Background:Ankylosing spondylitis (AS) is a progressive, chronic inflammatory illness with an unclear etiology that explicitly targets the vertebral column, peripheral joints, and extraarticular tissues. The purpose of this research was to investigate if the existence of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the promoter region of the tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) gene at positions -1031T/C (rs199964), -857C/T (rs1799724) and -806C/T (rs4248158) in a sample of Iraqi AS patients could influence the patients' outcomes with etanercept.

Methods:Sixty patients with established AS receiving only etanercept were selected to enroll in this study, with a mean age of 40.75±8.6

Background: With the increasing demands for adult orthodontics, a growing need arises to bond attachments to porcelain surfaces. Optimal adhesion to porcelain surface should allow orthodontic treatment without bond failure but not jeopardize porcelain integrity after debonding.The present study was carried out to compare the shear bond strength of metal bracket bonded to porcelain surface prepared by two mechanical treatments and by using different etching systems (Hydrofluoric acid 9% and acidulated phosphate fluoride 1.23%). Materials and Methods: The samples were comprised of 60 models (28mm *15mm*28mm) of metal fused to porcelain (feldspathic porcelain). They were divided as the following: group I (control): the porcelain surface left u

The purpose of this study is to investigate learners' listening comprehension problems with Englishlectures. The study was guided by research question (What are the listening comprehension problems learners have with lectures in English).Furthermore; the main significant goal were declared through conducting this study, as well as providing some procedures of distribution the questionnaire of the study.Moreover, it presents several definitions of listening. This study definitely depends on questionnaire instrument to gathering the required data. The participants of the study were 30 learners completed their secondary school and joined at the college. Based on the findings among the five factors (text, speaker, task, environment, and list

In Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) the non-linear data projection provided by a one hidden layer Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), trained to recognize phonemes, and has previous experiments to provide feature enhancement substantially increased ASR performance, especially in noise. Previous attempts to apply an analogous approach to speaker identification have not succeeded in improving performance, except by combining MLP processed features with other features. We present test results for the TIMIT database which show that the advantage of MLP preprocessing for open set speaker identification increases with the number of speakers used to train the MLP and that improved identification is obtained as this number increases beyond sixty.

He mentioned in this article the main types of corruption, which are political, moral, financial and administrative. Others may add other types of corruption, such as religious, scientific, media, informational and statistical corruption. At the global level, the focus is largely on financial corruption, although other types of corruption are no less bad than it. Financial corruption can be defined as all financial deviations in violation of general laws or the provisions of regulations, legislation, and procedures regulating the work of the state, private institutions and individuals and applied in state institutions and the private sector in general and inconsistent with the controls and instructions of financial control.

In th

Low conversion copolymerization of acrylamide AM (monomer-1) have been conducted with acrylic acid AA in dry benzene at 70°C , using Benzoyl peroxide BPO as initiator . The copolymer composition has been determined by elemental analysis. The monomer reactivity ratios have been calculated by the Kelen-Tudos and Finman-Ross graphical procedures. The derived reactivity ratios (r1, r2) are: (0.620, 0.996) for (AM / AA) systems , and found that the reactivity of the monomer AA is more than the monomer AM in the copolymerization of (AA/AM) system. The reactivity ratios values were used for microstructures calculation.

In this paper we reported the microfabrication of three-dimensional structures using two-photon polymerization (2PP) in a mixture of MEH-PPV and an acrylic resin. Femtosecond laser operating at 800nm was employed for the two-photon polymerization processes. As a first step in this project we obtained the better composition in order to fabricate microstructers of MEH-PPV in the resin via two-photon polymerzation. Acknowledgement:This research is support by Mazur Group, Harvrad Universirt.

This study had succeeded in producing a new graphical representation of James abacus called nested chain abacus. Nested chain abacus provides a unique mathematical expression to encode each tile (image) using a partition theory where each form or shape of tile will be associated with exactly one partition.Furthermore, an algorithm of nested chain abacus movement will be constructed, which can be applied in tiling theory.

In this paper a WLAN network that accesses the Internet through a GPRS network was implemented and tested. The proposed network is managed by the Linux based server. Because of the limited facilities of GPRS such as dynamic IP addressing besides to its limited bandwidth a number of techniques are implemented to overcome these limitations.

      Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server was added to provide a single central control for all TCP/IP resources. Squid Proxy  was added to provide caching of the redundant accessed Web content to reduce the Internet bandwidth usage and speeding up the client’s download time. Network Address Translation (NAT) service was configured to share one IP ad

In recent years, Bitcoin has become the most widely used blockchain platform in business and finance. The goal of this work is to find a viable prediction model that incorporates and perhaps improves on a combination of available models. Among the techniques utilized in this paper are exponential smoothing, ARIMA, artificial neural networks (ANNs) models, and prediction combination models. The study's most obvious discovery is that artificial intelligence models improve the results of compound prediction models. The second key discovery was that a strong combination forecasting model that responds to the multiple fluctuations that occur in the bitcoin time series and Error improvement should be used. Based on the results, the prediction acc