La gestión de activos intangibles y su papel en la mejora del rendimiento financiero y la creación de valor, estudio analítico de una muestra de bancos privados iraquíes

The study aims to study the role of intangible assets in the banking sector using mixed methods. A quantitative approach was adopted to test the relationships between the various intangible elements and between them and the banking performance and value creation of a sample of seven private sector banks for the period from 2014 to 2016. The research problem focuses on the contribution of intangible assets (Al) in financial performance and value creation, The research is based on the hypothesis that there is no relationship between the variables of intangible assets and the performance and value creation in the sample banks. The empirical results indicate that human capital in senior management has a positive impact on customer relations or financial performance and creation. Value for the bank and A theoretical model based on intangible foundations have been developed, which reveals how intangible materials and physical/financial resources interact in the process of establishing bank value. The study reached a number of recommendations, the most important of which is that banks should draw their attention to the conformity of intangible indicators with the Bank’s strategy and performance by offering suggestions to improve the measurement of intangible assets in financial institutions and the need to understand the importance of intangible assets through its various components in influencing activities.El objetivo del estudio es estudiar el papel de los activos intangibles en el sector bancario utilizando métodos mixtos. Se adoptó un enfoque cuantitativo para probar las relaciones entre los diversos elementos intangibles y entre ellos y el desempeño bancario y la creación de valor de una muestra de siete bancos del sector privado para el período de 2014 a 2016. El problema de la investigación se centra en la contribución de los activos intangibles (Al) en el desempeño financiero y la creación de valor. La investigación se basa en la hipótesis de que no existe una relación entre las variables de activos intangibles y el desempeño y la creación de valor en los bancos de muestra. Los resultados empíricos indican que el capital humano en la alta gerencia tiene un impacto positivo en las relaciones con los clientes o en el desempeño y creación financieros. Se ha desarrollado un valor para el banco y un modelo teórico basado en fundamentos intangibles, que revela cómo los materiales intangibles y los recursos físicos / financieros interactúan en el proceso de establecer el valor bancario. El estudio llegó a una serie de recomendaciones, la más importante de las cuales es que los bancos deberían llamar su atención sobre la conformidad de los indicadores intangibles con la estrategia y el desempeño del Banco, ofreciendo sugerencias para mejorar la medición de los activos intangibles en las instituciones financieras y la necesidad de comprenderlos. La importancia de los activos intangibles a través de sus diversos componentes para influir en las actividades

The Role of Transformational Leadership for Human Resource Managers in Training and Development

Purpose: The aim of this study is to examine the subject of transformational leadership, one of the important modern topics in the management of business organizations, because of its importance in making important decisions related to activities and jobs, and this requires the availability of human resources with high skills and efficiency and has the ability to assume responsibility.   Theoretical framework: Recent literature mentioned that there are many leadership styles, the most prominent of which is transformational leadership. The purpose of the theoretical framework is to identify this style with its dimensions and variables, as well as to identify all dimensions and variables of training.   Design/methodology/approach: A community and a research sample were selected from (40) individuals in the Department of Special Education, and the questionnaire was used as the main tool to obtain data.   Findings: One of the most important conclusions of the research is that there is a strong relationship and influence of transformational leadership in the training process and in all dimensions except for the empowerment of workers and materials.   Research, Practical & Social implications: By understanding the dimensions of the research, it is possible to increase confidence between the employees, the management and the trained workers in it, in addition to preparing a catalogue that identifies the materials that will be trained on.   Value: The value of the study is concentrated on adding some knowledge to leaders, practitioners and administrators, transformational leadership and the training process

Computer-aided categorisation and quantification of connectives in English and Arabic (based on newspaper text corpora).

This study presents a detailed contrastive description of the textual functioning of connectives in English and Arabic. Particular emphasis is placed on the organisational force of connectives and their role in sustaining cohesion. The description is intended as a contribution for a better understanding of the variations in the dominant tendencies for text organisation in each language. The findings are expected to be utilised for pedagogical purposes, particularly in improving EFL teaching of writing at the undergraduate level. The study is based on an empirical investigation of the phenomenon of connectivity and, for optimal efficiency, employs computer-aided procedures, particularly those adopted in corpus linguistics, for investigatory purposes. One important methodological requirement is the establishment of two comparable and statistically adequate corpora, also the design of software and the use of existing packages and to achieve the basic analysis. Each corpus comprises ca 250,000 words of newspaper material sampled in accordance to a specific set of criteria and assembled in machine readable form prior to the computer-assisted analysis. A suite of programmes have been written in SPITBOL to accomplish a variety of analytical tasks, and in particular to perform a battery of measurements intended to quantify the textual functioning of connectives in each corpus. Concordances and some word lists are produced by using OCP. Results of these researches confirm the existence of fundamental differences in text organisation in Arabic in comparison to English. This manifests itself in the way textual operations of grouping and sequencing are performed and in the intensity of the textual role of connectives in imposing linearity and continuity and in maintaining overall stability. Furthermore, computation of connective functionality and range of operationality has identified fundamental differences in the way favourable choices for text organisation are made and implemented

The Effect of High Pressures and High Temperatures on the Properties of Water Based Drilling Fluids

Tremendous amounts of hydrocarbons are located in deeper formations where higher pressures and temperatures are experienced. Designing a proper drilling fluid that can tolerate such high-pressure, high-temperature (HP/HT) conditions is a challenging task. The work presented in this paper is focused on investigating the rheological behavior of water-based drilling fluids with different properties at extremely high pressure and temperature conditions using a state-of-the-art viscometer capable of measuring drilling fluids properties up to 600 °F and 40,000 psig. The results of this study show that the viscosity, yield point and gel strength decrease exponentially with increasing temperature until the mud samples fail. This behavior is the result of the thermal degradation of the solid, polymers, and other components of the mud samples. Increase in intermolecular distances due to high temperature will lower the resistance of the fluid to flow and, hence, its viscosity, yield point, and gel strength will reduce. Moreover, conducting this study led to the conclusion that viscosity, yield point, and gel strength increase linearly as the pressure increase. Pressure’s effect on these parameters, however, is more apparent at lower temperatures. Ultimately, the study concluded that the mud samples that were used, which are standard industrial types, failed at a temperature of 250 oF and that the combined effect of temperature and pressure on mud’s rheology is complex.Key words: Drilling fluids; HPHT; Rheology; Water based mu

The Influence Of Equal Channel Angular Pressing Angles On The Microstructure And Properties Of Al-Si-Mg Alloy [TA483. J91 2006 f rb].

Penyelidikan ini bertujuan untuk meningkatkan sifat-sifat fizikal dan mekanikal aloi Al-Si-Mg melalui penghalusan struktur ira yang dihasilkan oleh kecacatan plastik lampau. The aim of this research is to improve the physical and mechanical properties of Al-Si-Mg alloy by grain structure refinement produced by severe plastic deformation through equal channel angular pressing (ECAP)

Local learning for multi-layer, multi-component predictive system

This study introduces a new multi-layer multi-component ensemble. The components of this ensemble are trained locally on subsets of features for disjoint sets of data. The data instances are assigned to local regions using the similarity of their features pairwise squared correlation. Many ensemble methods encourage diversity among their base predictors by training them on different subsets of data or different subsets of features. In the proposed architecture the local regions contain disjoint sets of data and for this data only the most similar features are selected. The pairwise squared correlations of the features are used to weight the predictions of the ensemble's models. The proposed architecture has been tested on a number of data sets and its performance was compared to five benchmark algorithms. The results showed that the testing accuracy of the developed architecture is comparable to the rotation forest and is better than the other benchmark algorithms

Growth, reproduction and food habit of an invasive species of Carassius auratus in the Al-Diwaniya River, Middle of Iraq

Carassius auratus is an invasive species that has successfully established populations throughout Iraq. Unfortunately there is no information available regarding the biological properties of the species in Al-Diwaniya River, Middle Euphrates, Iraq. So growth, reproduction and food habit of C. auratus were investigated in this river from November 2016 to October 2017. Length groups of the fishes from 19 to 21cm were prevailing the catch and formed 30.8%. Length-weight relationship was calculated as W= 0.013L 3.129 for all individuals, with allometric growth. The condition of the fish increased in early spring. The maximum age recorded was 5 years with 30.1 cm. The parameters to the von Bertalanffy growth curve fitted to mean total lengths at age were L?= 43.0, K= 0.225 and to= - 0.412. The index of growth performance (?) was 2.612. The unbalanced overall ratio of males to females was 1:3.81. Higher values of gonado-somatic index (GSI) for males and females occurred in early spring. C. auratus is an herbivorous, with a diet that includes algae (52.6%), macrophytes (22.0%), diatoms (15.8%), crustacean (4.8%) and aquatic insects (4.8%). Our results highlighted basic biological aspects of the invasive C. auratus which can assist in fisheries management and conservation of the fish species in Al-Diwaniya river.&nbsp

Comparative Study of Using Oil-Based Mud Versus Water-Based Mud in HPHT Fields

Growing demand for oil and gas is driving the exploration and production industry to look for new resources in un-explored areas, and in deeper formations. According to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, former Minerals Management Service (MMS), over 50% of proven oil and gas reserves in the United States lie below 14,000 ft. subsea. In the Gulf of Mexico some wells were drilled at 27,000 ft below seabed with reservoir temperatures above 400 °F and reservoir pressures of 24,500 psi. As we drill into deeper formations we will experience higher pressures and temperatures.Drilling into deeper formation requires drilling fluids that withstand higher temperatures and pressures. The combined pressure-temperature effect on drilling fluid’s rheology is complex. This provides a wide range of difficult challenges and mechanical issues. This can have negative impact on rheological properties when exposed to high pressure high temperature (HPHT) condition and contaminated with other minerals, which are common in deep drilling. High Pressure and High Temperature (HPHT) wells have bottom hole temperatures of 300 °F (150 °C) and bottom hole pressures of 10,000 psi (69 MPa) or higher.Water-Based mud (WBM) and Oil-Based mud (OBM) are the most common drilling fluids currently used and both have several characteristics that qualify them for HPHT purposes. This paper compares the different characteristics of WBM and OBM to help decide the most suitable mud type for HPHT drilling by considering mud properties through several laboratory tests to generate some engineering guidelines. The tests were formulated at temperatures from 100 °F up to 600 °F and pressures from 5,000 psi to 25,000 psi. The comparison will mainly consider the rheological properties of the two mud types of mud and will also take into account the environmental feasibility of using them. Key words: Oil-based mud; Water-based mud; HPHT field

Multi evidence fusion scheme for content-based image retrieval by clustering localised colour and texture features

Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is an automatic process of retrieving images according to their visual content. Research in this field mainly follows two directions. The first is concerned with the effectiveness in describing the visual content of images (i.e. features) by a technique that lead to discern similar and dissimilar images, and ultimately the retrieval of the most relevant images to the query image. The second direction focuses on retrieval efficiency by deploying efficient structures in organising images by their features in the database to narrow down the search space. The emphasis of this research is mainly on the effectiveness rather than the efficiency. There are two types of visual content features. The global feature represents the entire image by a single vector, and hence retrieval by using the global feature is more efficient but often less accurate. On the other hand, the local feature represents the image by a set of vectors, capturing localised visual variations in different parts of an image, promising better results particularly for images with complicated scenes. The first main purpose of this thesis is to study different types of local features. We explore a range of different types of local features from both frequency and spatial domains. Because of the large number of local features generated from an image, clustering methods are used for quantizing and summarising the feature vectors into segments from which a representation of the visual content of the entire image is derived. Since each clustering method has a different way of working and requires settings of different input parameters (e.g. number of clusters), preparations of input data (i.e. normalized or not) and choice of similarity measures, varied performance outcomes by different clustering methods in segmenting the local features are anticipated. We therefore also intend to study and analyse one commonly used clustering algorithm from each of the four main categories of clustering methods, i.e. K-means (partition-based), EM/GMM (model-based), Normalized Laplacian Spectral (graph-based), and Mean Shift (density-based). These algorithms were investigated in two scenarios when the number of clusters is either fixed or adaptively determined. Performances of the clustering algorithms in terms of image classification and retrieval are evaluated using three publically available image databases. The evaluations have revealed that a local DCT colour-texture feature was overall the best due to its robust integration of colour and texture information. In addition, our investigation into the behaviour of different clustering algorithms has shown that each algorithm had its own strengths and limitations in segmenting local features that affect the performance of image retrieval due to variations in visual colour and texture of the images. There is no algorithm that can outperform the others using either an adaptively determined or big fixed number of clusters. The second focus of this research is to investigate how to combine the positive effects of various local features obtained from different clustering algorithms in a fusion scheme aiming to bring about improved retrieval results over those by using a single clustering algorithm. The proposed fusion scheme integrates effectively the information from different sources, increasing the overall accuracy of retrieval. The proposed multi-evidence fusion scheme regards scores of image retrieval that are obtained from normalizing distances of applying different clustering algorithms to different types of local features as evidence and was presented in three forms: 1) evidence fusion using fixed weights (MEFS) where the weights were determined empirically and fixed a prior; 2) evidence fusion based on adaptive weights (AMEFS) where the fusion weights were adaptively determined using linear regression; 3) evidence fusion using a linear combination (Comb SUM) without weighting the evidences. Overall, all three versions of the multi-evidence fusion scheme have proved the ability to enhance the accuracy of image retrieval by increasing the number of relevant images in the ranked list. However, the improvement varied across different feature-clustering combinations (i.e. image representation) and the image databases used for the evaluation. This thesis presents an automatic method of image retrieval that can deal with natural world scenes by applying different clustering algorithms to different local features. The method achieves good accuracies of 85% at Top 5 and 80% at Top 10 over the WANG database, which are better when compared to a number of other well-known solutions in the literature. At the same time, the knowledge gained from this research, such as the effects of different types of local features and clustering methods on the retrieval results, enriches the understanding of the field and can be beneficial for the CBIR community

Ambivalent colonal relations in octavia butler’s wild seed

This article explores postcolonial powers of ambivalence in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed (1980). It will offer an in-depth analysis of the thematic and ideological characteristics of selected work. We will mainly focus on the theme of the mutual relationship between the colonized and the colonizer in the novel. This relationship is specified to the concept of ambivalence that incarnates the dual, yet, uncontrolled relationship between the colonized and the colonizer. Nevertheless, the colonized considers the colonizer as oppressive but an envious power; and the colonizer judges the colonized as inferior but indigenous. The colonial relationship will also be revealed by using the concept of self-other. Such concept scrutinizes the way the colonized and the colonizer perceive and resist each other. Thus, the study’s main focus point is the power relationship developed in the light of colonial ambivalence and self-other continuum. The colonial characteristics of this study offer a new interpretation of the colonial relationship depicted in the novel. Accordingly, the ambivalent relationship between the colonized and the colonizer will be equal (i.e. both of them have positive and negative attributes). This interpretation paves the way for other discourse studies interested in the depiction of the colonized and the colonizer relationship in postcolonial literature in general, and in Butler’s fiction in particular