The present research was implemented to analyses the seedling tolerance of three species Eucalyptus gomphocephala DC (Myrtaceae) (common name 'Tuart'), Eucalyptus marginata Sm. (common name 'Jarrah') and Corymbia calophylla (Lindl.) K.D. Hill & J. A. S. Johnson (common name 'Marri') to soil-induced stressor, namely soil alkalinity (limestone). Seeds germinated in shallow trays filled with white sand in a naturally lit glasshouse (control treatment). A liming treatment was conducted with 20% w/w crushed and sifted Tomala limestone adds to potting mix to increase soil pH. The experiment was conducted over 82 days. E. gomphocephala is restricted soils overlying limestone on study area and according to total seedling dry weight data and calculated relative growth rates coped best in a limestone-enriched soil. However, when examining all the growth and physiological data collected C. calophylla appeared to be the middling tolerant, with no significant difference in leaf allocation or leaf water loss between the well-watered controls and the limestone-enriched treatments whereas the E. marginata was the least tolerant with a 14% reduction in stomatal conductance. 

The second era of Ottmanian (1835-1911AD) had witnessed a stable economic development and growth due to internal and external policy and because of the reforms achieved by the Ottmanian Empire in all its states. Agriculture is considered a significant formation in the economical growth due to its direct relation to population’s income and effect with people’s needs in any country in the world because agriculture is the main source of food to the people. The agricultural and animal products have played an essential role in the economy of Tripoli at that time, the Ottoman authority was responsible on supervision of farms while the workforce was local people of Tripoli, this situation had led to improve the economical condition of the state and its people, also it was the main source for income to the Ottoman government.

Herein, graphene (GN) was synthesized, exfoliated by anchoring dodecyl sulfate chain through hydrophobic interaction over its surface (GN-SDS), and was tested to sequester Cu(II) and Mn(II) ions in single-metal system from aqueous phase. Acid-base titrations and elemental analysis results verified successful dodecyl sulfate chain anchoring over GN-SDS surface. Adsorption/desorption isotherms depicted Type-IV isotherm with H3 type hysteretic loop, confirming mesoporous nature of GN-SDS with BET surface area – 242 m2/g. The ID/IG ratios of GN and GN-SDS obtained by RAMAN spectroscopy were 0.8537 and 0.8540, respectively confirming no distortion in structure during modification. Electrostatic interaction between metal ions and negative surface charge and-/or Cπ electrons of GN-SDS was governing the adsorption process. Maximum Cu(II) and Mn(II) adsorption on GN-SDS was observed at pH 5 and 6, respectively. Rapid Cu(II) and Mn(II) adsorption kinetics accomplishing 80–92% and 87–96%, respectively at varied concentration in 60 min was observed. Maximum adsorption capacities for Cu(II) and Mn(II) on GN-SDS were 369.16 and 223.67 mg/g, respectively. Langmuir isotherm and pseudo-second-order kinetic models were fitted to experimental data. Thermodynamically favorable adsorption process was observed. 30–33% drop in GN-SDS adsorption potential for Cu(II) and Mn(II) after five consecutive regeneration cycles was observed.

Abstract— With the growth of digital Arabic documents specially in information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP) applications, identification of irregular plurals which are commonly called broken plurals (BP) in modern standard Arabic becomes very urgent issue. Broken plurals are formed by imposing interdigitating patterns on stems, and singular words cannot be recovered by standard affix stripping stemming techniques. Identifying broken plurals is an important and difficult problem which needs to be addressed. In information retrieval, deriving singulars from plurals is referred to as a stemming. The process of stemming can be achieved by removing the attached affixes from a given word. To the best of our knowledge, all existing Arabic stemmers are unreliable and still under research. Consequently, this paper proposes an approach which identifies broken plurals without the need to perform the stemming process on any given word. The well known decision tree system (WEKA J48) is applied to build a classifier (model) on a very huge Arabic corpus as a training data which is pre-processed and prepared as a piece of this work. The built classifier is evaluated using unseen test set. The obtained results reveal that a very promising broken plural recognizer could be designed and implemented for NLP applications.

Although the third wave of democratization overturned autocracies around the world, Libyan and Egyptian regimes stayed afloat for a long period. Libya and Egypt were ruled by dictatorial regimes for decades, but there were varying degrees of tyranny in both countries. One means of comparing political transition in Libya and Egypt is to examine both regimes’ structures. Qaddafi’s regime was a personalistic regime that lacked the genuine institutions that could rein in Qaddafi's singularity by power and by ruling the country. In contrast Mubarak regime was seen as a hybrid regime in that it apparently combined democratic and authoritarian institutions, but in reality, it was a dictatorship regime. Mubarak regime used democratic institutions as a facade to hide the real nature of the regime .The political system is dominated by the president, who has strong legislative powers and can dissolve parliament. Keywords: political transition, military institution, civil war

Medium carbon V-microalloyed steel continuously cooled from the austenitization temperature at still air, with predominantly acicular ferrite structure, has been investigated by means of four-point bending of notched Griffiths–Owens’s type specimens at liquid nitrogen temperature. Local fracture stress and plastic strain were determined by using finite element analysis and fracture surface examination using scanning electron microscope. It was revealed that cleavage fracture initiation, which takes place close to the notch root in the narrow zone of high plastic strains, is not related to any broken coarse second phase particles. It was assumed that microcracks nucleate by strain induced fracture of pearlite nodules. Two effective surface energy values of 24 and 42 J/m2 were estimated according to the Griffith’s equation, indicating the influence of crystallographic orientation between neighboring grains at the origin of fracture. Lower value was attributed to fracture of coarse ferrite–pearlite units with similar crystallographic orientation and higher value to fracture propagation through fine acicular ferrite matrix.

Abstract

The main purpose of catalytic reforming unit is to upgrade low-octane naphtha to high-octane gasoline. In this work, the estimation capacities of the response surface methodology (RSM) and artificial neural network (ANN), to determine the research octane number (RON) of reformates produced from the catalytic naphtha reforming unit were investigated. The article presents a comparative study and combined application between response surface methodology (RSM) and artificial neural networks (ANN) based on design of experiment (DOE) strategy in the modeling and prediction of the research octane number (RON). In this study, DOE⿿CCRD full factorial design was incorporated into the ANN methodology, so the need of a large quantity of training data was avoided. ANN methodology showed a very obvious advantage over RSM for both data fitting and estimation capabilities. Based on the results of analysis of variance (ANOVA), a multiple determination coefficient of 0.8 and 0.99 were obtained for both RSM and ANN respectively. It has been found that by employing RSM approach coupled with ANN model based on DOE strategy, the visualization of the experimental points in three dimensional spaces can disclose qualitatively and quantitatively the activity relationships. This approach of combination of RSM⿿ANN⿿DOE has revealed its ability to solve a quadratic polynomial model involving solving, optimization, complexity and difficult relationships especially nonlinear ones may be investigated without complicated equations involved. The study revealed that, the maximum RON of 88 was obtained at the optimum conditions offered by RSM. Furthermore, at the optimal conditions of (T = 521 °C, P = 37.6 bar, LHSV = 2.02 h⿿1), the maximum RON of 98 was obtained for the ANN model. However, the models were implemented for the construction of 3D response surface plots from the ANN and RSM models in order to show the most effective variables as well as the effects of their interaction on the research octane number.