The fiscal position of governments in rentier economies depends heavily on oil revenues. The relationship between oil prices and the budget surplus or deficit is often nonlinear and characterized by complex temporal dependencies, which may limit the predictive capability of conventional econometric models. Accordingly, this study aims to forecast the Iraqi budget surplus and deficit and compare the predictive performance of the ARDL, NARDL, LSTM, 1D-CNN, and hybrid 1D-CNN-LSTM models using oil prices as the primary predictive variable. The hybrid model integrates the feature-extraction capability of One-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks (1D-CNN) with the ability of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to capture long-term

The automatic estimation of speaker characteristics, such as height, age, and gender, has various applications in forensics, surveillance, customer service, and many human-robot interaction applications. These applications are often required to produce a response promptly. This work proposes a novel approach to speaker profiling by combining filter bank initializations, such as continuous wavelets and gammatone filter banks, with one-dimensional (1D) convolutional neural networks (CNN) and residual blocks. The proposed end-to-end model goes from the raw waveform to an estimated height, age, and gender of the speaker by learning speaker representation directly from the audio signal without relying on handcrafted and pre-computed acou

Background: The high reactivity of hydrogen peroxide used in bleaching agents have raised important questions on their potential adverse effects on physical properties of restorative materials. The purpose of this in vitro study was to evaluate the effect of in-office bleaching agents on the microhardness of a new Silorane-based restorative material in comparison to methacrylate-based restorative material. Materials and method: Forty specimens of Filtek™ P90 (3M ESPE,USA) and Filtek™ Supreme XT (3M ESPE, USA) of (8mm diameter and 3m height) were prepared. All specimens were polished with Sof-Lex disks (3M ESPE, USA). All samples were rinsed and stored in incubator 37˚C for 24 hours in DDW. Ten sample of each material were subjected to

This study aims to measure and analyze the direct and indirect effects of the financial variables, namely (public spending, public revenues, internal debt, and external debt), on the non-oil productive sectors with and without bank credit as an intermediate variable, using quarterly data for the period (2004Q1–2021Q4), converted using Eviews 12. To measure the objective of the study, the path analysis method was used using IBM SPSS-AMOS. The study concluded that the direct and indirect effects of financial variables have a weak role in directing bank credit towards the productive sectors in Iraq, which amounted to (0.18), as a result of market risks or unstable expectations in the economy. In addition to the weak credit ratings of borr

Two quantitative, environment-friendly and easily monitored assays for Ni (II) and Co (III) ions analysis in different lipstick samples collected from 500-Iraqi dinars stores located in Baghdad were introduced. The study was based on the reaction of nickel (II) ions with dimethylglyoxime (DMG) reagent and the reaction of cobalt (III) ions with 1-nitroso-2-naphthol (NN) reagent to produce colored products. The color change was measured by spectrophotometric method at 565 nm and 430 nm for Ni and Co, respectively, with linear calibration graphs in the concentration range 0.25-100 mg L^-1 (Ni) and 0.5-100 mg L^-1 (Co) and LOD and LOQ of 0.11 mg L^-1 and 0.36 mg L^-1 (Ni), and 0.15 mg L^-1 an

This study aims to determine the reasons for the increase in the frequency of sand and dust storms in the Middle East and to identify their sources and mitigate them. A set of climatic data from 60 years (1960–2022) was analyzed. Sand storms in Iraq are a silty sand mature arkose composed of 72.7% sand, 25.1% silt, and 2.19% clay; the clay fraction in dust storms constitutes 70%, with a small amount of silt (20.6%) and sand (9.4%). Dust and sand storms (%) are composed of quartz (49.2, 67.1), feldspar (4.9, 20.9), calcite (38, 5), gypsum (4.8, 0.4), dolomite (0.8, 1.0), and heavy minerals (3.2, 6.6). Increasing temperatures in Iraq, by an average of 2 °C for sixty years, have contributed to an increase in the number of dust storm

      The combined system of electrocoagulation (EC) and electro-oxidation (EO) is one of the most promising methods in dye removal. In this work, a solution of 200 mg/l of Congo red was used to examine the removal of anionic dye using an EC-EO system with three stainless steel electrodes as the auxiliary electrodes and an aluminum electrode as anode for the EC process, Cu-Mn-Ni Nanocomposite as anode for the EO process. This composite oxide was simultaneously synthesized by anodic and cathodic deposition of Cu (NO3)2, MnCl2, and Ni (NO3)2 salts with 0.075 M as concentrations of each salt with a fixed molar ratio (1:1:1) at a constant current density of 25 mA/cm2. The characteristics structure and surface morphology of the depo