The Unheard Voices of Al-Intifadah Al-Shabaaniyah: An Exploration of the 1991 Uprising and America’s Betrayal Through the Testimonies of Iraqi Participants Residing in America

This thesis delves into the often-overlooked 1991 uprising in Iraq, a significant early instance of resistance against Middle Eastern dictatorship. Rooted in the experiences shared within Michigan\u27s Iraqi community. Focusing on southern Iraq, the thesis investigates the catalysts and mechanisms that enabled oppressed individuals under Saddam Hussein\u27s Ba’athist regime to unite and rebel. Through extensive oral history methodologies, this research engages with diverse survivors—mothers, youth, and children—across various southern Iraqi cities. Their narratives unveil the hardships endured before, during, and after the rebellion. Remarkably, despite oppressive conditions and violent impediments, the southern Iraqi populace achieved a formidable mass uprising. This accomplishment, however, was overshadowed by the conspicuous absence of support from the United States. This lack of intervention facilitated the dictatorship\u27s prolonged grasp for twelve more years, leading to grievous loss of innocent lives, human rights violations, and civilians confronting Saddam\u27s brutal rule unaided. The aftermath of Saddam\u27s retaliatory assault resulted in an estimated 30,000 to 60,000 civilian casualties in the South. The survivors of this tumultuous event carry lasting scars—PTSD, depression, and anxiety—echoing the trauma they endured. This thesis endeavors to illuminate this uprising\u27s significance by amplifying the voices of its survivors. By listening to these accounts, it seeks to provide a comprehensive perspective on the events, shedding light on a pivotal historical moment that profoundly impacted the lives of those involved

Behaviour of Self-Compacting Concrete Columns Reinforced Longitudinally with Steel Tubes

Performance of concrete columns has been significantly improved by using composite material systems such as encased sections and concrete filled steel tubes. Different combinations of encased sections and steel sections have been widely studied. Steel sections and concrete have been used to construct composite columns with different cross-sections. The composite columns are usually constructed of normal vibrated concrete. Recently, self-compacting concrete (SCC) is also used in the construction of the composite columns. The synergies between steel and SCC in composite columns provide better performance in terms of high strength, stiffness, ductility, as well as fire and seismic resistance. This study proposes two innovative concepts: a new method to determine the stress-strain behaviour of SCC under direct uniaxial tension and a new method of reinforcing SCC columns by using longitudinal small-diameter steel tubes instead of reinforcing steel bars. For the stress-strain behaviour of SCC under direct uniaxial tension, special steel claws were designed, built and installed at both ends of 100 × 100 × 500 mm SCC specimens. These claws were used to transfer the applied tensile forces to the specimens. The crosssection of the specimens was reduced in the middle to ensure that failure would occur in the middle of the specimen. The test results showed that there was no slippage or fracture at the ends of any of the tested specimens. Also, the failure occurred in the middle of specimens, as expected. The direct tensile testing method developed in this study was also used for different types of concrete including normal strength concrete (NSC), high-strength concrete (HSC) and steel fibre reinforced high-strength concrete (SFHSC). The developed method provided rational and reliable results for the direct tensile strength of the SCC, NSC, HSC and SFHSC using a simple and effective testing technique

Half Gaussian-based wavelet transform for pooling layer for convolution neural network

Pooling methods are used to select most significant features to be aggregated to small region. In this paper, anew pooling method is proposed based on probability function. Depending on the fact that, most information is concentrated from mean of the signal to its maximum values, upper half of Gaussian function is used to determine weights of the basic signal statistics, which is used to determine the transform of the original signal into more concise formula, which can represent signal features, this method named half gaussian transform (HGT). Based on strategy of transform computation, Three methods are proposed, the first method (HGT1) is used basic statistics after normalized it as weights to be multiplied by original signal, second method (HGT2) is used determined statistics as features of the original signal and multiply it with constant weights based on half Gaussian, while the third method (HGT3) is worked in similar to (HGT1) except, it depend on entire signal. The proposed methods are applied on three databases, which are (MNIST, CIFAR10 and MIT-BIH ECG) database. The experimental results show that, our methods are achieved good improvement, which is outperformed standard pooling methods such as max pooling and average pooling

Seasonal Pattern of Acute Appendicitis in Basrah

Background: appendicitis is the most common acute surgical condition of the abdomen.Aim: The aim of the project is to study the seasonal variation in the incidence of acute appendicitis in Basrah and its correlation to gender, age, presentation and length of hospital stay of affected patients. Material and methods: Patients with acute appendicitis who admitted to the surgical unit in Basrah General hospital during the period from January 2010 to December 2013 were prospectively evaluated according to the demographic features, particularly age and sex, length of hospital stay, seasonal variation and the postoperative outcome.Results: out of 1261 patients included in the study (57%) patients were males and (43%) of patient were females with age range from 3-70 years. All the patients treated surgically by open and laparoscopic means. 34 patients found to have perforated appendix, 25 patients presented with abdominal mass and 7 patients were presented with appendicular abscess. A significant seasonal effect was observed, with the rate of acute appendicitis being higher in the summer months.Conclusion: Appendicitis is more common in males, in those aged 10-19years, and during the summer month

Stractural Behavior of Reinforced Concrete Corbel Using High-Strength Materials under Monotonic and Repeated Loads

The growth of Development techniques for high strength materials and precast structures leads to increase the interesting on these technics. This study will focus on the corbels which made from high strength materials (Reactive Powder Concrete materials) which including  the testing of (15 samples) and their cost, twelve of them were testing under a vertical monotonic load, while the other sample putted under the effect of repeated load. As well as, the samples divided to various groups according to many variable parameters which are (ratio of steel fiber, (a/d) ratio, existing the secondary stirrups steel, type of loading). Thus, these parameters effected on the ultimate shear strength, first crack loading, ultimate deflection, load-deflection curves, ductility and stiffness

Influence of Molecular Weight and Degree of Deacetylation of Low Molecular Weight Chitosan on the Bioactivity of Oral Insulin Preparations

The objective of the present study was to prepare and characterize low molecular weight chitosan (LMWC) with different molecular weight and degrees of deacetylation (DDA) and to optimize their use in oral insulin nano delivery systems. Water in oil nanosized systems containing LMWC-insulin polyelectrolyte complexes were constructed and their ability to reduce blood glucose was assessed in vivo on diabetic rats. Upon acid depolymerization and testing by viscosity method, three molecular weights of LMWC namely, 1.3, 13 and 18 kDa were obtained. As for the DDA, three LMWCs of 55%, 80% and 100% DDA were prepared and characterized by spectroscopic methods for each molecular weight. The obtained LMWCs showed different morphological and in silico patterns. Following complexation of LMWCs with insulin, different aggregation sizes were obtained. Moreover, the in vivo tested formulations showed different activities of blood glucose reduction. The highest glucose reduction was achieved with 1.3 kDa LMWC of 55% DDA. The current study emphasizes the importance of optimizing the molecular weight along with the DDA of the incorporated LMWC in oral insulin delivery preparations in order to ensure the highest performance of such delivery systems

Investigation of engineering properties of normal and high strength fly ash based geopolymer and alkali-activated slag concrete compared to ordinary Portland cement concrete

Fly ash-based geopolymer (FAGP) and alkali-activated slag (AAS) concrete are produced by mixing alkaline solutions with aluminosilicate materials. As the FAGP and AAS concrete are free of Portland cement, they have a low carbon footprint and consume low energy during the production process. This paper compares the engineering properties of normal strength and high strength FAGP and AAS concrete with OPC concrete. The engineering properties considered in this study included workability, dry density, ultrasonic pulse velocity (UPV), compressive strength, indirect tensile strength, flexural strength, direct tensile strength, and stress-strain behaviour in compression and direct tension. Microstructural observations using scanning electronic microscopy (SEM) are also presented. It was found that the dry density and UPV of FAGP and AAS concrete were lower than those of OPC concrete of similar compressive strength. The tensile strength of FAGP and AAS concrete was comparable to the tensile strength of OPC concrete when the compressive strength of the concrete was about 35 MPa (normal strength concrete). However, the tensile strength of FAGP and AAS concrete was higher than the tensile strength of OPC concrete when the compressive strength of concrete was about 65 MPa (high strength concrete). The modulus of elasticity of FAGP and AAS concrete in compression and direct tension was lower than the modulus of elasticity of OPC concrete of similar compressive strength. The SEM results indicated that the microstructures of FAGP and AAS concrete were more compact and homogeneous than the microstructures of OPC concrete at 7 days, but less compact and homogeneous than the microstructures of OPC concrete at 28 days for the concrete of similar compressive strength

Identification d'appareils photos par apprentissage

Source camera identification has recently received a wide attention due to its importantrole in security and legal issue. The problem of establishing the origin ofdigital media obtained through an imaging device is important whenever digitalcontent is presented and is used as evidence in the court. Source camera identification is the process of determining which camera device or model has been used to capture an image.Our first contribution for digital camera model identification is based on the extractionof three sets of features in a machine learning scheme. These featuresare the co-occurrences matrix, some features related to CFA interpolation arrangement,and conditional probability statistics computed in the JPEG domain.These features give high order statistics which supplement and enhance the identification rate. The experiments prove the strength of our proposition since it achieves higher accuracy than the correlation-based method.The second contribution is based on using the deep convolutional neural networks(CNNs). Unlike traditional methods, CNNs can automatically and simultaneouslyextract features and learn to classify during the learning process. A layer ofpreprocessing is added to the CNN model, and consists of a high pass filter which isapplied to the input image. The obtained CNN gives very good performance for avery small learning complexity. Experimental comparison with a classical two stepsmachine learning approach shows that the proposed method can achieve significantdetection performance. The well known object recognition CNN models, AlexNetand GoogleNet, are also examined.L'identification d'appareils photos a récemment fait l'objet d'une grande attention en raison de son apport en terme sécurité et juridique. Établir l'origine d'un médias numériques, obtenus par un appareil d'imagerie est important à chaque fois que le contenu numériques est présente et utilise comme preuve devant un tribunal.L'identification d'appareils photos consiste à déterminer la marque, le modèle, ou le dispositif qui a été utilisé pour prendre une image.Notre première contribution pour l'identification du modèle d'appareil photo numérique est basée sur l'extraction de trois ensembles de caractéristiques puis l'utilisation d'apprentissage automatique. Ces caractéristiques sont la matrice de cooccurrences,des corrélations inter-canaux mesurant la trace laissée par l'interpolation CFA, et les probabilités conditionnelles calculées dans le domaine JPEG. Ces caractéristiques donnent des statistiques d'ordre élevées qui complètent et améliorent le taux d'identification. Les expériences prouvent la force de notre proposition, car la précision obtenue est supérieure à celle des méthodes basées sur la corrélation.La deuxième contribution est basée sur l'utilisation des CNNs. Contrairement aux méthodes traditionnelles, les CNNs apprennent simultanément les caractéristiques et la classification. Nous proposons d'ajouter une couche de pré-traitement (filtre passe-haut applique à l'image d’entrée) au CNN. Le CNN obtenu donne de très bonnes performances pour une faible complexité d'apprentissage. La méthode proposée donne des résultats équivalent à ceux obtenu par une approche en deux étapes (extraction de caractéristiques + SVM). Par ailleurs nous avons également examines les CNNs : AlexNet et GoogleNet. GoogleNet donne actuellement les meilleurs taux d'identification pour une complexité d'apprentissage plus grand

Axial Load-Axial Deformation Behaviour of SCC Columns Reinforced with Steel Tubes

A simplified analytical model has been developed for the axial load-axial deformation behaviour of self-compacting concrete (SCC) columns reinforced with steel tubes. The developed analytical model takes into account the contribution of the steel tubes, unconfined concrete cover, confined concrete core and confined concrete inside the steel tube. The results of the analytical model have been compared with experimental results of four SCC column specimens. The results of the analytical model are in good agreement with the experimental results. A parametric study has been conducted to investigate the influences of the compressive strength of SCC, tensile strength of steel tube, wall thickness of steel tube and pitch of steel helix on the axial load-axial deformation behaviour of SCC columns reinforced with steel tubes. The ductility of SCC columns has been found to be significantly influenced by the increase in the compressive strength of SCC and the pitch of steel helix