Even though abstracts are short, they require a specific type and formal structure that is accepted by academic discourse communities (San & Tan, 2012). They are governed by a discipline's own conventions i.e. a series of moves that characterize the flow of the discourse and linguistic features. This study aims to identify the rhetorical moves and metadiscourse markers that are deployed in the abstracts of projects that were written by undergraduate students in the English department at the faculty of Arts/Gharyan University. The data consisted of 30 abstracts. Hyland's models (2000; 2005) were adopted in this study. The first model (2000) was used to analyze the rhetorical moves. The second one (2005) was employed to analyze the metadiscourse. The findings revealed that most of the abstracts did not consist of the five rhetorical moves. The introduction and purpose moves were prominent, while the method, result, conclusion, and structure (new move) moves were not prominent. The absence of some of the rhetorical moves in the English abstracts of undergraduate projects might make the project abstract unable to achieve its communicative purposes and will lead to difficulty for readers to understand the content of the abstract. For metadiscourse, the findings showed that interactive metadiscourse was deployed more than interactional metadiscourse. Among these two categories, transitions, frame markers, and endophoric were used more frequently.

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The rapidly growing use and storage of private, sensitive, and personal information across different applications have given rise to the need to restrict access to such information; thus, leading to the development of biometric authentication. Multimodal biometric authentication has improved system accuracy, but it has not been able to overcome all the vulnerabilities of biometric authentication. To reduce the amount of data that is stored or communicated during the authentication process and to ensure the authenticity of the biometric templates, image-watermarking techniques have been used to embed the information in one template over the other. In this paper, a new watermarking method is proposed, based on the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) method and the Least Significant Bit (LSB) method. The LSBs of the quantized DCT coefficients of a face image are manipulated according to the values of a binarized fingerprint image. This combination was used to allow the storing and communication of the watermarked images using the popular JPEG format. As the watermark information is not hand-crafted, tamper detection could not be achieved by comparing a static image to the extracted watermark. Thus, a Machine-Learning (ML)-based method was implemented to detect the existence of fingerprint patterns in the watermark. However, as the proposed system used a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to measure the similarity between the templates collected from the user and those stored in the model database, tamper detection was already embedded in the same neural network. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The results show a 98.96% average accuracy, where each prediction took an average processing time of 139.06 ms. The results also showed that the accuracy of tampering detection was 100%. Besides, the size of the files on the disk (or the bandwidth required to communicate the files) was reduced to less than 50% of their original size using the proposed fragile multibiometric watermarking technique.

Abstract

Background: Warts are a common skin condition that affects people all over the world. This ailment affects 2–20% of students in primary school. A well-known keratolytic agent, potassium hydroxide (KOH), has many dermatological uses. Vitamin D is important in the proliferation and differentiation of keratinocytes.

Objective: The aim of the current work was to compare the efficacy and safety of intralesional vitamin D3 injections and 5% KOH cream separately and in combination with each other in the treatment of warts.

Patients and Methods: This study was carried out at the private outpatient Al- Ahlam Center of Dermatology and Cosmetology in Gharyan, Libya from 1^st of Sep to last of Dec 2021. 45 patients with warts were included in the study. They were classified into 3 groups according to method of treatment into Vitamin D3 group, 5% KOH cream group, and combination group.

Results: The mean age of patients was 27.04 ± 11.7 years. 31 patients completed the study. Complete response was seen in 12 patients with vitamin D injection after period of 4 months, 9 patients with 5% KOH cream after period 2-3 months, and 10 patients with combination both treatment after a period of 1 month.

Conclusions: It could be concluded that intralesional vitamin D with 5% KOH cream is safe, effective, and inexpensive treatment option for recalcitrant palmoplantar and periungual warts.

 KeywordsVitamin D3; Palmoplanter; Periungual; KOH; Warts

Abstract

The present work was carried out in order to investigate the physical and chemical quality of the Libyan Asbi'ah groundwater and the degree of its contamination. The achieved results were compared with international quality standards for drinking water. The sampleswere collected from five water wells of the Asbi'ah region. Several parameters were examined including Colour, Taste, smell, pH, total dissolved solids (TDS), Calcium and Magnesium Hardness, Total Hardness, Iron, Fluoride, Ammonia, Phosphate and Chloride. The results showed that the groundwater of Asbi'ah area were within the limitations of WHO Standards. For instance, the maximum values of Fe, PO4, F, NH3 and Cl were (0.92, 0.16, 1.2, 0.05)mg/L respectively. However, some samples had a bit high of concentrations for TDS (590mg/L) and Total Hardness (702mg/L). The most of the water wells shared the high concentration of Total Hardness which might be due to the earth geology of the studied area. This makes the water taste unacceptable and therefore, the water might not be used as drinking water.

Keywords: Natural Groundwater, Chemical & Physical Properties, Contamination, Asbi'ah -Libya.

م إجراء هذه الدراسة للتحقق من الجودة الفيزيائية والكيميائية للمياه الجوفية ودرجة تلوثها في منطقة الأصابعة الليبية.

تمت مقارنة النتائج المتحصل عليها مع معايير الجودة العالمية لمياه الشرب.

جمعت العينات من خمسة آبار مياه جوفية بمنطقة الأصابعة.

تم فحص العديد من المعايير بما في ذلك اللون، الطعم، الرائحة، الأس الهيدروجيني، المواد الصلبة الذائبة الكلية (TDS)، صلابة الكالسيوم والمغنيسيوم، الصلابة الكلية، الحديد، الفلورايد، الأمونيا، الفوسفات والكلوريد.

أظهرت النتائج أن المياه الجوفية في منطقة الدراسة كانت ضمن الحدود المسموح بها من منظمة الصحة العالمية.

على سبيل المثال، كانت القيم القصوى ل Fe، PO4، F، NH3، Cl هي (0.92، 0.16، 1.2، 0.05) مجم / لتر على التوالي.

من جهة أخرى، كان لبعض العينات تركيزات عالية قليلا بالنسبة TDS (590 ملجم / لتر (والعسر الكلي (702 ملجم/لتر).

تشترك معظم آبار المياه في التركيز العالي للعسر الكلي والذي قد يكون بسبب التكوينات الجيولوجية للأرض في منطقة الدراسة.

هذه التراكيز العالية تجعل طعم الماء غير مقبول وغير مستساغ وبالتالي قد لا يمكن استخدام هذه المياه كمياه للشرب.

In this paper, a novel robust blind grayscale image digital watermarking scheme is introduced based on lifting wavelet transform (LWT) in combination with discrete cosine transform (DCT), Hessenberg decomposition, and entropy analysis for copyright protection of multimedia information. At first, the two levels of LWT are applied to the host grayscale image to improve the imperceptibility of the watermarking scheme and then the high-frequency sub-band of the 2-level of LWT is decomposed by DCT. Next, the DCT coefficients are divided into 4× 4 non-overlapping blocks. After that, Hessenberg decomposition performs on each selected block, whereas the first row, first column element of the upper Hessenberg matrix is utilized to hide the watermark. To evaluate the imperceptibility and robustness of the proposed digital watermarking scheme, the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and normalized cross-correlation (NC) are utilized to measure the quality and the ability of the proposed watermarking scheme to robust against signal processing operations and geometric attacks. Experimental and analysis results have demonstrated that the proposed scheme is achieved a very good tradeoff between imperceptibility and robustness. The comparison with other scheme have shown that the proposed digital watermarking schemes have a superior performance in terms of imperceptibility and robustness than other