Nowhere is American author Shirley Jackson’s (1916-1965) social and political criticism is so intense than it is in her seminal fictional masterpiece “The Lottery”. Jackson severely denounces injustice through her emphasis on a bizarre social custom in a small American town, in which the winner of the lottery, untraditionally, receives a fatal prize. The readers are left puzzled at the end of the story as Tessie Hutchinson, the unfortunate female winner, is stoned to death by the members of her community, and even by her family. This study aims at investigating the author’s social and political implications that lie behind the story, taking into account the historical era in which the story was published (the aftermath of th

 

This work implements the face recognition system based on two stages, the first stage is feature extraction stage and the second stage is the classification stage. The feature extraction stage consists of Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) in a hierarchical format in conjunction with Gabor Filters and local image sampling. Different types of SOM’s were used and a comparison between the results from these SOM’s was given.

The next stage is the classification stage, and consists of self-organizing map neural network; the goal of this stage is to find the similar image to the input image. The proposal method algorithm implemented by using C++ packages, this work is successful classifier for a face database consist of 20

The application of physiological oxygen (physoxia) concentrations is becoming increasingly commonplace within a mammalian stem cell culture. Human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) attract widespread interest for clinical application due to their unique immunomodulatory, multi-lineage potential, and regenerative capacities. Descriptions of the impact of physoxia on global DNA methylation patterns in hMSCs and the activity of enzymatic machinery responsible for its regulation remain limited. Human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BM-hMSCs, passage 1) isolated in reduced oxygen conditions displayed an upregulation of SOX2 in reduced oxygen conditions vs. air oxygen (21% O2, AO), while no change was noted for either OCT-4 or NA

The most important function of a prosthetic hand is their ability to perform tasks in a manner similar to a natural hand, so it is necessary to perform kinematic analysis to determine the performance and the ability of the prosthetic human finger design to work normally and smoothly when it's drive by two sets of links that embedded in its structure and pulled by a servomotor, so the Denvit-Hartenberg method was used to analyse the forward kinematics for the prosthetic finger joints to deduction the trajectory of the fingertip and the velocity of the joints was computed by using the Jacobian matrix. The prosthetic finger was modelled by the Solidwork - 2018 program and the results of kinematics were verified using MATLAB. The analys

Laser assisted skin wound closure offers many distinct advantages over conventional closure
techniques. The objective of this in vitro experimental study, carried out at the Institute of Laser for
Postgraduate Studies/Baghdad University, was to determine the effectiveness of 980 nm diode laser in
welding of human skin wounds. Multiple 3-4 cm long full thickness incisions in a specimen of human
skin obtained from the discarded panniculus of an Abdominoplasty operation were tried to be laser
welded using a 4 mm spot diameter laser beam from a 980 nm diode laser at different laser parameters
and modes of action. The tensile strength at the weld site was analyzed experimentally. Although laser
assisted wound welding did

In this paper, a cognitive system based on a nonlinear neural controller and intelligent algorithm that will guide an autonomous mobile robot during continuous path-tracking and navigate over solid obstacles with avoidance was proposed. The goal of the proposed structure is to plan and track the reference path equation for the autonomous mobile robot in the mining environment to avoid the obstacles and reach to the target position by using intelligent optimization algorithms. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) Algorithms are used to finding the solutions of the mobile robot navigation problems in the mine by searching the optimal paths and finding the reference path equation of the optimal

Background: As a multifactorial disorder, temporomandibular joint (TMD) is difficult to diagnose, and multiple factors affect the joint and cause the temporomandibular disorder. Standardization of clinical diagnosis of TMD should be used to reach a definite clinical diagnosis; the condylar bone may degenerate in accordance with these disorders. Aims: Evaluate the correlation between the clinical diagnosis and degenerative condylar change (flattening, sclerosis, erosion, and osteophyte). Materials and Methods: A prospective study with a study group of 97 TMD patients (total of 194 joints) aged 20 to 50. Patients were sent to cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) to assess the degenerative condylar change. Results: No association was found bet

Polarization is an important property of light, which refers to the direction of electric field oscillations. Polarization modulation plays an essential role for polarization encoding quantum key distribution (QKD). Polarization is used to encode photons in the QKD systems. In this work, visible-range polarizers with optimal dimensions based on resonance grating waveguides have been numerically designed and investigated using the COMSOL Multiphysics Software. Two structures have been designed, namely a singlelayer metasurface grating (SLMG) polarizer and an interlayer metasurface grating (ILMG) polarizer. Both structures have demonstrated high extinction ratios, ~1.8·103 and 8.68·104 , and the bandwidths equal to 45 and 55 nm for th

In this paper, a miniaturized 2 × 2 electro-optic plasmonic Mach– Zehnder switch (MZS) based on metal–polymer–silicon hybrid waveguide is presented. Adiabatic tapers are designed to couple the light between the plasmonic phase shifter, implemented in each of the MZS arms, and the 3-dB input/output directional couplers. For 6 µm-long hybrid plasmonic waveguide supported by JRD1 polymer (r33= 390 pm/V), a π-phase shift voltage of 2 V is obtained. The switch is designed for 1550 nm operation wavelength using COMSOL software and characterizes by 2.3 dB insertion loss, 9.9 fJ/bit power consumption, and 640 GHz operation bandwidth