The Incidence of Postpartum Metritis and Retained Placenta in Cattle and Buffalo Cows in some Villages Around Baghdad

This survey aimed to investigate the incidence rate of some reproductive problems especially retained placenta and metritis in cattle and buffalo cows to design appropriate manners for correction and treatment of such disorders of those two important animals in Iraq. A field survey was carried out on 257 cattle cows during 2011 and 290 during 2012 and 383 local water buffalo cows (Bubalus bubalis), during 2011 and 404 during 2012 in some villages around Baghdad (Al-Fudalia, 7 Nisan and Basmaia) where animals were reared. A complete data about case history, owner complains, clinical examinations for reproductive status, were documented by private clinics during 2011 - 2012. Results revealed that retained placenta percentage in cattle was 12.84, 12.41% during 2011, 2012 respectively, whereas it was 12.53, 12.62% during 2011, 2012 respectively in buffalo cows, in the case of uterine infections percentages, buffalo exhibited the highest percentages (40.46,37.87 %) during 2011, 2012 respectively in the comparison with cattle which showed 35.40, 35.17 % during 2011,2012 respectively. Highly significant differences (p ≤ 0.01) between species were observed yearly and during some months during the years of study. We concluded that management programs differences and environmental changes may lead to monthly and yearly differences in reproductive disorders capability

Critical review and methodological issues in integrated life-cycle analysis on road networks

Life-cycle management of road network projects traditionally emphasise material production and construction stages, with less attention given to usage stage and functionality improvement. Increasingly there is a need to address: inconsistencies in cost attribute selection; adjusting for uncertainties and costs; clarifying system boundaries; data sources; functional units and regional or temporal applicability of life-cycle frameworks. The current study focuses on a critical literature review of life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) and life-cycle assessment (LCA) research published in the last decade (post 2008) towards identification of research gaps. Accurately analysing all life-cycle stages, feedback loops, future cash and resource flows, and interlinking performance with overall sustainability can aid the decision-making process towards sustainable alternatives for constructing new, or rehabilitating existing roads. This review finds that the use of recycled materials, base/sub-base stabilisers and asphalt binder replacement has the potential of energy saving (=34% or 3.1 TJ), mitigating landfill disposal issues, and greenhouse gas load reduction (=34.5% CDE). Lack of real world LCCA-LCA application and stakeholder prejudice against recycled material usage are addressable by better stakeholder (decision-makers and road users) engagement via a social component. The proposed enhancements identified in this study can increase LCA/LCCA attraction to policy-makers, planners and users and ultimately ensure a more sustainable asset

Life-cycle asset management in residential developments building on transport system critical attributes via a data-mining algorithm

Public transport can discourage individual car usage as a life-cycle asset management strategy towards carbon neutrality. An effective public transport system contributes greatly to the wider goal of a sustainable built environment, provided the critical transit system attributes are measured and addressed to (continue to) improve commuter uptake of public systems by residents living and working in local communities. Travel data from intra-city travellers can advise discrete policy recommendations based on a residential area or development's public transport demand. Commuter segments related to travelling frequency, satisfaction from service level, and its value for money are evaluated to extract econometric models/association rules. A data mining algorithm with minimum confidence, support, interest, syntactic constraints and meaningfulness measure as inputs is designed to exploit a large set of 31 variables collected for 1,520 respondents, generating 72 models. This methodology presents an alternative to multivariate analyses to find correlations in bigger databases of categorical variables. Results here augment literature by highlighting traveller perceptions related to frequency of buses, journey time, and capacity, as a net positive effect of frequent buses operating on rapid transit routes. Policymakers can address public transport uptake through service frequency variation during peak-hours with resultant reduced car dependence apt to reduce induced life-cycle environmental burdens of buildings by altering residents' mode choices, and a potential design change of buildings towards a public transit-based, compact, and shared space urban built environment

USING SYSTEM EXECUTION EXECTION TRACES TO ANALYZE PERFORMANCE PROPERTIES OF SOFTWARE SYSTEMS

poster abstractSystem execution traces (execution logs) are traditionally used to evalu-ate functional properties of a software system. Prior research, however, has shown the usefulness of system execution traces in evaluating software sys-tem performance properties. Due to the complexity and verboseness of a system execution trace, however, higher-level abstractions, e.g., dataflow models are required to support such evaluation. Our current research effort therefore has focused on extending this dataflow model based system per-formance analysis in two folds. In one aspect, we have considered adapting the dataflow model when the system execution trace does not contain prop-erties required to support performance analysis. In the other aspect, we have developed techniques to auto-generate the supporting dataflow model from a system execution trace. The second aspect is critical because it is hard to manually craft a dataflow model for large and complex software sys-tems, especially distributed software systems. The tool and technique we developed for adapting the dataflow model is called System Execution Trace Adaptation Framework (SETAF); whereas, the tool and technique for auto-generating the dataflow model from a system execution trace is called Dataflow Model Auto Constructor (DMAC). Our cur-rent results from applying SETAF to several open-source production software applications show that there are 3 main patterns for adapting system execu-tion traces to support performance analysis if they do not already have the required properties. Likewise, our current results from applying DMAC to the same software applications show that DMAC is able to auto-construct a data-flow model that covers up to 95% of the originating system execution trace. This work was sponsored in part by the Australian Defense Science and Technology Organi-zation (DSTO

Adaptive Indexing of Documents Using Genetic Algorithms and Relevance Feedback

مقدمة: في هذه الورقة، تم البحث في مشكلة استرجاع الوثائق الصحيحة التي تحقق رغبات المستخدم. الهدف الرئيسي في أنظمة استرجاع المعلومات هو استرداد جميع الوثائق ذات الصلة فقط. طرق العمل: تم استخدام الخوارزمية الجينية لتحقيق هذا الهدف. أوصاف المستندات تم تكييفها وتغييرها باستخدام الخوارزمية الجينية، اعتمادًا على الأحكام التي اطلقها المستخدم (والتي تم جمعها والاحتفاظ بها) حول اهمية المستندات بالنسبة له. الخوارزمية الجينية هي أداة قوية تعتمد على مبادئ الداروينية وتقنيات التطور للبحث في فضاءات البحث المعقدة. يسهل استخدام الخوارزمية الجينية تكييف فهارس المستندات. تم تنفيذ ثلاثة طرق في الانتخاب: نمذجة عجلة الروليت ، ونمذجة عجلة الروليت مع النخبة والنمذجة الشاملة التصادفية. يتم حساب دالة الصلاحية باستخدام معامل Jaccard الذي يقيس التقارب بين الاستعلام وفهرس المستند. الاستنتاجات: توجد بين الكلمات المفتاحية المستخدمة لوصف محتوى الوثائق اعتماديات إحصائية. من الصعب استيعاب هذه الاعتماديات في نظام الاسترجاع. يمكن للخوارزمية الجينية أن تأخذ في الاعتبار هذه الاعتماديات أثناء عملها. وفقًا لنظرية المخطط وفرضية حجر البناء [10] ، يتم نشر المخططات الأكثر صلاحية من جيل إلى جيل ، حيث يتم أخذ عينات منها وإعادة تجميعها وتحويلها وإعادة تشكيلها لتشكيل سلاسل ذات صلاحية أعلى. هناك جانب آخر يمكن أن تقدمه الخوارزمية الجينية ، وهو الاعتماد على التغذية الراجعة المقدمة من مستخدمي نظام الاسترجاع لتكييف أوصاف المستندات، وإنتاج مجموعة جديدة من الأوصاف الأقرب إلى حاجات المستخدمين. تم استخدام ثلاثة انواع من الانتخاب المتناسب مع الصلاحية ، وهي نمذجة عجلة الروليت ، ونمذجة عجلة الروليت ذات النخبة ، والنمذجة الشاملة التصادفية. أظهرت النتائج تفوق النوع الثالث على الأول والثاني.Background: In this paper, the problem of retrieving the correct documents that satisfy the user's concerns is investigated. The main aim in information retrieval systems is to retrieve all and only relevant documents. Materials and Methods: The genetic algorithm is utilized to adapt and change the documents indexes, depending on relevance judgments collected from users. Genetic algorithm is a powerful tool that depends on the Darwinian principles and evolution techniques to search complex spaces. The use of genetic algorithm facilitates the adaptation of documents indexes. Sampling operation is performed using roulette wheel, roulette wheel with elitism and stochastic universal sampling. The fitness function is computed using Jaccard's coefficient that measure the closeness between query and document index. Results: The results show that the new descriptions are more efficient and closer to the population of users that use the information retrieval system. In addition, the stochastic universal sampling gave the best results. Conclusion: The keywords used to describe the content of documents have statistical dependencies among them. It is difficult to accommodate these dependencies in retrieval system. Genetic algorithm can consider these dependencies during its action. According to schema theorem and building block hypothesis [10], the fittest schemata are propagated from generation to generation, where they are sampled, recombined, mutated and resampled to form strings of potentially higher worth. Another aspect genetic algorithm can offer, is the reliance on the feedback provided by users of the retrieval system to adapt documents descriptions and selections variations were experimented with roulette sampling, with elitism, and with produce new set of descriptions closer to the population of users' needs. Three fitness proportionate selection variations are used, roulette wheel sampling, roulette wheel with elitism and  stochastic universal sampling. The results have indicated the superiority of the third over the first two.&nbsp

Surgical Case Scheduling with sterilizing activity constraints

International audienc

Molecular Localization of Epstein Barr Virus and Rb Tumor Suppressor Gene Expression in Tissues from Prostatic Adenocarcinoma and Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia

Background Epstein- Barr virus (EBV) is a ubiquitous in that infecting more than 90% of adult population worldwide. Recently, EBV has been linked to the development of variety of human malignancies including prostate tissues that range from benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) to prostatic adenocarcinoma (PAC). Somatic point mutations in Rb gene have been detected in prostate cancer and are involved in progression steps of prostate carcinogenesis. Objective: To analyze the distribution and impact of concordant Rb expression and latent EBV infection on a group of prostate adenocarcinoma and benign prostatic hyperplasia. Patients and methods: Seventy- two (72) formalin-fixed, paraffin- embedded  prostatic tissues were obtained in this study; (40) biopsies from prostatic carcinoma and  (20) from benign prostate hyperplasia as well as (12) apparently normal prostatic  autopsies control group. Detection of EBV-EBERs was done by ultra sensitive version of in situ hybridization method where as immunohistochemistry detection system was used to demonstrate the expression of Rb gene. Results: Detection of EBV-EBERs -ISH reactions in tissues with PAC was observed in 19 out of 40 (47.5%), while in the tissues from BPH was detected in 10% (2 out of 20). No EBV-EBERs positive – ISH reaction was detected in healthy prostate tissues in the control group.   The differences between the percentages of EBERs detection in tissues PAC and each of BPH & control groups were statistically highly significant (P value = < 0.0001). Positive Rb immunohistochemical (IHC) reactions were observed in 19 PAC cases (47.5%) and in 2 BPH cases (10%). Conclusions: Our results indicate that the EBV might contribute to the development of subset of prostate tumors. In addition, the significant percentage of expression of possible Rb gene as well as EBV in prostate adenocarcinoma could indicate for an important role of these molecular and viral factors in prostatic carcinogenesis. Key word: EBV; prostate adenocarcinoma, benign prostatic hyperplasia, in situ hybridization

Improve a secure blind watermarking technique for digital video

In recent years, digital watermark video has become increasingly popular in a range of industries, but because it is widely available on the Internet, it is simple to make unlawful copies and tamper with digital video. Watermarking digital video has become more popular as a method of detecting changes and preventing illegal duplication. This paper presents a video copyright protection system that is secure, blind, and robust. Two approaches that are resistant to diverse attacks are proposed in this research. The initial step is to encrypt a hybrid watermark (Message, Image) using two different encryption techniques (RSA and AES).The second is a steganography technique based on LSB-based robust watermarking, which embeds an encrypted secret bit Message and Image in key frames of an MP4 video file by utilizing the mean of the grayscale images that differ and take the most significant differences between the two images. The intensity of the histogram will become more consistent across all pixels as the encryption quality improves. For keyframe watermarking in the spatial domain, the proposed methods can maintain the watermarked information while achieving high imperceptibility and a Peak Single to Noise Ratio [PSNR] equivalent to more than 50 db, where quality measures (MSE, PSNR, and correlation coefficient) that calculate the levels of distortion caused by embedding a watermark in digital video produce good results

Online Teaching Strategies of Language skills during Pandemic:A Case of Self-Efficacy of Teaching Faculty in Qatar Universities

COVID-19 caused teaching to shifted online which emanated challenges for both teachers and students. To overcome such challenges, self-efficacy plays a vital role. The major objective of this study was to investigate the self-efficacy of teaching staff during the time of COVID-19. The population was a total of over 1100 the university instructors, out of which a sample of 212 (Female=62, Male= 150) participants was administered. The research data was collected through Likert scale after given a training of using various online teaching strategies with language skills for three days. The factors including in this scale were students’ engagement, classroom management, and instructional strategies with 22 statements. Descriptive and Infrential statistics were assessed by using AMOS software. The findings of this research revealed that the respondents showed a high level of self-efficacy towards teaching during pandemic; and that online teaching was challenging for both pre-service teachers and experienced teachers. Further, there was a significant difference found among the demographic variables of the study regarding students’ engagement, classroom management and instructional strategies with language skills. Further, the qualitative results revealed no significant difference about the demographic characteristics of the respondents regarding self-efficacy through online teaching. There was a significant difference found in mean score where female score was greater than male score. This research is expected to make a great contribution for the development of the self-efficacy of the teaching faculty for the successful completion of teaching-learning process through online teaching