Haruki Murakami (1949-present) is a contemporary Japanese writer whose works have been translated into fifty languages and won him plenty of Japanese and international awards. His short stories are well constructed in a weird realistic manner and are mixed with elements of surrealism. His novels and short stories fall under the genre of magical realism. One of the major revolving themes that Murakami wrote about was the haunting feeling of emptiness and disconnectedness in a world which seems to care much for materialism and self-interests.

    The paper explores two of Murakami’s short stories in his book After the Quake (2000) and the relevance of their themes and characters to Iraq after the q

       Despite the multiplicity of institutions contributing to the decision-making process in the United States of America, they interact to crystallize positions regarding international and strategic situations. The formulation of the national security policy depends on a number of institutions that complement each other in order to achieve an advanced security situation. Thus, the decision reflects the process of interaction of the existing regulatory institutions. This is because the essence of the national security and achieving its requirements also stems from the existence of a coherent system of shared beliefs and principles in the American society. Besides, these elements are the bases for achieving

Motivation is one of the most important factors that influence students learning and has a great effect on their success and achievement. For this reason, in this paper, the researcher is going to investigate the motivational teaching strategies used by EFL Iraqi school teachers. To achieve the aim of the study, the researcher adapted a questionnaire with some changes and modification’s. This questionnaire with five point scale (always, often, sometimes, rarely and never). To achieve face validity, the questionnaire items are given to a jury of experts. Alpha Cronbach formula is used to achieve the questionnaire reliability. After that, the questionnaire was applied on a sample of 38 teachers during the academic year 2019-2020. Th

The present work was done in an attempt to build systematic procedures for treating warts by 810 nm diode laser regarding dose parameters, application parameters and laser safety. The study was done in Al- Kindy Teaching Hospital in Baghdad, Iraq during the period from 1st October 2003 till 1st April 2004. Fifteen patients completed the treatment and they were followed for the period of 3 months. Recalcitrant and extensive warts were selected for the study. Patients were randomly divided into 3 groups to be treated by different laser powers 9, 12 and 15 W, power density of 286 W/cm2, 381W/cm2, 477 W/cm2 pulse duration of 0.2 s, interval of 0.2 s and repeated pulses were used. The mode of application was either circular or radial. Pain oc

This study aimed to obtain a local isolation of Aspergillus niger and then studied its ability to produce citric acid from raw materials available locally using solid state fermentation. Six local isolates were collected from different sources including some samples of the damaged fruits such as grapefruit, oranges and sindi. Wheat bran was used as a raw material or as culture medium for the production of citric acid from the collected isolates. The conditions for citric acid production were determined by humidity percentage of 1: 1 (water: culture medium), temperature of 28 C, pH 4 and inoculum dose with 5× 106 spore/ml and for 3 days of incubation. The orange was the best model for citric acid production with a concentration of 12.8 mg/m

Porosity plays an essential role in petroleum engineering. It controls fluid storage in aquifers, connectivity of the pore structure control fluid flow through reservoir formations. To quantify the relationships between porosity, storage, transport and rock properties, however, the pore structure must be measured and quantitatively described. Porosity estimation of digital image utilizing image processing essential for the reservoir rock analysis since the sample 2D porosity briefly described. The regular procedure utilizes the binarization process, which uses the pixel value threshold to convert the color and grayscale images to binary images. The idea is to accommodate the blue regions entirely with pores and transform it to white in r

The density functional B3LYP is used to investigate the effect of decorating the silver (Ag) atom on the sensing capability of an AlN nanotube (AlN-NT) in detecting thiophosgene (TP). There is a weak interaction between the pristine AlN-NT and TP with the sensing response (SR) of approximately 9.4. Decoration of the Ag atom into the structure of AlN-NT causes the adsorption energy of TP to decrease from − 6.2 to − 22.5 kcal/mol. Also, the corresponding SR increases significantly to 100.5. Moreover, the recovery time when TP is desorbed from the surface of the Ag-decorated AlN-NT (Ag@AlN-NT) is short, i.e., 24.9 s. The results show that Ag@AlN-NT can selectively detect TP among other gases, such as N2, O2, CO2, CO, and H2O.