This study was set out to investigate factors affecting labor productivity on construction in the north of Iraq (Kurdistan) and to rank all the factors based on engineers, contractors, and designer’s opinions. 76 factors were analyzed based on previous literature and a pilot study. Next, by using online Google Form, a questionnaire form was created and sent to people who have experience in the construction industry. Afterward, the questionnaire form was sent to targeted people by email and social media apps. Factors were divided into nine groups “Management, Technical and Technology, Human and Workforce, Leadership, Motivation, Safety, Time, Material and Equipment, and External”. However, 202 respondents participated in this study,

Recently, a new secure steganography algorithm has been proposed, namely, the secure Block Permutation Image Steganography (BPIS) algorithm. The new algorithm consists of five main steps, these are: convert the secret message to a binary sequence, divide the binary sequence into blocks, permute each block using a key-based randomly generated permutation, concatenate the permuted blocks forming a permuted binary sequence, and then utilize a plane-based Least-Significant-Bit (LSB) approach to embed the permuted binary sequence into BMP image file format. The performance of algorithm was given a preliminary evaluation through estimating the PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) of the stego image for limited number of experiments comprised hiding

Thrust blocks and restraint joints are the two most popular methods of counteracting the thrust force that generated at pipe fittings (bends, Tee, wye, reducers, dead ends, etc…). Both systems perform the same function, which is to prevent the joints from separating from the pipes. The aim of the study is to review previous studies and scientific theories related to the study and design of thrust blocks and restraint joints to study the behavior of both systems under thrust force and to study the factors and variables that affect the behavior of these systems. The behavior of both systems must be studied because they cannot be abandoned, as each system has conditions whose use is more feasible, scientific, and economic

Fingerprint recognition is one among oldest procedures of identification. An important step in automatic fingerprint matching is to mechanically and dependably extract features. The quality of the input fingerprint image has a major impact on the performance of a feature extraction algorithm. The target of this paper is to present a fingerprint recognition technique that utilizes local features for fingerprint representation and matching. The adopted local features have determined: (i) the energy of Haar wavelet subbands, (ii) the normalized of Haar wavelet subbands. Experiments have been made on three completely different sets of features which are used when partitioning the fingerprint into overlapped blocks. Experiments are conducted on

Objectives: Determine the age and gender distribution of children who experience diabetes mellitus (DM) under
the age of 15 years and the presence of some associated factors that might be a predisposing factor for the
disease including obesity.
Methodology: A cross-sectional study was conducted at diabetic clinic in Children Welfare Teaching Hospital
in Baghdad City during 2006. The study sample included diabetic children less than 15 years of age. Data were
taken from the patients' record and by direct interview with the patients' parents. Information included
demographic data, as well as past history of the patient and his/her family relative to diabetes and other immune
diseases.
Results: Data analysis showed t

Steganography is a technique of concealing secret data within other quotidian files of the same or different types. Hiding data has been essential to digital information security. This work aims to design a stego method that can effectively hide a message inside the images of the video file.  In this work, a video steganography model has been proposed through training a model to hiding video (or images) within another video using convolutional neural networks (CNN). By using a CNN in this approach, two main goals can be achieved for any steganographic methods which are, increasing security (hardness to observed and broken by used steganalysis program), this was achieved in this work as the weights and architecture are randomized. Thus,

Cloud storage provides scalable and low cost resources featuring economies of scale based on cross-user architecture. As the amount of data outsourced grows explosively, data deduplication, a technique that eliminates data redundancy, becomes essential. The most important cloud service is data storage. In order to protect the privacy of data owner, data are stored in cloud in an encrypted form. However, encrypted data introduce new challenges for cloud data deduplication, which becomes crucial for data storage. Traditional deduplication schemes cannot work on encrypted data. Existing solutions of encrypted data deduplication suffer from security weakness. This paper proposes a combined compressive sensing and video deduplication to maximize

The study was carried out by reinforcing the resin matrix material

which was (Epoxy- Ep828) by useing Kevlar fibers and glass fibers type (E-gl ass) both or them in the form of woven roving and poly propylene tlbcrs  in  the form chopped  strand  mats.  wi th (30%)  volume  fraction. Some mechan i cal  properties of the were prepared composite specimens U ltraviolet   radiation  were  stuied   after   being  subjected  to  different weathering conditi ons i ncluded. Compression and hardness testing were carried out using Briel! method so as to compare between composite behavior i n the environments previously mentioned .

 <

     Strengthening of the existing structures is an important task that civil engineers continuously face. Compression members, especially columns, being the most important members of any structure, are the most important members to strengthen if the need ever arise. The method of strengthening compression members by direct wrapping by Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) was adopted in this research. Since the concrete material is a heterogeneous and complex in behavior, thus, the behavior of the confined compression members subjected to uniaxial stress is investigated by finite element (FE) models created using Abaqus CAE 2017 software. The aim of this research is to study experimentally and numerically, the beha