applied on a set of seven stand

Background: Periodontal diseases are inflammatory diseases affecting the supporting tissues of the teeth. One of the leading environmental factors that are closely related not only to the risk but also to the prognosis of periodontitis is smoking. This study aimed to evaluate the influence of smoking on periodontal health status and to measure the levels of matrix metalloproteinase-9 in smokers and nonsmokers chronic periodontitis patients, also it aimed to test the correlation between the levels of matrix metalloproteinase-9 and the clinical periodontal parameters. Materials and Methods: Five milliliters samples of un-stimulated whole saliva and full-mouth clinical periodontal recordings (plaque index, gingival index, bleeding on probing,

Background: The value of lateral cephalometric radiographs to evaluate the pharyngeal airway is limited because it provided 2-dimensional (2D) images of complex 3-dimensional (3D) anatomic structures. Three dimensional analyses of the airway volumes are required to understand oral and pharyngeal adaptations in mouth breathing and nasal breathing subjects. The aim of this study was to measure the pharyngeal airway volume and the size of the face, then compare between pharyngeal airway volume in mouth breathing and nasal breathing subjects and find the gender difference in each group, also to study the relation between pharyngeal airway volume and the size of the face. Material and Methods: Fifty patients including 28 males and 22 females wit

This paper presents a parametric audio compression scheme intended for scalable audio coding applications, and is particularly well suited for operation at low rates, in the vicinity of 5 to 32 Kbps. The model consists of two complementary components: Sines plus Noise (SN). The principal component of the system is an. overlap-add analysis-by-synthesis sinusoidal model based on conjugate matching pursuits. Perceptual information about human hearing is explicitly included into the model by psychoacoustically weighting the pursuit metric. Once analyzed, SN parameters are efficiently quantized and coded. Our informal listening tests demonstrated that our coder gave competitive performance to the-state-of-the- art HelixTM Producer Plus 9 from

.

<p>The popularity, great influence and huge importance made wireless indoor localization has a unique touch, as well its wide successful on positioning and tracking systems for both human and assists also contributing to take the lead from outdoor systems in the scope of the recent research works. In this work, we will attempt to provide a survey of the existing indoor positioning solutions and attempt to classify different its techniques and systems. Five typical location predication approaches (triangulation, fingerprinting, proximity, vision analysis and trilateration) are considered here in order to analysis and provide the reader a review of the recent advances in wireless indoor localization techniques and systems to hav

The research problem lies in the ambiguity of the usage of propaganda contents by two main media outlets (the Russian RT and American Alhurra) in their news coverage of the Syrian crisis through their websites and the methods used by them to convince users taking into account the mutual propaganda conflict between the United States and Russia in the war against Syria. The objectives of the research can be represented by the following: investigating the contents of American and Russian electronic propaganda towards Syrian crisis.
• Identifying the contents that received most of the coverage in the Syrian crisis by the two news outlets.
• Identifying the terms and phrases that have been most used by the websites of RT and Alhurr

Objectives. This study was carried out to quantitatively evaluate and compare the sealing ability of Endoflas by using differentobturation techniques. Materials and Methods. After 42 extracted primary maxillary incisors and canines were decoronated, theircanals were instrumented with K files of size ranging from #15 to #50. In accordance with the obturation technique, the sampleswere divided into three experimental groups, namely, group I: endodontic pressure syringe, group II: modified disposable syringe,and group III: reamer technique, and two control groups. Dye extraction method was used for leakage evaluation. Data wereanalyzed using one-way ANOVA and Dunnett’s T3 post hoc tests. The level of significance was set at p<0:05. Results.