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

The use of containers in transportation leads to the reduction in time and effort of the process of loading and unloading of goods as well as protecting the goods from damage and breakage and to reduce the financial costs.
. This development has led also to make changes in the sizes and capacity of ships, therefore changes in the ports must be taken place where they must be provided with an appropriate depth for such vessels, that means the increase in the depth of ports and the establishment of wide storage yards and to provide appropriate mechanisms for handling process.
In this study, the researcher has dealt with this type of transport business in Iraqi ports, namely:
1- Khur Al-Zubair port.
2- Um Qaser port.
In order

Background: The apical seal is the single most important factor in determining the success of surgical endodontics, the aim of this study was to compare the sealing ability of Mineral Trioxide Aggregate in three different cavity designs. Materials and Methods: Thirty extracted human single-rooted teeth were divided into three groups of ten teeth per group, a retrograde cavity preparation was carried out using a low speed handpiece and round bur with parallel walls in the first group, ultrasonic retrotip and unit in the second group and a low speed handpiece with a carbide inverted cone bur with undercuts in the third group, all the cavities were filled with MTA. microleakage was measured by dye penetration technique using methylene blue. Re

This paper is concerned with introducing and studying the first new approximation operators using mixed degree system and second new approximation operators using mixed degree system which are the core concept in this paper. In addition, the approximations of graphs using the operators first lower and first upper are accurate then the approximations obtained by using the operators second lower and second upper sincefirst accuracy less then second accuracy. For this reason, we study in detail the properties of second lower and second upper in this paper. Furthermore, we summarize the results for the properties of approximation operators second lower and second upper when the graph G is arbitrary, serial 1, serial 2, reflexive, symmetric, tra

<p class="0abstract">Image denoising is a technique for removing unwanted signals called the noise, which coupling with the original signal when transmitting them; to remove the noise from the original signal, many denoising methods are used. In this paper, the Multiwavelet Transform (MWT) is used to denoise the corrupted image by Choosing the HH coefficient for processing based on two different filters Tri-State Median filter and Switching Median filter. With each filter, various rules are used, such as Normal Shrink, Sure Shrink, Visu Shrink, and Bivariate Shrink. The proposed algorithm is applied Salt&amp; pepper noise with different levels for grayscale test images. The quality of the denoised image is evaluated by usi

The nuclear charge density distributions, form factors and
corresponding proton, charge, neutron, and matter root mean square
radii for stable 4He, 12C, and 16O nuclei have been calculated using
single-particle radial wave functions of Woods-Saxon potential and
harmonic-oscillator potential for comparison. The calculations for the
ground charge density distributions using the Woods-Saxon potential
show good agreement with experimental data for 4He nucleus while
the results for 12C and 16O nuclei are better in harmonic-oscillator
potential. The calculated elastic charge form factors in Woods-Saxon
potential are better than the results of harmonic-oscillator potential.
Finally, the calculated root mean square

Recording an Electromyogram (EMG) signal is essential for diagnostic procedures like muscle health assessment and motor neurons control. The EMG signals have been used as a source of control for powered prosthetics to support people to accomplish their activities of daily living (ADLs). This work deals with studying different types of hand grips and finding their relationship with EMG activity. Five subjects carried out four functional movements (fine pinch, tripod grip and grip with the middle and thumb finger, as well as the power grip). Hand dynamometer has been used to record the EMG activity from three muscles namely; Flexor Carpi Radialis (FCR), Flexor Digitorum Superficialis (FDS), and Abductor Pollicis Brevis (ABP) with different

Membrane distillation (MD) is a hopeful desalination technique for brine (salty) water. In this research, Direct Contact Membrane Distillation (DCMD) and  Air Gap Membrane Distillation (AGMD) will be used. The sample used is from Shat Al –Arab water (TDS=2430 mg/l). A polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) flat sheet membrane was used as a flat sheet form with a plate and frame cell. Several parameters were studied, such as; operation time, feed temperature, permeate temperature, feed flow rate. The results showed that with time, the flux decreases because of the accumulated fouling and scaling on the membrane surface. Feed temperature and feed flow rate had a positive effect on the permeate flux, while permeate temperatu

Wellbore instability and sand production onset modeling are very affected by Sonic Shear Wave Time (SSW). In any field, SSW is not available for all wells due to the high cost of measuring. Many authors developed empirical correlations using information from selected worldwide fields for SSW prediction. Recently, researchers have used different Artificial Intelligence methods for estimating SSW. Three existing empirical correlations of Carroll, Freund, and Brocher are used to estimate SSW in this paper, while a fourth new empirical correlation is established. For comparing with the empirical correlation results, another study's Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was used. The same data t

Missing data is one of the problems that may occur in regression models. This problem is usually handled by deletion mechanism available in statistical software. This method reduces statistical inference values because deletion affects sample size. In this paper, Expectation Maximization algorithm (EM), Multicycle-Expectation-Conditional Maximization algorithm (MC-ECM), Expectation-Conditional Maximization Either (ECME), and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) are used to estimate multiple regression models when explanatory variables have some missing values. Experimental dataset were generated using Visual Basic programming language with missing values of explanatory variables according to a missing mechanism at random general pattern and s