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

Vapor-liquid equilibrium data are presented for the binary systems n-hexane - 1-propanol, benzene - 1-propanol and n-hexane – benzene at 760 mm of mercury pressure. In addition ternary data are presented at selected compositions with respect to the 1-propanol in the 1-propanol, benzene, n-hexane system at 760 mmHg. The results indicate the relative volatility of n-hexane relative to benzene increases appreciably with addition of 1-propanol.

Abstract: This research was performed to study the effect of some amino acids and vitamins on the growth of bacteria Staphylococcus aureas and its sensitivity against UV light. The results showed low inhibition in bacterial growth because amino acids repairs the damges caused by UV light. Besides the effect of two groups of antibiotics (β-lactame and tetracycline) on the growth of S. aureus and the possible interference of amino acids and vitamins in the activity of the antibiotics against this bacteria in the presence of UV light were studied. The result show increase in the sensitivity towards these antibiotics and provided protection against the antibiotics.

Coaches and analysts face a significant challenge of inaccurate estimation when analyzing Men's 100 Meter Sprint Performance, particularly when there is limited data available. This necessitates the use of modern technologies to address the problem of inaccurate estimation. Unfortunately, current methods used to estimate Men's 100 Meter Sprint Performance indexes in Iraq are ineffective, highlighting the need to adopt new and advanced technologies that are fast, accurate, and flexible. Therefore, the objective of this study was to utilize an advanced method known as artificial neural networks to estimate four key indexes: Accelerate First of 10 meters, Speed Rate, Time First of 10 meters, and Reaction Time. The application of artifi

A novel fractal design scheme has been introduced in this paper to generate microstrip bandpass filter designs with miniaturized sizes for wireless applications. The presented fractal scheme is based on Minkowski-like prefractal geometry. The space-filling property and self-similarity of this fractal geometry has found to produce reduced size symmetrical structures corresponding to the successive iteration levels. The resulting filter designs are with sizes suitable for use in modern wireless communication systems. The performance of each of the generated bandpass filter structures up to the 2^nd iteration has been analyzed using a method of moments (MoM) based software IE3D, which is widely adopted in microwave research and in

We demonstrate the results of a mathematical model for investigation the nonlinear Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS), which can be employed to achieve high optical amplifier. The SBS is created by interaction between the incident We demonstrate the results of a mathematical model for investigation the nonlinear Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS), which can be employed to achieve high optical amplifier. The SBS is created by interaction between the incident light and the acoustic vibration fiber. The design criteria and the amplification characteristic of the Brillouin amplifier is demonstrated and discussed for fiber Brillouin amplifier using different pump power with different fiber length. The results show, high Brillouin gain can

The optimization calculations are made to find the optimum properties of combined quadrupole lens consist of electrostatic and magnetic lenses to produce achromatic lens. The modified bell-shaped model is used and the calculation is made by solving the equation of motion and finding the transfer matrices in convergence and divergence planes, these matrices are used to find the properties of lens as the magnification and aberrations coefficients. To find the optimum values of chromatic and spherical aberrations coefficients, the effect of both the excitation parameter of the lens (n) and the effective length of the lens into account as effective parameters in the optimization processing

The need to create the optimal water quality management process has motivated researchers to pursue prediction modeling development. One of the widely important forecasting models is the sessional autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) model. In the present study, a SARIMA model was developed in R software to fit a time series data of monthly fluoride content collected from six stations on Tigris River for the period from 2004 to 2014. The adequate SARIMA model that has the least Akaike's information criterion (AIC) and mean squared error (MSE) was found to be SARIMA (2,0,0) (0,1,1). The model parameters were identified and diagnosed to derive the forecasting equations at each selected location. The correlation coefficien

A genetic algorithm model coupled with artificial neural network model was developed to find the optimal values of upstream, downstream cutoff lengths, length of floor and length of downstream protection required for a hydraulic structure. These were obtained for a given maximum difference head, depth of impervious layer and degree of anisotropy. The objective function to be minimized was the cost function with relative cost coefficients for the different dimensions obtained. Constraints used were those that satisfy a factor of safety of 2 against uplift pressure failure and 3 against piping failure.
Different cases reaching 1200 were modeled and analyzed using geo-studio modeling, with different values of input variables. The soil wa