Many authors investigated the problem of the early visibility of the new crescent moon after the conjunction and proposed many criteria addressing this issue in the literature. This article presented a proposed criterion for early crescent moon sighting based on a deep-learned pattern recognizer artificial neural network (ANN) performance. Moon sight datasets were collected from various sources and used to learn the ANN. The new criterion relied on the crescent width and the arc of vision from the edge of the crescent bright limb. The result of that criterion was a control value indicating the moon's visibility condition, which separated the datasets into four regions: invisible, telescope only, probably visible, and certai

Public-private partnership (PPP) has been used over the past 20-30 years by governments in developed countries to meet the public demand for infrastructural services. In Iraq, the PPP concept is comparatively new to the Government of Iraq (GoI), where the government has historically taken most of the responsibility for providing public services. There are few PPP projects in Iraq. However, the number is increasing. Recently the Iraqi market has experienced a number of attempts of PPP in different sectors, especially after the new investment law in 2006. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the investment environment in Iraq and to indicate the main factors affecting PPP in particular for infrastructure projects. Some literature review and

Background: The early detection of oral cancers gives the greatest chance of curing and the delay in presentation has a significant impact on the associated morbidity and mortality. The lack of general dental practitioners (GDP) knowledge in early cancer detection has been shown to contribute to delays in referral and treatment. The aim of this study was to investigate the oral cancer awareness among a group of GDP by assessing their knowledge of detection and prevention of oral cancer. Materials and methods: A questionnaire based study was designed. The questionnaire was delivered to 200 GDP assessing oral examination method, knowledge of oral cancer risk factors, clinical appearance and the most common site, point of referral and requests

This study was designed to investing the drug prescribing pattern which is the important point in the rational or irrational use of drugs among patients dispensing their prescriptions from the private pharmacies in Maysan governorate, Iraq for a period of 1 month. The data collected from prescriptions were calculated and analyzed according to the WHO prescribing guidelines. The data showed that the mean of drugs included in single prescription was 3.4, and 12% of prescribed drugs were written as generic names; moreover, the percentage of antibiotics, corticosteroids and anxiolytics were 33.3%, 11.4% and 23.8% respectively. Those results indicate the irrational use of drugs when compared with the world health organization standard values