Exposure of reinforced concrete buildings to an accidental fire may result in cracking and loss in the bearing capacity of their major components, columns, beams, and slabs. It is a challenge for structural engineers to develop efficient retrofitting techniques that enable RC slabs to restore their structural integrity, after being exposed to intense fires for a long period of time. Experimental
investigation was carried out on twenty one slab specimens made of self compacting concrete, eighteen of them are retrofitted with CFRP sheets after burning and loading till failure while three of them (which represent control specimens) are retrofitted with CFRP sheet after loading till failure without burning. All slabs had been tested in a

Traditional accounting takes only one dimension (economic) in calculating the value added of the company, and all other aspects (including environmental and social) are neglected, and despite the emergence of Sustainability Accounting and the interest of companies in preparing sustainability reports, these reports are suffering from many problems, including multiple metrics used in measuring companies (cash, quantity and lavish). In addition, these reports may reach dozens of pages in some companies and this causes the problem (information overload) which affects the qualitative properties of accounting information such as appropriate and relative, which requires the need to find a tool that can measure the Sustainability Unit of

Abstract

People are supposed to use language harmoniously and compatibly. However, aggression may characterize much of human communication. Aggression has long been recognized as a negative anti-social issue that prevails in most personal interactions. If it abounds in familial communications, it is more dangerous due to its harmful effects on individuals, and consequently on societies. Aggression refers to all the instances in which we try to get our way without any consideration for others. Moriarty’s novel (2014), Big Little Lies, is argued to represent the patterns of aggressive communications. This study aims to find out the motivations behind aggressive language in familial communication in this

Traditionally, path selection within routing is formulated as a shortest path optimization problem. The objective function for optimization could be any one variety of parameters such as number of hops, delay, cost...etc. The problem of least cost delay constraint routing is studied in this paper since delay constraint is very common requirement of many multimedia applications and cost minimization captures the need to
distribute the network. So an iterative algorithm is proposed in this paper to solve this problem. It is appeared from the results of applying this algorithm that it gave the optimal path (optimal solution) from among multiple feasible paths (feasible solutions).

Self-driving automobiles are prominent in science and technology, which affect social and economic development. Deep learning (DL) is the most common area of study in artificial intelligence (AI). In recent years, deep learning-based solutions have been presented in the field of self-driving cars and have achieved outstanding results. Different studies investigated a variety of significant technologies for autonomous vehicles, including car navigation systems, path planning, environmental perception, as well as car control. End-to-end learning control directly converts sensory data into control commands in autonomous driving. This research aims to identify the most accurate pre-trained Deep Neural Network (DNN) for predicting the steerin

Background: Gastro oesophageal reflux disease (GERD) is characterized by diverse symptoms. There is an evidence for a genetic component to Gastro oesophageal reflux disease as supported by familial aggregation of this disease. Aim of the study was to investigate whether certain human leucocyte antigen genes HLA-DRB1 are associated with (GERD).Methods: Patients and controls were prospectively recruited from GIT center at Al-Kindy Teaching Hospital (Baghdad-Iraq) between January 2014 and July 2016. Sixty Iraqi Arab Muslim patients with a history of heartburn and dyspepsia were compared with 100 Iraqi Arab Muslims controls. All study patients and control groups underwent upper gastrointestinal endoscopic examinations and their serums were anal

The second leading cause of death and one of the most common causes of disability in the world is stroke. Researchers have found that brain–computer interface (BCI) techniques can result in better stroke patient rehabilitation. This study used the proposed motor imagery (MI) framework to analyze the electroencephalogram (EEG) dataset from eight subjects in order to enhance the MI-based BCI systems for stroke patients. The preprocessing portion of the framework comprises the use of conventional filters and the independent component analysis (ICA) denoising approach. Fractal dimension (FD) and Hurst exponent (Hur) were then calculated as complexity features, and Tsallis entropy (TsEn) and dispersion entropy (DispEn) were assessed as

Microalgae have been increasingly used for wastewater treatment due to their capacity to assimilate nutrients. Samples of wastewater were taken from the Erbil wastewater channel near Dhahibha village in northern Iraq. The microalga Coelastrella sp. was used in three doses (0.2, 1, and 2g. l^-1) in this experiment for 21 days, samples were periodically (every 3 days) analyzed for physicochemical parameters such as pH, EC, Phosphate, Nitrate, and BOD₅, in addition to, Chlorophyll a concentration. Results showed that the highest dose 2g.l^-1 was the most effective dose for removing nutrients, confirmed by significant differences (p≤0.05) between all doses. The highest removal percentage was