The purpose of this work is to investigate the batch removal of Pb2+ from aqueous solutions using marine dried brown seaweed S. baccularia. Seaweed was used as a low-cost adsorbent. The effects of pH, contact time, temperature, shaking speed and the concentration of the Pb2+ solution were examined in the biosorption process with S. baccularia. The results showed that when S. baccularia was used as the bioadsorbent, the optimum pH, Pb2+ concentration, equilibrium time, temperature, and shaking speed were 3, 20 ppm, 120 min, 30°C, and 120rpm. The equilibrium adsorption data are fitted to the Langmuir isotherm model. The separation factor (RL) in the experiment was less than one (<1), indicating that the adsorption of metal ions on Sargassum baccularia adsorbent is favorable. The calculated activation energy (Ea) implies that the adsorption of Pb (II) on brown seaweed is a physical adsorption. Thermodynamic results show that adsorption occurs spontaneously in nature.

The main goal of the current paper is focused to investigate the effect of isothermal heat treatment

temperature and time on microstructure and strength in a medium carbon vanadium titanium free micro

alloyed steel. Isothermal heat treatment was carried out in the temperature range 350 to 600 C° at

different holding times varying from 2s to 1200s followed by water quenching. Samples were

investigated using optical microscope (OM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) paired with

energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) and by compressive testing using a servo-hydraulic testing

machine. The results show that, the final microstructure of samples held at high temperatures (550 and

600°C) consists of polygonal intra-granularly nucleated ferrite idiomorphs, combined with grain

boundary ferrite and pearlite were produced and followed by retained austenite that transformed to

martensite upon quenching (incomplete transformation phenomenon). At intermediate temperatures

(450 and 500 °C) an interlocked acicular ferrite (AF) microstructure is produced, hence acicular ferrite

becomes prevalent in the microstructure at (450 °C). The microstructure after the heat treatment at

500°C consists coarse nonpolygonal ferrite grains separated by pearlite colonies. However, at low

temperatures (400 and 350°C), the final microstructure of the samples held at 350°C consists of

bainitic sheaves, where the sheave of parallel acicular ferrite plates, similar to bainitic sheaves but

intra-granularly nucleated were observed, which called in some references as sheaf type acicular ferrite

for samples isothermally treated at 400°C. Yield stress was determined by compression testing on samples

with final Microstructure, the results show that, the observed change in the microstructure is related by a

marked decrease of compressive yield strength, approximately from 1000 to 700 MPa.

For Arabic letters recognition, we achieve three of pattern recognition approaches namely gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), local binary pattern recognition (LBP) and artificial neural network (ANN) and compare between them to result best performance. Two of these methods level co-occurrence matrix and local binary pattern recognition are used for feature extraction whereas in artificial neural network (ANN) we use the intensity values of pixels for input of the neural network. Two classifiers are used, the K-Nearest Neighbor classifier (KNN) for the LBP, GLCM and neural network classifier for (ANN) artificial neural network. Also, we evaluate the results by using leave one person out approach, fold classification and leave one out.

Marketing experts have debated for more than two decades about the effect of nationality and culture on marketing. However, most research on this issue was conducted in Western countries. An important question for marketers in the international arena, therefore, is whether the consumer's responses (i.e., sentiment and behavioural aspects) toward the global marketing programs in developing countries depend on culture. In a research representing a large sample of consumers and four different home appliances country-of-origin global operators in Libya, we explore the potential role of culture on consumers' responses toward foreign marketing programs. Results indicate that although the foreign companies have a tendency to adopted standardisation perspective, this does not impact on consumers' responses in a single cultural context toward marketing. The findings reveal that buying behavior was more a function of individual difference than of national cultural context. Further, our results suggest that for mainstream home appliances, segmenting on the basis of nationality is probably unnecessary and that a standardized approach would likely be successful across an increasingly relevant Arab world; and that continuing perceptions of Arab insularity are likely to be misplaced. Faced with the effectiveness of globally efficient marketing programs, local manufacturers would need to work hard to identify particular niche segments where a culturally-specific appeal might be more successful

Keywords: buyer's characteristics, consumer behaviour, the Arab World, marketing program, home appliances