This work focuses on the use of biologically produced activated carbon for improving the physi-co-chemical properties of water samples obtained from the Tigris River. An eco-friendly and low-cost activated carbon was prepared from the Alhagi plant using potassium hydroxide (KOH) as an impregnation agent. The prepared activated carbon was characterised using Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy to determine the functional groups that exist on the raw material (Alhagi plant) and Alhagi activated carbon (AAC). Scanning electron microscope–energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscope was also used to investigate the surface shape and the elements that compose the powder. Brunauer–Emmett–Teller surface area analysis was used to evaluate the spe

In this paper, we introduce a DCT based steganographic method for gray scale images. The embedding approach is designed to reach efficient tradeoff among the three conflicting goals; maximizing the amount of hidden message, minimizing distortion between the cover image and stego-image,and maximizing the robustness of embedding. The main idea of the method is to create a safe embedding area in the middle and high frequency region of the DCT domain using a magnitude modulation technique. The magnitude modulation is applied using uniform quantization with magnitude Adder/Subtractor modules. The conducted test results indicated that the proposed method satisfy high capacity, high preservation of perceptual and statistical properties of the steg

This paper presents the results of experimental investigations to predict the bearing capacity of square footing on geogrid-reinforced loose sand by performing model tests. The effects of several parameters were studied in order to study the general behavior of improving the soil by using the geogrid. These parameters include the eccentricity value, depth of first layer of reinforcement, and vertical spacing of reinforcement layers. The results of the experimental work indicated that there was an optimum reinforcement embedment depth at which the bearing capacity was the highest when single-layer reinforcement was used. The increase of (z/B) (vertical spacing of reinforcement layer/width of footing) above 1.5 has no effect on the re

Abstract: Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a significant field in computational linguistics as it is indispensable for many language understanding applications. Automatic processing of documents is made difficult because of the fact that many of the terms it contain ambiguous. Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) systems try to solve these ambiguities and find the correct meaning. Genetic algorithms can be active to resolve this problem since they have been effectively applied for many optimization problems. In this paper, genetic algorithms proposed to solve the word sense disambiguation problem that can automatically select the intended meaning of a word in context without any additional resource. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on a col

In order to reduce hydrostatic pressure in oil wells and produce oil from dead oil wells, laboratory rig was constructed, by injecting LPG through pipe containing mixture of two to one part of East Baghdad crude oil and water. The used pressure of injection was 2.0 bar, which results the hydrostatic pressure reduction around 246 to 222 mbar and flow rate of 34.5 liter/hr fluid (oil-water), at 220 cm injection depth. Effects of other operating parameters were also studied on the behavior of two phase flow and on the production of oil from dead oil wells.

Computer systems and networks are being used in almost every aspect of our daily life; as a result the security threats to computers and networks have also increased significantly. Traditionally, password-based user authentication is widely used to authenticate legitimate user in the current system0T but0T this method has many loop holes such as password sharing, shoulder surfing, brute force attack, dictionary attack, guessing, phishing and many more. The aim of this paper is to enhance the password authentication method by presenting a keystroke dynamics with back propagation neural network as a transparent layer of user authentication. Keystroke Dynamics is one of the famous and inexpensive behavioral biometric technologies, which identi

Fractal image compression depends on representing an image using affine transformations. The main concern for researches in the discipline of fractal image compression (FIC) algorithm is to decrease encoding time needed to compress image data. The basic technique is that each portion of the image is similar to other portions of the same image. In this process, there are many models that were developed. The presence of fractals was initially noticed and handled using Iterated Function System (IFS); that is used for encoding images. In this paper, a review of fractal image compression is discussed with its variants along with other techniques. A summarized review of contributions is achieved to determine the fulfillment of fractal ima

In the field of construction project management, time and cost are the most important factors to be considered in planning every project, and their relationship is complex. The total cost for each project is the sum of the direct and indirect cost. Direct cost commonly represents labor, materials, equipment, etc.
Indirect cost generally represents overhead cost such as supervision, administration, consultants, and interests. Direct cost grows at an increasing rate as the project time is reduced from its original planned time. However, indirect cost continues for the life of the project and any reduction in project time means a reduction in indirect cost. Therefore, there is a trade-off between the time and cost for completing construc

The exploitation of obsolete recyclable resources including paper waste has the advantages of saving resources and environment protection. This study has been conducted to study utilizing paper waste to adsorb phenol which is one of the harmful organic compound byproducts deposited in the environment. The influence of different agitation methods, pH of the solution (3-11), initial phenol concentration (30-120ppm), adsorbent dose (0.5-2.5 g) and contact time (30-150 min) were studied. The highest phenol removal efficiency obtained was 86% with an adsorption capacity of 5.1 mg /g at optimization conditions (pH of 9, initial phenol concentration of 30 mg/L, an adsorbent dose of 2 g and contact time of 120min and at room temperature).