The metallurgical influence of niobium (Nb) on an annealed high manganese (Mn) steel is still an active issue of discussion between automobile companies and steel manufacturers. Some controversy exists in the literature concerning the influence of Nb solubility on microstructure and thereby on mechanical properties. The influence of Nb-solubility on microstructure of Fe30Mn alloy steel was investigated experimentally and by computational materials modeling. Nb was added in 0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6 and 1% additions and the alloy samples were annealed at 1200oC for 2, 5, 10, 30 and 60 minutes. The microstructure was investigated using an optical microscope, TEM and SEM-EDX and precipitates were chemically tested. Niobium solubility in Fe30Mn austenite was theoretically studied based on Gladman assumptions and was also examined by Thermo-Calc analysis. The result of this work is a comparison between the microstructure analysis and theoretical studies, and it has been found that Nb was soluble in Fe30Mn austenite phase and has had a solute drag effect where Nb(C,N) and NbN precipitates were seen and the effect was pinning effect 

Abstract

Cohesion is one of the most important characteristics of good translation. Having a good translation is not achieved unless this factor is carefully observed. We may find students who have good mastery of spelling, grammatical rules and the skill of speaking but have noticeable weaknesses of using cohesive devices when they translate literary prose texts from Arabic into English. This study tries to examine the use of cohesive devices by University students when they translate literary prose text from Arabic into English. Texts used as a tool or instrument of data collection were given to some students to translate. The participants, in their translations, depended on certain devices ignoring the others. The subjects disregarded completely some categories of cohesive devices, such as the class of possessive pronouns, comparative reference, ellipsis, and substitution. Students sometimes misused the items, such as what happened with ‘the’. Many students were unable to vary the language (expressions) they used to express their ideas. Students sometimes succeeded in achieving cohesiveness but sometimes failed. A number of students did not end the sentences they wrote and started new ones.

Abstract

The research was conducted to investigate the problems and difficulties that ESL students and teachers have faced while they are teaching and learning pronunciation skills. It has been explained some pronunciation goals and factors that affect pronunciation learning. Also, it has been given some ideas for focusing on specific pronunciation features. In addition, some plans for effective learning experiences have been mentioned.  

As businesses are spreading to different locations they require a strong 

and secure way of communication between the different offices. There 

are different services which require nonstop flow of traffic. The 

multimedia applications with voice and video needs more priority than 

other applications, as it is sensitive to delay. The MPLS (Multiprotocol 

Label Switching) based VPN (Virtual Private Network) can provide QoS 

(Quality of Service) features. This paper investigate on how DiffServ 

QoS Model parameters over MPLS VPNs environment can help the 

enterprise network customers to maintain the quality for their multimedia 

application usage in their network. To test our approach, a MPLS VPN 

Traffic Engineering approach was configured on two distinct enterprise 

businesses and MPLS VPN networking with and without DiffServ QoS 

parameters for voice, email and data were implemen

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Early diagnosis of retinal OCT images has been shown to curtail blindness and visual impairments. However, the advancement of ophthalmic imaging technologies produces an ever-growing scale of retina images, both in volume and variety, which overwhelms the ophthalmologist ability to segment these images. While many automated methods exist, speckle noise and intensity inhomogeneity negatively impacts the performance of these methods. We present a comprehensive and fully automatic method for annotation of retinal layers in OCT images comprising of fuzzy histogram hyperbolisation (FHH) and graph cut methods to segment 7 retinal layers across 8 boundaries. The FHH handles speckle noise and inhomogeneity in the preprocessing step. Then the normalised vertical image gradient, and it’s inverse to represent image intensity in calculating two adjacency matrices and then the FHH reassigns the edge-weights to make edges along retinal boundaries have a low cost, and graph cut method identifies the shortest-paths (layer boundaries). The method is evaluated on 150 B-Scan images, 50 each from the temporal, foveal and nasal regions were used in our study. Promising experimental results have been achieved with high tolerance and adaptability to contour variance and pathological inconsistency of the retinal layers in all (temporal, foveal and nasal) regions. The method also achieves high accuracy, sensitivity, and Dice score of 0.98360, 0.9692 and 0.9712, respectively in segmenting the retinal nerve fibre layer. The annotation can facilitate eye examination by providing accurate results. The integration of the vertical gradients into the graph cut framework, which captures the unique characteristics of retinal structures, is particularly useful in finding the actual minimum paths across multiple retinal layer boundaries. Prior knowledge plays an integral role in image segmentation.

Abstract:

This study investigated the potential use of olive pomace (OP) as an adsorbent to

reduce the concentration of methyl orange (MO) in aqueous solutions. The effect of

some important parameters on the process of adsorption was examined, including

pH, adsorbent weight, temperature, contact time, agitation speed, and the initial

concentration of MO. The results showed that the optimum concentration of MO was

10 ppm and the optimum pH = 2, indicating that the process of MO adsorption on the

surface of the OP was better in acidic medium. The equilibrium time was 80 min at a

speed of 100 rpm. The results of the study showed the significant role of OP weight,

agitation speed, temperature and the contact time in increasing the adsorption

efficiency. On comparing the pseudo first order and pseudo second order models, the

results showed that the pseudo second order model fitted the experimental data well.

The study also included testing of Langmuir and Freundlich models on the

adsorption isotherm data, and it was found that experimental data obey the

Freundlich isotherm. To sum up, the study showed that OP has high adsorption

efficiency to remove MO by applying a simple, inexpensive method.

Watermarking techniques have been considered as one of the best efficacious methods 

to solve the issues of protecting copyright due to the proliferation of digital multimedia 

information on the internet. The digital multimedia information is such as image, 

audio, and video which can today be easily copied, distributed, and modified without 

loss in fidelity. As a result, it is necessary to utilize some kind of copyright protection 

techniques to avoid illegal copying, distribution, and digital copyright modification. 

The digital watermarking techniques have engaged the researchers’ attention as a 

technique for protecting copyright in the digital multimedia information. This 

technique includes a subcategory of information-hiding technologies in which the 

ownership information is hidden into the original multimedia information without 

impacting the original multimedia information quality. Despite the advances in digital 

watermarking techniques, the main objective of many types of research in digital 

watermarking topic is to improve transparency and resistance to attacks and the present 

digital watermarking schemes are not sufficiently stable or strong against various 

attacks. This study aims to develop state-of-the-art digital watermarking techniques 

for different multimedia information through improving the imperceptibility and 

robustness to geometrical attacks and signal processing operations. Four novel robust 

blind digital watermarking schemes are introduced in this thesis for copyright 

protection of multimedia information that have not been previously introduced. The 

first robust blind digital watermarking scheme is applied for colour images utilizing 

discrete wavelet transform in combination with Walsh Hadamard transform and 

Hessenberg decomposition. The second robust blind digital watermarking scheme is 

applied for grayscale images utilizing discrete wavelet transform in combination with 

Walsh Hadamard transform and Hessenberg decomposition. The third robust blind 

digital watermarking scheme is applied for colour videos utilizing discrete wavelet 

transform in combination with Walsh Hadamard transform and Hessenberg 

decomposition. Forth robust blind digital watermarking scheme is applied for audio 

signals utilizing discrete wavelet transform in combination with Walsh Hadamard 

transform and Hessenberg decomposition. Several experiments are performed in order 

to present the effectiveness of the proposed digital watermarking schemes in terms of 

imperceptibility and robustness against attacks related to each scheme. The proposed 

digital watermarking schemes achieve good imperceptibility and robustness against 

geometrical attacks and signal processing operations. The proposed digital 

watermarking schemes have a superior performance in terms of imperceptibility and 

robustness than other reported schemes in the literature.

Keywords: Watermarking, Copyright Protection, Discrete Wavelet Transform, Walsh 

Hadamard Transform, Hessenberg Decomposition.

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is one of the most vital tools for diagnosing and tracking progress of medication of various retinal disorders. Many methods have been proposed to aid with the analysis of retinal images due to the intricacy of retinal structures, the tediousness of manual segmentation and variation from different specialists. However image artifacts, in addition to inhomogeneity in pathological structures, remain a challenge, with negative influence on the performance of segmentation algorithms. In this paper we present an automatic retinal layer segmentation method, which comprises of fuzzy histogram hyperbolization and graph cut methods. We impose hard constraints to limit search region to sequentially segment 8 boundaries and 7 layers of the retina on 150 OCT B-Sans images, 50 each from the temporal, nasal and center of foveal regions. Our method shows positive results, with additional tolerance and adaptability to contour variance and pathological inconsistence of the retinal structures in all regions.