This mixed method research analyses urban heritage and identity management concerning Karbala, and important spiritual and historical center. Homing in on particular spatial issues germane to Muharram’s rites, this study explores spiritual activities for the remembrance of the martyrdoms of Imam Hussein (A) and his brother Abbas (A), and their followers (RA), and identifies the way in which such activities construct urban identity in Karbala. Furthermore, this study contemplates the deployment of contemporary AR and VR technologies for urban identity. After reviewing extensive studies on religious, cultural, and urban heritage, a field survey of the Muharram pilgrimage in Karbala was conducted, spatially analyzing pilgrims’ movements in public areas. Virtual reconstructions of Karbala using immersive technologies are explored to increase visitor engagement to determine physical-virtual spatial interactions’ shaping of preservation and experiences. The results indicate that Muharram rites, especially Hussaini processionals, inherently embody urban, cultural, and religious identifications with Karbala, literally shaping the city’s physical form and promoting social engagement in temporary congregation areas. Furthermore, the virtual technological immersive experiences, including the Day of Ashura, promote ancillary and even remote comprehension of cultural importance and knowledge transmission. Additionally, the integration of VR and AR in cultural heritage preservation not only enhances historical documentation but also creates immersive educational experiences. These technologies bridge the gap between physical and virtual engagement, ensuring that visitors—both present and remote—can interact with Karbala’s cultural legacy in a meaningful way. This approach fosters a stronger emotional and cognitive connection to the city's rich spiritual and historical narratives. This study is original in its multipronged analysis, encompassing virtual technology and spatial analysis for complementary heritage and culture conservation and reconstruction in Karbala. It offers urban planning, cultural preservation, and technological development insights, and charts the course for sensitive modernization in Karbala. Copyright: ©2025 The authors.
The aim of this research is to study the extent of the impact of government funding decisions on the financial performance of the directorate of Diyala province. The research problem was based on the financial reality of the directorate, and the data were collected from the financial divisions, planning and follow-up, implementation, and engineers of the resident engineer departments. Demonstrate the impact of government funding decisions on financial performance. Using scientific methods in estimating their financial needs through the annual estimated budget. The use of financial analysis to assess the performance of the Directorate, for the purpose of assessing the financial situation of the Directorate of research. The researc
... Show MoreAl-Dalmaj marsh and the near surrounding area is a very promising area for energy resources, tourism, agricultural and industrial activities. Over the past century, the Al-Dalmaje marsh and near surroundings area endrous from a number of changes. The current study highlights the spatial and temporal changes detection in land cover for Al-Dalmaj marsh and near surroundings area using different analyses methods the supervised maximum likelihood classification method, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Geographic Information Systems(GIS), and Remote Sensing (RS). Techniques spectral indices were used in this study to determine the change of wetlands and drylands area and of other land classes, th
... Show MoreRapid increase in the use of smart mobile phones and the proliferation of social media networking programs such as facebook, tweeter, whatsapp and viber etc. affects the learning attitude of second language. This research aims to investigate the effects of emoticons provided by Viber application on Iraqi students in context of vocabulary acquisition. 60 Iraqi students are randomly selected from X international school with the average of age 7 to 9 years. All the subjects are given 50 English words for five weeks, 25 English words were written on papers and the rest Viber stickers laden with English words. The results show that students recognize the vocabularies given by Viber stickers better than the written vocabulary. In general, student
... Show MoreAfrican-American writers during the 19th century wrote in the shadow of the prominent romance, sentimental, and domestic fiction. Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) reflects an “alternative social character”, for the female protagonist suffers racism in the free North, because she is a mulatto child. Through depicting the life of free blacks, who supposedly lives a better life than Southern slaves, Wilson exposes how she has actually lived and sensed life in antebellum America. According to Raymond Williams (2011), there are two kinds of literary writings. The first represents the general tendency of the age, and he calls it “dominant social character”; representing the majority content of both the public writing and speaking. But, a
... Show MoreArtificial intelligence (AI) is entering many fields of life nowadays. One of these fields is biometric authentication. Palm print recognition is considered a fundamental aspect of biometric identification systems due to the inherent stability, reliability, and uniqueness of palm print features, coupled with their non-invasive nature. In this paper, we develop an approach to identify individuals from palm print image recognition using Orange software in which a hybrid of AI methods: Deep Learning (DL) and traditional Machine Learning (ML) methods are used to enhance the overall performance metrics. The system comprises of three stages: pre-processing, feature extraction, and feature classification or matching. The SqueezeNet deep le
... Show More<abstract><p>Many variations of the algebraic Riccati equation (ARE) have been used to study nonlinear system stability in the control domain in great detail. Taking the quaternion nonsymmetric ARE (QNARE) as a generalized version of ARE, the time-varying QNARE (TQNARE) is introduced. This brings us to the main objective of this work: finding the TQNARE solution. The zeroing neural network (ZNN) technique, which has demonstrated a high degree of effectiveness in handling time-varying problems, is used to do this. Specifically, the TQNARE can be solved using the high order ZNN (HZNN) design, which is a member of the family of ZNN models that correlate to hyperpower iterative techniques. As a result, a novel
... Show MoreSince the beginning of this century, a new communication map has been formed that foretells to get mankind to enter into a media environment in which the media is mixed with communication, which is technically and even intellectually known as integration.
This environment and its features are no different from the environment in its natural physical incision. If the level and temperature in the physical nature is a specific issue in the natural ecological balance, the level of freedoms, especially the transfer of information and views and circulation in society is also a determinant in the extent of media balance in the world on the one hand and in each country on the other.
There is also a special environment for nature,
... Show MoreThe manifestations of climate change are increasing with the days: sudden rains and floods, lakes that evaporate, rivers that experience unprecedentedly low water levels, and successive droughts such as the Tigris, Euphrates, Rhine, and Lape rivers. At the same time, energy consumption is increasing, and there is no way to stop the warming of the Earth's atmosphere despite the many conferences and growing interest in environmental problems. An aspect that has not received sufficient attention is the tremendous heat produced by human activities. This work links four elements in the built environment that are known for their high energy consumption (houses, supermarkets, greenhouses, and asphalt roads) according t
... Show MoreArtificial intelligence (AI) is entering many fields of life nowadays. One of these fields is biometric authentication. Palm print recognition is considered a fundamental aspect of biometric identification systems due to the inherent stability, reliability, and uniqueness of palm print features, coupled with their non-invasive nature. In this paper, we develop an approach to identify individuals from palm print image recognition using Orange software in which a hybrid of AI methods: Deep Learning (DL) and traditional Machine Learning (ML) methods are used to enhance the overall performance metrics. The system comprises of three stages: pre-processing, feature extraction, and feature classification or matching. The SqueezeNet deep le
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