The road transportation system is considered as major component of the infrastructure in any country, it affects the developments in economy and social activities. The Asphalt Concrete which is considered as the major pavement material for the road transportation system in Baghdad is subjected to continuous deterioration with time due to traffic loading and environmental conditions, it was felt that implementing a comprehensive pavement maintenance management system (PMMS), which should be capable for preserving the functional and structural conditions of pavement layers, is essential. This work presents the development of PMMS with Visual inspection technique for evaluating the Asphalt Concrete pavement surface condition; common types of Asphalt Concrete distress including (bleeding of Asphalt, patching, block cracking, edge cracking, longitudinal and transverse cracking, rutting, pot holes, longitudinal and transverse deformation) with their various severity and intensity conditions have been included in the system as data base. The surface of the pavement was divided into sections, and the pavement condition is visually evaluated by the raters using specially designed forms, each type of defect was measured, classified, and rated according to type, severity, and extent. Data will be fed to the system using the computer, various types of intensity and severity of distress were analyzed by the system, the present condition rating (PCR) of the pavement section is determined, and the system suggests the required maintenance action. The developed system which is assigned (PMMS-09) was verified in evaluating the pavement surface condition at AL-Jaderiah campus roadway network. The results indicated that the system is sound in evaluation of the pavement condition and in suggestion of the proper maintenance to reserve the pavement condition.
Nd:YAG laser pulses of 9 nanosecond pulse duration and operating wavelength at 1.06 μm, were utilized to drill high thermal conductivity and high reflectivity aluminum and copper foils. The results showed a dependence of drilled holes characteristics on laser power density and the number of laser pulses used. Drilled depth of 74 ϻm was obtained in aluminum at 11.036×108 W/cm2 of laser power density. Due to its higher melting point, copper required higher laser power density and/or larger number of laser pulses to melt, and a maximum depth of 25 μm was reached at 13.46×108 W/cm2 using single laser pulse.
There are many ways to communicate a story, one can tell it, sing it, act it, write it, film it and can draw it. Each form of storytelling has its unique characteristics that separate it from the other forms. These distinguishing characteristics of each form does not indicate the superiority of one form over the other, on the contrary, it indicates the human ability to be creative on many levels. As students of literature, only the written form of a story is taken into account. One reason for the negligence of other forms of storytelling might be that singing and filming a story is not related to literature. But there has been a form of storytelling that uses words along with pictures which eventually became a genre of novels called grap
... Show MoreBackground: Symptoms related to the upper gastro-intestinal tract are very common. Attribution of these symptoms to upper G. I. T.diseases are usually done on clinical bases, which could be confirmed by Esophago Gastro Duodenoscopy (EGD). The use of such tools might increase the diagnosis accuracy for such complaints. The indications for upper G I endoscopy might decrease the negative results of endoscopies.Objective: To follow strict indications for Esophago Gastro Duodenoscopy in order to decrease the negative endoscopy results. Methods: One thousand eight hundred and ninety cases were subjected to EGD from Feb. 1999 to Feb 2009 at Alkindy Teaching Hospital and Abd-Al-Majeed private hospital in Baghdad, Iraq. A special endoscopy unit f
... Show MoreIn this paper, we propose a method using continuous wavelets to study the multivariate fractional Brownian motion through the deviations of the transformed random process to find an efficient estimate of Hurst exponent using eigenvalue regression of the covariance matrix. The results of simulations experiments shown that the performance of the proposed estimator was efficient in bias but the variance get increase as signal change from short to long memory the MASE increase relatively. The estimation process was made by calculating the eigenvalues for the variance-covariance matrix of Meyer’s continuous wavelet details coefficients.
Background: Acute cholecystitis is common surgical
problem, which was treated previously by conservative
treatment .Later early open has been introduced as an
alternative to interval for treatment of acute cholecystitis.
Early open was found to be a safe, successful with
comparable postoperative complication rate. With the
advent of laparoscopy laparoscopic have been used for
chronic cholecystitis and became the first line of
treatment. New reports have shown that laparoscopic can
be used as an alternative to open for surgical treatment of
acute cholecystitis.
Objectives: to compare the success, safety of early
laparoscopic versus early open as a primary treatment of
acute cholecystitis.
Methods:
In this paper, we characterize the percolation condition for a continuum secondary cognitive radio network under the SINR model. We show that the well-established condition for continuum percolation does not hold true in the SINR regime. Thus, we find the condition under which a cognitive radio network percolates. We argue that due to the SINR requirements of the secondaries along with the interference tolerance of the primaries, not all the deployed secondary nodes necessarily contribute towards the percolation process- even though they might participate in the communication process. We model the invisibility of such nodes using the concept of Poisson thinning, both in the presence and absence of primaries. Invisibility occurs due to nodes
... Show MoreMachine learning models have recently provided great promise in diagnosis of several ophthalmic disorders, including keratoconus (KCN). Keratoconus, a noninflammatory ectatic corneal disorder characterized by progressive cornea thinning, is challenging to detect as signs may be subtle. Several machine learning models have been proposed to detect KCN, however most of the models are supervised and thus require large well-annotated data. This paper proposes a new unsupervised model to detect KCN, based on adapted flower pollination algorithm (FPA) and the k-means algorithm. We will evaluate the proposed models using corneal data collected from 5430 eyes at different stages of KCN severity (1520 healthy, 331 KCN1, 1319 KCN2, 1699 KCN3 a
... Show MoreOne of the significant stages in computer vision is image segmentation which is fundamental for different applications, for example, robot control and military target recognition, as well as image analysis of remote sensing applications. Studies have dealt with the process of improving the classification of all types of data, whether text or audio or images, one of the latest studies in which researchers have worked to build a simple, effective, and high-accuracy model capable of classifying emotions from speech data, while several studies dealt with improving textual grouping. In this study, we seek to improve the classification of image division using a novel approach depending on two methods used to segment the images. The first
... Show MoreThe current study aims to investigate the second cycle students’ motives for using electronic games in Oman. The sample consisted of (570) students, (346 males and 224 females). The participants completed an open-ended question which was analyzed based on ground theory. The results showed that (46.820%) of the males and (77.678) of the females played electronic games for pleasure, entertainment, and fun. This first category of motivation got the highest percentage of frequency (58.947%). The motive to become a hacker, a popular YouTuber got the lowest percentage (2.280%). Other students’ motives toward playing electronic games included: filling the leisure time, overcoming boredom, feeling adventures, getting science fiction and chal
... Show MoreIn this study, the feasibility of Forward–Reverse osmosis processes was investigated for treating the oily wastewater. The first stage was applied forward osmosis process to recover pure water from oily wastewater. Sodium chloride (NaCl) and magnesium chloride (MgCl2) salts were used as draw solutions and the membrane that was used in forward osmosis (FO) process was cellulose triacetate (CTA) membrane. The operating parameters studied were: draw solution concentrations (0.25 – 0.75 M), oil concentration in feed solution (FS) (100-1000 ppm), the temperature of FS and draw solution (DS) (30 - 45 °C), pH of FS (4-10) and the flow rate of both DS and FS (20 - 60 l/h). It was found that the water flux and oil concentration in FS increas
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