Malaysia will be an ageing population by 2030 as the number of those aged 60 years and above has increased drastically from 6.2 percent in 2000 and is expected to reach 13.6 percent by 2030. There are many challenges that will be faced due to the ageing population, one of which is the increasing cost of pensions in the future. In view of that, it is necessary to investigate the effect of actuarial assumptions on pension liabilities under the perspective of ageing. To estimate the pension liabilities, the Projected Unit Credit method is used in the study and commutation functions are employed in the process. Demographic risk and salary risk have been identified as major risks in analyzing pension liabilities in this study. The sensitivity

This work presents an innovative approach to enhancing the performance of concrete with reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) aggregates using titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles. Traditional limestone coarse aggregates were partially replaced with 30% and 50% RAP aggregates; a subset of mixtures containing RAP aggregates was treated with TiO2 nanoparticles. The rheological, mechanical, and long-term properties of concrete, along with changes in its chemical composition following the addition of RAP and TiO2, were evaluated. Results revealed that using 30% and 50% RAP in concrete mixtures reduced their compressive strength by 18% and 27%, respectively. However, using TiO2 in those mixtures enhanced their compressive strength by 8.7% an

Introduction and Aim: The pro-inflammatory cytokine IL-39, a member of the IL-12 family plays a key role in the inflammatory response by modulating immune cell activity and inflammation. A literature search shows no study undertaken for the effect of IL-39's on arthritis so far. Hence, the purpose of this study was to investigate the role of IL-39 in rheumatoid arthritis. Materials and Methods: This study involved 80 patients with rheumatoid arthritis registered at the Rheumatology Clinic at Baghdad teaching hospital. The patients were divided into three groups based on treatments received. Group 1 included patients who were not on any treatment for arthritis, Group 2 with patients on hydroxychloroquine and or prednisone treatment,

The purpose of the current investigation is to distinguish between working memory ( ) in five patients with vascular dementia ( ), fifteen post-stroke patients with mild cognitive impairment ( ), and fifteen healthy control individuals ( ) based on background electroencephalography (EEG) activity. The elimination of EEG artifacts using wavelet (WT) pre-processing denoising is demonstrated in this study. In the current study, spectral entropy ( ), permutation entropy ( ), and approximation entropy ( ) were all explored. To improve the  classification using the k-nearest neighbors ( NN) classifier scheme, a comparative study of using fuzzy neighbourhood preserving analysis with -decomposition ( ) as a dimensionality reduction technique an

Colloidal silver nanoparticles were prepared by single step green synthesis using aqueous extracts of the leaves of thyme as a function of different molar concentration of AgNO₃ (1,2,3,4 mM(. The Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FESEM), UV-Visible and X-ray diffraction (XRD) were used to characterize the resultant AgNPs. The surface Plasmon resonance was observed at wavelength of 444 nm. The four intensive peaks of XRD pattern indicate the crystalline nature and the face centered cubic structure of the AgNPs. The average crystallite size of the AgNPs ranged from 18 to 22 nm. The FESEM image illustrated the well dispersion of the AgNPs and the spherical shape of the nanoparticles with a particle size distribution be

Image is an important digital information that used in many internet of things (IoT) applications such as transport, healthcare, agriculture, military, vehicles and wildlife. etc. Also, any image has very important characteristic such as large size, strong correlation and huge redundancy, therefore, encrypting it by using single key Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) through IoT communication technologies makes it vulnerable to many threats, thus, the pixels that have the same values will be encrypted to another pixels that have same values when they use the same key. The contribution of this work is to increase the security of transferred image. This paper proposed multiple key AES algorithm (MECCAES) to improve the security of the tran

The Iraqi market for securities in light of financial globalization faces real challenges at the local and international levels, which were reflected in their shadows on the overall economic reality, which imposed the necessity of making fundamental changes in terms of form and content, and from here stems the research problem in the ability of the Iraqi stock market to adapt to the transformations Financial imposed by financial globalization in light of the weakness of the economic structure and its position in the global economy. The research starts from the hypothesis that the Iraqi market for securities in light of financial globalization has an important and significant role in the economic field, through its role in stimula

Bunium is one of the interested genus that grow in different region of Iraq, it is within the family Umbelliferae (Apiaceae), and the species within this family have a considerable fruit characteristics. The species that were chosen in this study are: B. brachyactis (Post) H. Wolff, B. caroides (Boiss.) Hausskn. Ex Bornm., B. chaerophylloides (Regel& Schmalh.) Drude, B. rectangulum Boiss. & Hausskn., B. verruculosum C.C.Towns. and B. avromanum (Boiss.& Hausskn) Drude., the study found that the fruits of these species have 5 protrusions different in size but all have the same number of vittae, but some are semiler in size and some are not, the number of vascular element are varied between these species, anatomical charact