When the depth of stressed soil is rather small, Plate Load Test (PLT) becomes the most efficient test to estimate the soil properties for design purposes. Among these properties, modulus of subgrade reaction is the most important one that usually employed in roads and concrete pavement design. Two methods are available to perform PLT: static and dynamic methods. Static PLT is usually adopted due to its simplicity and time saving to be performs in comparison with cyclic (dynamic) method. The two methods are described in ASTM standard.

In this paper the effect of the test method used in PLT in estimation of some mechanical soil properties was distinguished via a series of both test methods applied in a same site. The comparison of

Background: Mobile phones are approximately widely used everywhere like in hospital wards, clinics and universities as well as biomedical laboratories. They have become very important tool in students’ life. In contrast, these tools carry many harmful bacteria which are responsible for infectious diseases in human because they serve as a reservoir for different pathogens. Current study was aimed to isolate bacteria from students’ mobile phones at the Institute of Medical Technology/Al-Mansour/The Middle Technical University, Baghdad, Iraq. Also, the study investigated microbial resistance to many antimicrobial agents as well as the appropriate remedial measures. Method: Four hundred and fifty swabs from mobile phones were collected from

This study was designed to determine the colonization of the in-use hand washing soaps in hospital settings. It is a comparative cross-sectional research in a surgical specialties and Baghdad teaching hospital in Baghdad, Iraq. Swabs from surfaces of bar soaps and from liquid soaps via their applicator tips; at the sinks of toilets of hospital staff and working rooms of the wards were taken in January 2008. Conventional microbiologic methods were used for culture of the swabs and identification of the isolates. Colonization was detected 60% and 15.9% in bars and liquid forms respectively. And this lead to the conclusion that bar soaps could be colonized with microorganisms excessively. Liquid hand washing soaps are more appropriate in ho

This study was aimed to determine the mutations and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in exon 3 and 7 of estrogen receptor beta (ESR2) gene in women with breast cancer from Iraq. Different samples (blood, fresh tissue with blood from same patient, and formalin fixed paraffin embedded, FFPE) were collected from women with breast cancer. Molecular analysis exon 3 and 7 in ESR2 has been studied by using PCR. It was found exon 3 and 7 in ESR2 were revealed as a single band with size 151 and 157 bp, respectively. There was no SNP in exon 3 has been identified. While three novel polymorphisms (ACT, AGG and GCA) were detected in exon 7, the type of those polymorphisms deletion for ACT and AGG while substitution polymorphism for GCA. From this

Enhancing quality image fusion was proposed using new algorithms in auto-focus image fusion. The first algorithm is based on determining the standard deviation to combine two images. The second algorithm concentrates on the contrast at edge points and correlation method as the criteria parameter for the resulted image quality. This algorithm considers three blocks with different sizes at the homogenous region and moves it 10 pixels within the same homogenous region. These blocks examine the statistical properties of the block and decide automatically the next step. The resulted combined image is better in the contras

This paper presents a hybrid genetic algorithm (hGA) for optimizing the maximum likelihood function ln(L(phi(1),theta(1)))of the mixed model ARMA(1,1). The presented hybrid genetic algorithm (hGA) couples two processes: the canonical genetic algorithm (cGA) composed of three main steps: selection, local recombination and mutation, with the local search algorithm represent by steepest descent algorithm (sDA) which is defined by three basic parameters: frequency, probability, and number of local search iterations. The experimental design is based on simulating the cGA, hGA, and sDA algorithms with different values of model parameters, and sample size(n). The study contains comparison among these algorithms depending on MSE value. One can conc

Introduction: Cutaneous leishmaniasis is considered a parasitic contagion resulting from the flagellated parasite belonging to the genus of Leishmania. Also, cutaneous leishmaniasis is a zoonotic ailment transmitted through the bloodsucking sand-flies bite (belonging to the Phlebotomus genus). The disease's reservoirs included wild or semi-domesticated animals, in general rodents and dogs. Tissue inhibitor metalloproteinase-1 (TIMP-1) is one of the extracellular matrix proteins that have a role in vessel wall degeneration and aneurysm development. In addition, it belongs to the zinc-dependent endopeptidases family that are involved in the degradation of connective tissues proteins which are included in vascular integrity maintenance. The Ge

This study aimed to conduct a comparative analysis of seven calliphorid species of third- instar larvae that were collected from central Iraq. The purpose was to morphologically characterize these species and develop an identification key to differentiate them from closely related species. Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) graphical images and high-resolution traditional optical microscopes were used to analyze the morphological characteristics of the species Calliphora vomitoria (Linnaeus, 1758), C. vicina Robineau-Desvoidy, 1830, Chrysomya albiceps (Widemann, 1819), Ch. rufifacies (Macquart, 1844), Ch. megacephala (Fabricius, 1794), Lucilia cuprina (Wiedemann, 1830), and L. sericata (Meigen, 1826). An identification key was const