This study aimed to assess orthodontic postgraduate students’ use of social media during the COVID-19 lockdown. Ninety-four postgraduate students (67 master’s students and 27 doctoral students) were enrolled in the study and asked to fill in an online questionnaire by answering questions regarding their use of social media during the COVID-19 lockdown. The frequency distributions and percentages were calculated using SPSS software. The results showed that 99% of the students used social media. The most frequently used type of social media was Facebook, 94%, followed by YouTube, 78%, and Instagram, 65%, while Twitter and Linkedin were used less, and no one used Blogger. About 63% of the students used elements of social media to l

Survival analysis is widely applied to data that described by the length of time until the occurrence of an event under interest such as death or other important events. The purpose of this paper is to use the dynamic methodology which provides a flexible method, especially in the analysis of discrete survival time, to estimate the effect of covariate variables through time in the survival analysis on dialysis patients with kidney failure until death occurs. Where the estimations process is completely based on the Bayes approach by using two estimation methods: the maximum A Posterior (MAP) involved with Iteratively Weighted Kalman Filter Smoothing (IWKFS) and in combination with the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. While the other

Strengthening of composite beams is highly needed to upgrade the capacities of existing beams. The strengthening methods can be classified as active or passive techniques. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to provide detailed FE simulations for strengthened and unstrengthened steel–concrete composite beams at the sagging and hogging moment regions with and without profiled steel sheeting. The developed models were verified against experimental results from the literature. The verified models were used to present comparisons between the effect of using external post-tensioning and CFRP laminates as strengthening techniques. Applying external post-tensioning at the sagging moment regions is more effective because of the e

Knowing the distribution of the mechanical rock properties and the far field stresses for the field of interest is an important task for many applications concerning reservoir geomechanics, including wellbore instability analysis, hydraulic fracturing, sand production, reservoir compaction, and subsidence. A major challenge with determining the rock's mechanical properties is that they cannot be directly measured at the borehole. Furthermore, the recovered carbonate core samples for performing measurements are limited and they provide discrete data for specific depths.

   The purpose of this study is to build 2D and 3D geomechanical models of the Khasib reservoir in the East Baghdad oil field/ Central area. TECHLOG.2015.3 softwa

Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Lean Construction (LC) are two quickly growing applied research areas in construction management. This study focuses on identifying the most essential benefits and analyzing the most affecting constraints on the construction sector that construction players face as they attempt to combine BIM-LC in Iraqi construction. Experts assessed 30 benefits and 28 constraints from examining the previous literature, and a two-round Delphi survey formed the responses. Expert consensus analysis was utilized to elaborate and validate responses after descriptive statistical checks had been used for data processing.

According to the study's findings, the benefits include ensuring the most ef

Hydro cracking of heavy oil is used in refinery to produce invaluable products. In this research, a model of hydro cracking reactor has been used to study the behavior of heavy oil in hydro cracking under the conditions recommended by literature in terms lumping of feed and products. The lumping scheme is based on five lumps include: heavy oil, vacuum oil, distillates, naphtha and gases. The first order kinetics was assumed for the conversion in the model and the system is modeled as an isothermal tubular reactor. MATLAB 6.1 was used to solve the model for a five lump scheme for different values of feed velocity, and temperature.

       Human detection represents a main problem of interest when using video based monitoring. In this paper, artificial neural networks, namely multilayer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis function (RBF) are used to detect humans among different objects in a sequence of frames (images) using classification approach. The classification used is based on the shape of the object instead of depending on the contents of the frame. Initially, background subtraction is depended to extract objects of interest from the frame, then statistical and geometric information are obtained from vertical and horizontal projections of the objects that are detected to stand for the shape of the object. Next to this step, two ty

Community detection is useful for better understanding the structure of complex networks. It aids in the extraction of the required information from such networks and has a vital role in different fields that range from healthcare to regional geography, economics, human interactions, and mobility. The method for detecting the structure of communities involves the partitioning of complex networks into groups of nodes, with extensive connections within community and sparse connections with other communities. In the literature, two main measures, namely the Modularity (Q) and Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) have been used for evaluating the validation and quality of the detected community structures. Although many optimization algo

In this paper, an adaptive active disturbance rejection control is newly designed for precise angular steering position tracking of the uncertain and nonlinear SBW system with time delay communications. The proposed adaptive active disturbance rejection control comprises the following two elements: (1) An adaptive extended state observer and (2) an adaptive state error feedback controller. The adaptive extended state observer with adaptive gains is employed for estimating the unmeasured velocity, acceleration, and compound disturbance which consists of system parameter uncertainties, nonlinearities, exterior disturbances, and time delay in which the observer gains are dynamically adjusted based on the estimation error to enhance est