Foreign direct investment (FDI) has been viewed as a power affecting economic growth (EG) directly and indirectly during the past few decades. This paper reviewed an amount of researches examining the relationships between FDI and EG, especially the effects of FDI on EG, from 1994 up to 2012. The results show that the main finding of the FDI-EG relation is significantly positive, but in some cases it is negative or even null. And within the relation, there exist several influencing factors such as the adequate levels of human capital, the well-developed financial markets, the complementarity between domestic and foreign investment and the open trade regimes, etc.

The undetected error probability is an important measure to assess the communication reliability provided by any error coding scheme. Two error coding schemes namely, Joint crosstalk avoidance and Triple Error Correction (JTEC) and JTEC with Simultaneous Quadruple Error Detection (JTEC-SQED), provide both crosstalk reduction and multi-bit error correction/detection features. The available undetected error probability model yields an upper bound value which does not give accurate estimation on the reliability provided. This paper presents an improved mathematical model to estimate the undetected error probability of these two joint coding schemes. According to the decoding algorithm the errors are classified into patterns and their decoding

Luminescent sensor membranes and sensor microplates are presented for continuous or high-throughput wide-range measurement of pH based on a europium probe.

The steel jetty selected for strengthening is in Baghdad city, over Tigris River, consists of 55 short spans, each of approximately 4 meters and one naviga-tional opening of 12 m. The bridge is 224 meters length and 8 meters in width. The strengthening system was designed to remove overstresses that occurred when the bridge was subjected to abnormal loads of 380 tons. A strengthening system which installed in spring 2008 was used where the main concept is to depend on added side supporting elements which impose reversal forces on the bridge to counteract most of the loads expected from the abnormal heavy loads. The bridge was load tested before and after the strengthening system was activated. The load test results indicate that the strengt