An accurate assessment of the pipes’ conditions is required for effective management of the trunk sewers. In this paper the semi-Markov model was developed and tested using the sewer dataset from the Zublin trunk sewer in Baghdad, Iraq, in order to evaluate the future performance of the sewer. For the development of this model the cumulative waiting time distribution of sewers was used in each condition that was derived directly from the sewer condition class and age data. Results showed that the semi-Markov model was inconsistent with the data by adopting ( 2 test) and also, showed that the error in prediction is due to lack of data on the sewer waiting times at each condition state which can be solved by using successive conditi

Background: Bowel preparation prior to
colonic surgery usually includes antibiotic
therapy together with mechanical bowel
preparation which may cause discomfort to the
patients, prolonged hospitalization and water
& electrolyte imbalance.
Objective: to assess whether elective colon
and rectal surgery may be safely performed
without preoperative mechanical bowel
preparation.
Method: the study includes all patients who
had elective large bowel resection at Medical
City – Baghdad Teaching Hospital between
Feb, 2007 to Jan, 2010. Emergency operations
were not included. The patients were randomly
assigned to the 2 study groups (with or without
mechanical bowel preparation.
Results: A to

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

Derivatives of Schiff-bases possess a great importance in pharmaceutical chemistry. They can be used for synthesizing different types of bioactive compounds. In this paper, derivatives of new Schiff bases have been synthesized from several serial steps. The acid (I) was synthesized from the reaction of dichloroethanoic acid with 2 moles of p-aminoacetanilide. New acid (I) converted to its ester (II) via the reaction of (I) with dimethyl sulphate in the present of anhydrous of sodium carbonate and dry acetone. Acid hydrazide (III) has been synthesized by adding 80% of hydrazine hydrate  to the new ester using ethanol as a solvent. The last step included the preparation of new Schiff-bases (IV-VIII) by the reaction of acid hydrazide with

Background: Medical-surgical nurses are responsible of providing competent care to clients with a wide-array of acute and chronic health problems. This challenging task requires arming nurses with advanced competencies of health literacy to effectively educate their clients. However, evidence about medical-surgical nurse’s health literacy-related knowledge and experience is limited.  Purposes: This study aimed to determine the level of the health literacy-related knowledge and experience among medical-surgical nurses.Design: A descriptive-cross-sectional study was conducted among a total sample of 177 nurses who were practicing in medical-surgical wards in teaching hospitals in Iraq. A convenience sampling method was used to sele