Highly plastic soils exhibit unfavorited properties upon saturation, which produce different defects in engineering structures. Attempts were made by researchers to proffer solutions to these defects by experimenting in practical ways. This included various materials that could possibly improve the soil engineering properties and reduce environmental hazards. This paper investigates the strength behavior of highly plastic clay stabilized with brick dust. The brick dust contents were 10%, 20%, and 30% by dry weight of soil. A series of linear shrinkage and unconfined compression tests were carried out to study the effect of brick dust on the quantitative amount of shrinkage experienced by highly plastic clay and the undra

Detection of early clinical keratoconus (KCN) is a challenging task, even for expert clinicians. In this study, we propose a deep learning (DL) model to address this challenge. We first used Xception and InceptionResNetV2 DL architectures to extract features from three different corneal maps collected from 1371 eyes examined in an eye clinic in Egypt. We then fused features using Xception and InceptionResNetV2 to detect subclinical forms of KCN more accurately and robustly. We obtained an area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC) of 0.99 and an accuracy range of 97–100% to distinguish normal eyes from eyes with subclinical and established KCN. We further validated the model based on an independent dataset with

Seepage through earth dams is one of the most popular causes for earth dam collapse due to internal granule movement and seepage transfer. In earthen dams, the core plays a vital function in decreasing seepage through the dam body and lowering the phreatic line. In this research, an alternative soil to the clay soil used in the dam core has been proposed by conducting multiple experiments to test the permeability of silty and sandy soil with different additives materials. Then the selected sandy soil model was used to represent the dam experimentally, employing a permeability device to measure the amount of water that seeps through the dam's body and to represent the seepage line. A numerical model was adopted using Geo-Studio software i

This study aims to estimate the accuracy of digital elevation models (DEM) which are created with exploitation of open source Google Earth data and comparing with the widely available DEM datasets, Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), version 3, and Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer Global Digital Elevation Model (ASTER GDEM), version 2. The GPS technique is used in this study to produce digital elevation raster with a high level of accuracy, as reference raster, compared to the DEM datasets. Baghdad University, Al Jadriya campus, is selected as a study area. Besides, 151 reference points were created within the study area to evaluate the results based on the values of RMS.Furthermore, th

Abstract
This study aims to evaluated the user satisfaction of retrieval services
concerning to universities thesis and dissertations in university dissertation
unit of Baghdad Library for achieving the following objectives:
1- Evaluating the performance of this unit (thesis unit of Baghdad University
Library) regarding to users opinion.
2- Recognizing the reasons in this unit behind the case of non satisfaction of
its users and trying to find the suitable solutions.
To achieve those two objectives, the questionnaire tool was performed
and determined the user's satisfaction level by using a sample survey. 1118
graduated students were subjected to this experiment. The following main
results were appeared:<

In this paper, a fusion of K models of full-rank weighted nonnegative tensor factor two-dimensional deconvolution (K-wNTF2D) is proposed to separate the acoustic sources that have been mixed in an underdetermined reverberant environment. The model is adapted in an unsupervised manner under the hybrid framework of the generalized expectation maximization and multiplicative update algorithms. The derivation of the algorithm and the development of proposed full-rank K-wNTF2D will be shown. The algorithm also encodes a set of variable sparsity parameters derived from Gibbs distribution into the K-wNTF2D model. This optimizes each sub-model in K-wNTF2D with the required sparsity to model the time-varying variances of the sources in the s

We describe the use of on-chip buckled-dome Fabry–Perot microcavities as pressure sensing elements. These cavities, fabricated by a controlled thin-film buckling process, are inherently sealed and support stable optical modes (finesse  > 10 3 ), which are well-suited to coupling by single-mode fibers. Changes in external pressure deflect

This experiment was performed to investigate the influence of different oils in the diets of laying quail on their egg quality characteristics. One hundred and twenty 7-week-old Japanese quails (Coturnix coturnix japonica) were allocated to four groups with three replicates containing 10 quail each (30 quail per treatment group). They were fed for 13 weeks (including one week of adaptation period) on diets containing 3% oil from different sources, viz., sunflower (T1), linseed (T2), maize (T3), or fish oil (T4). Inclusion of the diet of laying quail with fish oil (T4) and maize oil (T2) resulted in a significant increase with respect to egg weight, yolk weight, albumen weight, yolk diameter, yolk height, albumen diameter, albumen height, sh