This study was set out to investigate factors affecting labor productivity on construction in the north of Iraq (Kurdistan) and to rank all the factors based on engineers, contractors, and designer’s opinions. 76 factors were analyzed based on previous literature and a pilot study. Next, by using online Google Form, a questionnaire form was created and sent to people who have experience in the construction industry. Afterward, the questionnaire form was sent to targeted people by email and social media apps. Factors were divided into nine groups “Management, Technical and Technology, Human and Workforce, Leadership, Motivation, Safety, Time, Material and Equipment, and External”. However, 202 respondents participated in this study, and they were asked to give weight to the factors using the Likert scale from 1 to 5. Finally, the Relative Importance Index RII was used to determine the factors statically with MS Excel 2015. In brief, all the respondents agreed upon “Economic condition in the country” is the first ranking factor. While “Site complication” was the last factor that affect labor productivity in construction. Last but not least, the “Motivation” group was the first ranked group. Apart from the factors, respondents agreed that Site Engineers have more effect on construction projects than Contractors and Designers.
The art of preventing the detection of hidden information messages is the way that steganography work. Several algorithms have been proposed for steganographic techniques. A major portion of these algorithms is specified for image steganography because the image has a high level of redundancy. This paper proposed an image steganography technique using a dynamic threshold produced by the discrete cosine coefficient. After dividing the green and blue channel of the cover image into 1*3-pixel blocks, check if any bits of green channel block less or equal to threshold then start to store the secret bits in blue channel block, and to increase the security not all bits in the chosen block used to store the secret bits. Firstly, store in the cente
... Show More<p>In this paper, a simple color image compression system has been proposed using image signal decomposition. Where, the RGB image color band is converted to the less correlated YUV color model and the pixel value (magnitude) in each band is decomposed into 2-values; most and least significant. According to the importance of the most significant value (MSV) that influenced by any simply modification happened, an adaptive lossless image compression system is proposed using bit plane (BP) slicing, delta pulse code modulation (Delta PCM), adaptive quadtree (QT) partitioning followed by an adaptive shift encoder. On the other hand, a lossy compression system is introduced to handle the least significant value (LSV), it is based on
... Show MoreBac kground:: Septal deviation is one of the commonest anatomical deformities of the nasal skeleton, this deviation is usually accompanied by compensatory hypertrophy of the inferior turbinate on the concave side that will accentuate the severity of nasal obstruction.
Objectives: To evaluate the effect of septoplasty on the size of the inferior turbinate in patients with nasal septum deviation.
Methods: This is a prospective study of 25 patients attending the otolaryngological department at Al-Jirahat teaching hospital from September 2011 to November 2013, complaining mainly of nasal obstruction. Otolaryngological examination had shown nasal septum deviation. The cross sectional areas of inferior turbinates were measured with compu
The research aims to determine the role of functional alienation and its impact on Job Satisfaction in General Motors Company, that were selected to apply the field side being an important company in Iraq, the problem was research with difficulty in employees adapt and their sense of alienation in their work which is reflected negatively on the level of satisfaction with work in company searched. A questionnaire was adopted as the main tool for data collection research which included (31) items distributed on (50) employees in the company selected, on a randomly chosen and based on the statistical program ready by (SPSS). Sample of this study was the most important findings of the research are the weak management of the company i
... Show MoreEnd Stage Renal Disease is a well-known global public health problem. Maintenance hemodialysis is considered a life-saving treatment for patients with such disease. This treatment method that requires patients to be adherent to hemodialysis attendance, dietary and fluid recommendations as well as adherence to prescribed medications to ensure success. The aim of the current study was to assess adherence, perception, and counseling among hemodialysis patients to different modalities of treatment (fluid restriction, dietary recommendations, medications, and hemodialysis schedules). A cross-sectional study carried out on hemodialysis patients who attended to the dialysis centers at al- Karama teachi
... Show MoreColor image compression is a good way to encode digital images by decreasing the number of bits wanted to supply the image. The main objective is to reduce storage space, reduce transportation costs and maintain good quality. In current research work, a simple effective methodology is proposed for the purpose of compressing color art digital images and obtaining a low bit rate by compressing the matrix resulting from the scalar quantization process (reducing the number of bits from 24 to 8 bits) using displacement coding and then compressing the remainder using the Mabel ZF algorithm Welch LZW. The proposed methodology maintains the quality of the reconstructed image. Macroscopic and
Estimating the semantic similarity between short texts plays an increasingly prominent role in many fields related to text mining and natural language processing applications, especially with the large increase in the volume of textual data that is produced daily. Traditional approaches for calculating the degree of similarity between two texts, based on the words they share, do not perform well with short texts because two similar texts may be written in different terms by employing synonyms. As a result, short texts should be semantically compared. In this paper, a semantic similarity measurement method between texts is presented which combines knowledge-based and corpus-based semantic information to build a semantic network that repre
... Show MoreTo assess cultural competence among nursing students from nine countries to provide an international perspective on cultural competence.
A descriptive, cross‐sectional design.
A convenience sample of 2,163 nursing students from nine countries was surveyed using the Cultural Capacity Scale from April to November 2016.
The study found a moderate range of cultural competence among the students. The ability to teach and guide other nursing colleagues to displ
Soils that cause effective damages to engineer structures (such as pavement and foundation) are called problematic or difficult soils (include collapsible soil, expansive soil, etc.). These damages occur due to poor or unfavorited engineering properties, such as low shear strength, high compressibility, high volume changes, etc. In the case of expansive soil, the problem of the shrink-swell phenomenon, when the soil reacts with water, is more pronounced. To overcome such problems, soils can be treated or stabilized with many stabilization ways (mechanical, chemical, etc.). Such ways can amend the unfavorited soil properties. In this review, the pozzolanic materials have been selected to be presented and discussed as chem
... Show MoreRecent years have seen an explosion in graph data from a variety of scientific, social and technological fields. From these fields, emotion recognition is an interesting research area because it finds many applications in real life such as in effective social robotics to increase the interactivity of the robot with human, driver safety during driving, pain monitoring during surgery etc. A novel facial emotion recognition based on graph mining has been proposed in this paper to make a paradigm shift in the way of representing the face region, where the face region is represented as a graph of nodes and edges and the gSpan frequent sub-graphs mining algorithm is used to find the frequent sub-structures in the graph database of each emotion. T
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