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

Carbon fibre reinforced polymers are widely used to strengthen steel structural elements. These structural elements are normally subjected to static, dynamic and fatigue loadings during their life-time. A number of studies have focused on the characteristics of CFRP sheets bonded to steel members under static, dynamic and fatigue loadings. However, there is a gap in understanding the bonding behaviour between CFRP laminates and steel members under impact loading. This paper shows the effect of different load rates from quasi-static to 300 × 103 mm/min on this bond. Two types of CFRP laminate, CFK 150/2000 and CFK 200/2000, were used to strengthen steel joints using Araldite 420 epoxy. The results show a significant bond strength enhancemen

Silicon nitride nanostructures were prepared by reactive sputtering technique using silicon targets with different types of electrical conductivity (n-type and p-type) and Ar:N2 gas mixing ratio of 70:30. The optical microscopy and spectroscopic characteristics of these films were determined in order to introduce the effect of target conductivity type on these characteristics. The results showed that using p-type silicon target would produce Si3N4 films with lower tendency to adsorb water vapor and other constituents of the atmospheric air, higher absorbance in the visible range 400-700nm, and lower variation in the energy band gap with film thickness than the Si3N4 films prepared from n-type silicon target.

In this paper, a handwritten digit classification system is proposed based on the Discrete Wavelet Transform and Spike Neural Network. The system consists of three stages. The first stage is for preprocessing the data and the second stage is for feature extraction, which is based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). The third stage is for classification and is based on a Spiking Neural Network (SNN). To evaluate the system, two standard databases are used: the MADBase database and the MNIST database. The proposed system achieved a high classification accuracy rate with 99.1% for the MADBase database and 99.9% for the MNIST database

The increased use of hybrid PET /CT scanners combining detailed anatomical information along withfunctional data has benefits for both diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. This presented study is to makecomparison of cross sections to produce 18F , 82Sr and68Ge via different reactions with particle incident energy up to 60 MeV as a part of systematic studies on particle-induced activations on enriched natNe, natRb, natGa 18O,85Rb, and 69Ga targets, theoretical calculation of production yield, calculation of requiredtarget and suggestion of optimum reaction to produce: Fluorine-18 , Strontium-82 andGermanium-68 touse in Hybrid Machines PET/CT Scanners.

Eprospective study undertaken between January 2007 and January 2011, 58 consecutive cases with compound tibial shaft fractures. All fractures were stabilized by external fixator device AO/ASIF type after failed the manipulation under anesthesia (MUA) to restore the osseous alignment. In 32 patients cancellous bone graft were used from the upper part of the tibia to enhance healing process, all these patients were followed for an average of 8–12 months. Our findings showed that stabilization of the fracture shaft tibia by external fixation with cancellous bone graft had significantly better result, than external fixation alone. We conclude that unilateral, uniplanar external fixation with early bone grafting from upper part of the tibia is

Attacking a transferred data over a network is frequently happened millions time a day. To address this problem, a secure scheme is proposed which is securing a transferred data over a network. The proposed scheme uses two techniques to guarantee a secure transferring for a message. The message is encrypted as a first step, and then it is hided in a video cover.  The proposed encrypting technique is RC4 stream cipher algorithm in order to increase the message's confidentiality, as well as improving the least significant bit embedding algorithm (LSB) by adding an additional layer of security. The improvement of the LSB method comes by replacing the adopted sequential selection by a random selection manner of the frames and the pixels wit