Haruki Murakami (1949-present) is a contemporary Japanese writer whose works have been translated into fifty languages and won him plenty of Japanese and international awards. His short stories are well constructed in a weird realistic manner and are mixed with elements of surrealism. His novels and short stories fall under the genre of magical realism. One of the major revolving themes that Murakami wrote about was the haunting feeling of emptiness and disconnectedness in a world which seems to care much for materialism and self-interests.

    The paper explores two of Murakami’s short stories in his book After the Quake (2000) and the relevance of their themes and characters to Iraq after the q

The housing sector in Iraq has suffered from multiple problems, the most prominent of which is the failure of the housing market to achieve housing production that faces population increases and a high number of households.

The research aims to foresight the future of the housing sector,  and to identify the expectations of experts in the development of the housing sector and housing production, in order to overcome the obstacles and problems.

Foresight does not mean forecasting about future events, but rather it is a process and skill aimed at familiarity with providing sufficient knowledge to achieve the desired future goals, Accordingly, adopting a method of future foresight will reduce error,  surprise and s

The aim of this research is to know the effect of two strategies of active learning, the five fingers and traffic signals, on the first grade intermediate level student's achievement and personal intelligence. The research sample was chosen from the Al- Mansour intermediate school for boys, including (101) students divided into three groups chosen randomly which represented the first experimental group (32) students, the second experimental group (34) students, and the control group (33) students. To achieve the research aims, the research prepared a physics achievement test containing (26) items, and a personal intelligence test containing (20) items. The psychometric characteristics, of the tests were checked up the following results were

This study aims to explain the purposes of thinking in light of the Holy Qur’an. The study adopted the deductive method by analyzing the meanings of the eighteen thinking verses mentioned in the Holy Qur’an That is by referring to the ancient and contemporary book interpretations and inferring the purposes of thinking from the context of those verses. The study concluded that there are seven main purposes, for thinking in the light of the Holy Qur’an, are understanding the universal regulations, contemplating the social codes, inferring, extracting maxims and meanings from the Qur’anic proverbs, analyzing the situation objectively, balancing between interests and evils, and freeing the mind from the authority of the paranormal. T

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of a Cognitive- Behavioral Training Program in reducing Problems Solving among a sample of education university  College Students, the study sample consisted of (50) students were randomly assigned to two groups: experimental, and control; (25) students per group, the results of (ANOVA) revealed that there were significant differences at (p < 0.05) between experimental and control group in Problems Solving level, while there were significant differences between both groups in achievement. The researchers recommended further studies on the other variables which after training students on the method of solving problems and techniques to reduce stress.<

This research aims to identify the role and impact of illustrations in contemporary fashion design inspired by historical costumes. Historical fashion aesthetics are adapted to design drawings. The experimental method was followed and a sample of 31 students in the department of fashion and textile design, third level were selected. Each student carried out two original historical and contemporary design. The models were executed two times: one with the usage of the program and the other without program help. The tools that were used are the program, the scale, the pre-skill test, and the post-skill test. One of the most relevant results of the research is the possibility of using historical costumes to highlight creativity and innovatio

The research problem lies in identifying the challenges facing spreading the culture of peace in Iraq, and the most important factors of its instability from the point of view of leaders and intellectual elites.The research derives its importance from the fact that the peace imposed by justice leads to a stable Iraq and a prosperous future.

The study aims to identify the most prominent challenges and obstacles created by wars and faced the process of spreading the culture of peace and instability in Iraq, and to shed light on the reasons leading to the employment of the capabilities of community leaders in spreading the culture of peace.The objective of the current research is to identify the challenges of spreading the culture o

      The problem of multi assembly line balancing appears as one of the most prominent and complex type of problem. The research problem of this dissertation is concerned with choosing the suitable method that includes the nature of the processes of the multi assembly type of the sewing line at factory no. (7). The State Company for Leather Manufacturing. The sewing line currently suffers from idle times at work stations which resulted in low production levels that do not meet the production plans. The authors have devised a flexible simulation model which uses the uniform distribution to generate task time for each shoe type produced by the factory. The simulation of the multi assembly line was based on assigni

Background: Relapse of previously moved teeth, is major clinical problem in orthodontics with respect to the goals of successful treatment. This study investigated the effect of orthodontic relapse on the proliferation of fibroblast and epithelial rests of Malassez cells in periodontal ligament of rat molars. Materials and Methods: Sixteen ten-week- old male Wister rats were randomly divided into four groups composed of four animals each: Group I received no orthodontic force (control). In both Group II and Group III, uniform standardized expansive springs were used for moving the maxillary first molars buccally for periods of one and three weeks respectively. The spring initially generated an average expansive force of 20 g on each side.

The present study investigates the relation between the biliteral and triliteral roots which is the introduction to comprehend the nature of the Semitic roots during its early stage of development being unconfirmed to a single pattern. The present research is not meant to decide on the question of the biliteral roots in the Semitic languages, rather it is meant to confirm the predominance of the triliteral roots on these languages which refers, partially, to analogy adopted by the majority of linguists. This tendency is frequently seen in the languages which incline to over generalize the triliteral phenomenon, i. e., to transfer the biliteral roots to the triliteral room, that is, to subject it to the predominant pattern regarding the r