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Numbness of the Mind Paradigm in Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake and Iraq’s After the Quake
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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 quake. Literally, Iraq may never have witnessed a real earthquake, but one can say its metaphorical meaning has a great implication upon the lives of its people. The reference to Iraq after the quake in this paper would focus on the aftermath of the 2003 War such as: the feeling of disconnection among people, disinclination in life, feelings of deprivation and depreciation, and the corruption of leaders and politicians. Likewise, though Murakami’s short stories chosen in this paper do not deal with the actual earthquake, its implications can be felt as we read the stories. His characters witness a sense of disconnectedness and the feeling of being unappreciated even when they do the hardest and most dangerous jobs.

    Two of Murakami’s short stories “UFO in Kushiro” and “Super Frog Saves Tokyo” are tackled to show the paradigm and comparison between the lives of these characters (that are actually a reflection of Japanese lives in mid 1990s) and the restricted depressing life of the Iraqis in the postwar era of the 2003 War. Both have experienced fragmentation, despair and lack of self-worth due to the reasons that are explained in this paper. The Iraqis however, may have experienced a deeper suffering where one can say they have reached a state of the numbness or enslavement of the mind and feelings. The paper also highlights that animosity should be dissipated from the hearts of people specifically in politicians and top leaders. Though it is a complicated world, man should conceive that the prosperity of mankind rests in his own hands. Cherishing the diversity of cultures and understanding each other’s moral principles are the means to diminish evil in order to reach the desired bliss.

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Publication Date
Fri Jun 01 2018
Journal Name
International Journal Of Computer Science Trends And Technology
Secure Video Data Deduplication in the Cloud Storage Using Compressive Sensing
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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

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Publication Date
Sun Jul 09 2023
Journal Name
Journal Of Engineering
The Effective Width in Composite Steel Concrete Beams at Ultimate Loads
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A composite section is made up of a concrete slab attached to a steel beam by means of shear connectors. Under positive and negative bending moment, part of the slab will act as a flange of the beam, resisting the longitudinal compression or tension force. When the spacing between girders becomes large, it is evident that the simple beam theory does not strictly apply because the longitudinal stress in the flange will vary with distance from the girder web, the flange being more highly stressed over the web than in the extremities. This phenomenon is termed "shear lag". In this paper, a nonlinear three-dimensional finite element analysis is employed to evaluate and determine the actual effective slab width of the composite steel-concrete

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Publication Date
Thu May 15 2014
Journal Name
Monthly Notices Of The Royal Astronomical Society
Gravitational lensing in WDM cosmologies: the cross-section for giant arcs
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The nature of the dark sector of the Universe remains one of the outstanding problems in modern cosmology, with the search for new observational probes guiding the development of the next generation of observational facilities. Clues come from tension between the predictions from Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) and observations of gravitationally lensed galaxies. Previous studies showed that galaxy clusters in the ΛCDM are not strong enough to reproduce the observed number of lensed arcs. This work aims to constrain the warm dark matter (WDM) cosmologies by means of the lensing efficiency of galaxy clusters drawn from these alternative models. The lensing characteristics of two samples of simulated clusters in the Λ warm dark matter and ΛCDM

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Publication Date
Mon Jan 01 2024
Journal Name
Journal Of Engineering
Significant Safety Factors Affecting the Safety Performance in Iraqi Construction Projects
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Despite recent attempts to improve safety in the construction sector, this sector is considered dangerous and unsafe. Iraq is one of the emerging nations that suffers from a lack of construction safety management. In 2018, the construction sector in Iraq was responsible for 38% of all industrial accidents. Creating a safety program minimizes this problem by making safety an intrinsic part of construction projects. As a result, this article aims to identify the crucial safety factors that affect the safety performance in Iraqi construction projects. After conducting a critical literature review of the related literature, a list of 35 sub-factors classified into nine categories of main factors was chosen to rank each facto

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Publication Date
Wed May 01 2024
Journal Name
Journal Of Physics: Conference Series
A modified ARIMA model for forecasting chemical sales in the USA
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Abstract<p>model is derived, and the methodology is given in detail. The model is constructed depending on some measurement criteria, Akaike and Bayesian information criterion. For the new time series model, a new algorithm has been generated. The forecasting process, one and two steps ahead, is discussed in detail. Some exploratory data analysis is given in the beginning. The best model is selected based on some criteria; it is compared with some naïve models. The modified model is applied to a monthly chemical sales dataset (January 1992 to Dec 2019), where the dataset in this work has been downloaded from the United States of America census (www.census.gov). Ultimately, the forecasted sales </p> ... Show More
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Publication Date
Wed May 14 2025
Journal Name
Reproductive Biology And Endocrinology
The aryl hydrocarbon receptor: a new frontier in male reproductive system
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Background: The aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) is a ligand-activated transcription factor historically recognized for its role in the regulation of toxicity mediated by environmental chemicals. Recent research points to AhR's critical participation in male reproductive physiology, particularly in spermatogenesis, hormone signaling, and the maintenance of sperm quality. Both endogenous ligands (e.g., dietary and gut microbiota-derived metabolites) and exogenous pollutants (e.g., dioxins and benzo-α-pyrene) influence AhR-mediated pathways, making it a key link between environmental exposures and male fertility. Results: This review highlights AhR's influence on the male reproductive system, emphasizing the role of endogenous AhR ligands an

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Publication Date
Mon Dec 15 2025
Journal Name
Al-nahrain Journal Of Science
ARIMA-NN Model for Drugs Sales Forecasting in the United States
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This study proposes a new version of the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) denoted by ARIMA-NN. The new model incorporates a multi-layer perceptron with matrix multiplication within a feed-forward network. The logistic, hyperbolic tangent (tanh), and sigmoid activation functions are used for weight updates in ARIMA-NN. A new forecasting algorithm is proposed, and one-step and multiple-steps forecasting procedures are rigorously analyzed. The proposed model was evaluated against existing forecasting model using performance metrics such as the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and Bayesian Information Criterion (

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Publication Date
Tue May 16 2023
Journal Name
Journal Of Namibian Studies : History Politics Culture
Sensory stimuli that support a child's recovery in the therapeutic environment
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Caring for and treating a child's health is an important need to achieve optimal health? It is a concept that reaches beyond mere recovery from illness. It's achieved by balancing the different aspects of the child, including physical, psychological, mental, and spiritual aspects.A sick child needs therapeutic environments that provide medical care in a way that accelerates the recovery process. The therapeutic environment for the child prefers to be positive and conscious with its incentives that enhance the child's ability to receive treatment, reduce their fear and anxiety and distract them from the disease, which provokes positive feelings and helps them to recover quickly.Here comes the great role that pediatric hospitals play

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Publication Date
Tue Dec 01 2015
Journal Name
Journal Of Economics And Administrative Sciences
Integrated Framework for technologies to reduce costs and reengineering processes to develop strategies companyes An Empirical Study In some companies affiliated to the Ministry of Oil
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Began the process of re-engineering processes in the private sector as a way to assist organizations in re-thinking how to run the business in order to improve production processes and reduce operational cost, to get to compete on a global level. That was a major restructuring by further evolution in the use of technology to support innovative operations.

 Entered the technology in all areas of life and different regulations, This led to use as a change in all aspects The companies achieved success and progress today through the use of resources so as to ensure the wishes of the customers and their needs, and the requirements of the market primarily, Which is reflected on the basis of building strate

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Publication Date
Fri Jul 24 2020
Journal Name
Indian Journal Of Forensic Medicine &amp; Toxicology
The Incidence of Hepatitis C Virus Infections among People Screened in Governmental Health Care Facilities in 2018 in Iraq
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