Volunteerism is an element included in many human cultures. It represents a positive cooperative act between individuals and groups. It expresses the social value systems. As a social phenomenon, it develops in societies according to innumerous circumstances and conditions. This study uses a functional approach that assumes that volunteering performs six functions for volunteers. Namely, we assume that volunteering (1) creates a sense of protection (2) meets significant cultural values (3) improves professional status of volunteers, (4) strengthens their social relationships, (5) helps them achieve a better understanding of life, and finally, (6) enhances their outlook and self-esteem. The central aim of the study is to discuss these fun

Aim: The reduction in the amount of marginal bone is the most important demand for the long term success of dental implants. This prospective clinical study was aimed to investigate the marginal bone loss of early loaded SLActive implants with different dimensions and surgical approaches. Materials and methods Fifteen patients aged from 18 to 60 years were divided into 2 groups (flapped and flapless approach) that underwent delayed implant placement protocol with SLActive implants. The marginal bone level was estimated by cone-beam computed tomography during three different periods: preoperatively, 8 weeks after surgery and 24 weeks after loading of the prosthesis. Results: The mean value of marginal bone level was not significantly chan

An accurate assessment of the pipes’ conditions is required for effective management of the trunk sewers. In this paper the semi-Markov model was developed and tested using the sewer dataset from the Zublin trunk sewer in Baghdad, Iraq, in order to evaluate the future performance of the sewer. For the development of this model the cumulative waiting time distribution of sewers was used in each condition that was derived directly from the sewer condition class and age data. Results showed that the semi-Markov model was inconsistent with the data by adopting ( 2 test) and also, showed that the error in prediction is due to lack of data on the sewer waiting times at each condition state which can be solved by using successive conditi

Aspect categorisation and its utmost importance in the eld of Aspectbased Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has encouraged researchers to improve topic model performance for modelling the aspects into categories. In general, a majority of its current methods implement parametric models requiring a pre-determined number of topics beforehand. However, this is not e ciently undertaken with unannotated text data as they lack any class label. Therefore, the current work presented a novel non-parametric model drawing a number of topics based on the semantic association present between opinion-targets (i.e., aspects) and their respective expressed sentiments. The model incorporated the Semantic Association Rules (SAR) into the Hierarchical Dirichlet Proce

There has been a growing interest in the use of chaotic techniques for enabling secure communication in recent years. This need has been motivated by the emergence of a number of wireless services which require the channel to provide very low bit error rates (BER) along with information security. This paper investigates the feasibility of using chaotic communications over Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) channels by combining chaos modulation with a suitable Space Time Block Code (STBC). It is well known that the use of Chaotic Modulation techniques can enhance communication security. However, the performance of systems using Chaos modulation has been observed to be inferior in BER performance as compared to conventional communication

This paper presents a new algorithm in an important research field which is the semantic word similarity estimation. A new feature-based algorithm is proposed for measuring the word semantic similarity for the Arabic language. It is a highly systematic language where its words exhibit elegant and rigorous logic. The score of sematic similarity between two Arabic words is calculated as a function of their common and total taxonomical features. An Arabic knowledge source is employed for extracting the taxonomical features as a set of all concepts that subsumed the concepts containing the compared words. The previously developed Arabic word benchmark datasets are used for optimizing and evaluating the proposed algorithm. In this paper,

This paper presents the Extended State Observer (ESO) based repetitive control (RC) for piezoelectric actuator (PEA) based nano-positioning systems. The system stability is proved using Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs), which guarantees the asymptotic stability of the system. The ESObased RC used in this paper has the ability to eliminate periodic disturbances, aperiodic disturbances and model uncertainties. Moreover, ESO can be tuned using only two parameters and the model free approach of ESO-based RC, makes it an ideal solution to overcome the challenges of nano-positioning system control. Different types of periodic and aperiodic disturbances are used in simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm. The comparison studi

The growing interest in the use of chaotic techniques for enabling secure communication in recent years has been motivated by the emergence of a number of wireless services which require the service provider to provide low bit error rates (BER) along with information security. This paper investigates the feasibility of using chaotic communications over Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) channels. While the use of Chaotic maps can enhance security, it is seen that the overall BER performance gets degraded when compared to conventional communication schemes. In order to overcome this limitation, we have proposed the use of a combination of Chaotic modulation and Alamouti Space Time Block Code. The performance of Chaos Shift Keying (CSK) wi