Iraq is highly dependent on international markets to provide food for its residents. As imported food prices are highly dependent on crude oil prices in global markets, any shock in oil prices will have an impact on food consumption in the country. As a result, it is essential to study the demand for imported food at every time period. To the best of our knowledge as researchers, as not even a single study is available in the literature, this paper is considered the first to study the demand for imported food groups in Iraq. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to estimate demand elasticities for several imported food categories in Iraq. This study uses an Almost Ideal Demand System model to analyze the demand for imported f

Maintenance of  hospital buildings and its management are regarded as an important subject which needs attention because hospital buildings are service institutions which are very important to a society, requiring the search for the best procedure to develop maintenance in hospitals. The research is aimed to determine an equation to estimate the annual maintenance cost for public hospital. To achieve this aim, Al-Sader City Hospital maintenance system in Al-Najaf province has been studied with its main elements through survey of data, records and reports relating to maintenance during the years of the study 2008-2014 and to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threat points in the current system through Swat analysi

Human interaction technology based on motion capture (MoCap) systems is a vital tool for human kinematics analysis, with applications in clinical settings, animations, and video games. We introduce a new method for analyzing and estimating dorsal spine movement using a MoCap system. The captured data by the MoCap system are processed and analyzed to estimate the motion kinematics of three primary regions; the shoulders, spine, and hips. This work contributes a non-invasive and anatomically guided framework that enables region-specific analysis of spinal motion which could be used as a clinical alternative to invasive measurement techniques. The hierarchy of our model consists of five main levels; motion capture system settings, marker data

The international system that established the United Nations after the end of the Second World War witnessed many changes. These changes overshadowed the nature of the work of the international organization, especially its first and most important executive organ (the Security Council). This has sometimes weakened and dulled the Security Council's role in performing the tasks stipulated in the Charter of the Organization, which has led the Organization itself to work on reforms within it in general and to seek reforms in the Security Council in particular. Academic and advisory efforts were made to submit proposals for amendment to be reflected on the Council's performance effectiveness.

Portable devices such as smartphones, tablet PCs, and PDAs are a useful combination of hardware and software turned toward the mobile workers. While they present the ability to review documents, communicate via electronic mail,  appointments management, meetings, etc. They usually lack a variety of essential security features. To address the security concerns of sensitive data, many individuals and organizations, knowing the associated threats mitigate them through improving authentication of users, encryption of content, protection from malware, firewalls,  intrusion prevention, etc. However, no standards have been developed yet to determine whether such mobile data management systems adequately provide the fu

It is noted in the title that the paper studies the viewpoint in the novel The Dog and the Long Night by the Iranian novelist Shahranoush Parsi Pour and in the novel Alibaba's Sad Night by the Iraqi novelist Abdulkhaliq Ar-Rikabi. Both are well known novelists, and about whose stories and novels many critical books, MA theses, and Ph.D. dissertations have been written. Also, some of their literary works have won prizes. Here, the researcher shed light on the concept of viewpoint, its types, and its importance in novels in general. This was done along with tackling the two viewpoints in both novels, where similarities and differences were identified. For this end, the researcher has adopted the analytic-descriptive appro

Natural honey is well known for its therapeutic value and has been used in traditional medicine of different cultures throughout the world. The aim of this study was to investigate the anti-inflammatory effect of Malaysian Gelam honey in inflammation-induced rats. Paw edema was induced by a subplantar injection of 1% carrageenan into the rat right hind paw. Rats were treated with the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) Indomethacin (10 mg/kg, p.o.) or Gelam honey at different doses (1 or 2 g/kg, p.o.). The increase in footpad thickness was considered to be edema, which was measured using a dial caliper. Plasma and paw tissue were collected to analyze the production of inflammatory mediators, such as NO, PGE₂

Image retrieval is used in searching for images from images database. In this paper, content – based image retrieval (CBIR) using four feature extraction techniques has been achieved. The four techniques are colored histogram features technique, properties features technique, gray level co- occurrence matrix (GLCM) statistical features technique and hybrid technique. The features are extracted from the data base images and query (test) images in order to find the similarity measure. The similarity-based matching is very important in CBIR, so, three types of similarity measure are used, normalized Mahalanobis distance, Euclidean distance and Manhattan distance. A comparison between them has been implemented. From the results, it is conclud

            Nowadays, it is convenient for us to use a search engine to get our needed information. But sometimes it will misunderstand the information because of the different media reports. The Recommender System (RS) is popular to use for every business since it can provide information for users that will attract more revenues for companies. But also, sometimes the system will recommend unneeded information for users. Because of this, this paper provided an architecture of a recommender system that could base on user-oriented preference. This system is called UOP-RS. To make the UOP-RS significantly, this paper focused on movie theatre information and collect the movie database from the IMDb website that provides informatio

The Braille Recognition System is the process of capturing a Braille document image and turning its content into its equivalent natural language characters. The Braille Recognition System's cell transcription and Braille cell recognition are the two basic phases that follow one another. The Braille Recognition System is a technique for locating and recognizing a Braille document stored as an image, such as a jpeg, jpg, tiff, or gif image, and converting the text into a machine-readable format, such as a text file. BCR translates an image's pixel representation into its character representation. As workers at visually impaired schools and institutes, we profit from Braille recognition in a variety of ways. The Braille Recognition S