John Updike’s use of setting in his fiction has elicited different and even conflicting reactions from critics, varying from symbolic interpretations of setting to a sense of confusion at his use of time and place in his stories.  The present study is an attempt at examining John Updike’s treatment of binary settings in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962) to reveal theme, characters’ motives and conflicts.  Analyzing Updike’s stories from a structuralist’s perspective reveals his employment of two different places and times in the individual stories as a means of reflecting the psychological state of the characters, as in “The Persistence of Desire”, or expressing conflicting views on social and political is

Conditional logistic regression is often used to study the relationship between event outcomes and specific prognostic factors in order to application of logistic regression and utilizing its predictive capabilities into environmental studies. This research seeks to demonstrate a novel approach of implementing conditional logistic regression in environmental research through inference methods predicated on longitudinal data. Thus, statistical analysis of longitudinal data requires methods that can properly take into account the interdependence within-subjects for the response measurements. If this correlation ignored then inferences such as statistical tests and confidence intervals can be invalid largely.

Introduction: Selenium is an essential trace element involved in different physiological functions of the human body. An inverse relationship between serum selenium levels and cervical intraepithelial neoplasia has been reported. cervical intraepithelial neoplasia is regarded as a potentially premalignant transformation of squamous cells of the cervix. Objectives: To evaluate the relationship between the serum level of selenium and cervical intraepithelial neoplasia. Methods: A case-control study was conducted at Baghdad Teaching Hospital and Iraqi National Cancer Research Center in the University of Baghdad during the period from July 2021 to July 2022. A convenient sample of 100 women was enrolled in the current study and included

Water quality planning relies on Biochemical Oxygen Demand BOD. BOD testing takes five days. The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is increasingly used for water resource forecasting. This work designed a PSO technique for estimating everyday BOD at Al-Rustumiya wastewater treatment facility inlet. Al-Rustumiya wastewater treatment plant provided 702 plant-scale data sets during 2012-2022. The PSO model uses the daily data of the water quality parameters, including chemical oxygen demand (COD), chloride (Cl^-), suspended solid (SS), total dissolved solids (TDS), and pH, to determine how each variable affects the daily incoming BOD. PSO and multiple linear regression (MLR) findings are compared, and their perfor

The current study aimed to determine the morphometric and meristic characteristics of the North African catfish Clarias gariepinus (Burchell, 1822). Six specimens of C. gariepinus were collected from the Tigris River, in central Iraq. This study is considered the confirmation first record of this species in Iraq, and the second documentation of this exotic fish. The present species is characterized by a very long dorsal fin, a rounded caudal fin and four pairs of barbels.

Grass trimming operation is widely done in Malaysia for the purpose of maintaining highways. Large number of operators engaged in this work encounters high level of noise generated by back pack type grass trimmer used for this purpose. High level of noise exposure gives different kinds of ill effect on human operators. Exact nature of deteriorated work performance is not known. For predicting the work efficiency deterioration, fuzzy tool has been used in present research. It has been established that a fuzzy computing system will help in identification and analysis of fuzzy models fuzzy system offers a convenient way of representing the relationships between the inputs and outputs of a system in the form of IF-THEN rules. The paper presents

The aim of this work is to learn the relationship of the stability of (β) emitter isobars with their shape for some isobaric elements with even mass number (A=152 - 162). To reach this goal firstly the most stable isobar have been determined by plotting mass parabola (plotting the binding energy (B.E) as a function of the atomic number (Z)) for each isobaric family. Then three-dimensional representation graphics for each nucleus in these isobaric families have been plotted to illustrate the deformation in the shape of a nucleus. These three-dimensional representation graphics prepared by calculating the values of semi-axis minor (a), major (b) and (c) ellipsoid axis’s. Our results show that the shape of nuclides which is represented the