There is various human biometrics used nowadays, one of the most important of these biometrics is the face. Many techniques have been suggested for face recognition, but they still face a variety of challenges for recognizing faces in images captured in the uncontrolled environment, and for real-life applications. Some of these challenges are pose variation, occlusion, facial expression, illumination, bad lighting, and image quality. New techniques are updating continuously. In this paper, the singular value decomposition is used to extract the features matrix for face recognition and classification. The input color image is converted into a grayscale image and then transformed into a local ternary pattern before splitting the image into

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.

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

Most researchers concentrate their studies on the design, stress and pressure distributions of the prosthetic socket. A little attention is considered for the stiffness of the various materials of the prosthetic sockets. Prosthetic laminated sockets in Iraq are costly to be manufactured while polypropylene socket is relatively cheap in comparing with the laminates.

Experimental study is conducted to compare the stiffness of five prosthetic sockets made of different materials. Compression, three point flexural and tensile tests are implemented by the Testometric machine. The laminate sockets give better results in compression than polypropylene. Polypropylene gives good results in bending compared with the laminate sockets. When t

The seasonal behavior of the light curve for selected star SS UMI and EXDRA during outburst cycle is studied. This behavior describes maximum temperature of outburst in dwarf nova. The raw data has been mathematically modeled by fitting Gaussian function based on the full width of the half maximum and the maximum value of the Gaussian. The results of this modeling describe the value of temperature of the dwarf novae star system leading to identify the type of elements that each dwarf nova consisted of.

Thin films of CuPc of various thicknesses (150,300 and 450) nm have been deposited using pulsed laser deposition technique at room temperature. The study showed that the spectra of the optical absorption of the thin films of the CuPc  are two bands of absorption one in the visible region at about 635 nm, referred to as Q-band, and the second in ultra-violet region where B-band is located at 330 nm. CuPc thin films were found to have direct band gap with values around (1.81 and 3.14 (eV respectively. The vibrational studies were carried out using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR). Finally, From open and closed aperture Z-scan data non-linear absorption coefficient and non-linear refractive index have been calculated res

Wind energy is one of the most common and natural resources that play a huge role in energy sector, and due to the increasing demand to improve the efficiency of wind turbines and the development of the energy field, improvements have been made to design a suitable wind turbine and obtain the most energy efficiency possible from wind. In this paper, a horizontal wind turbine blade operating under low wind speed was designed using the (BEM) theory, where the design of the turbine rotor blade is a difficult task due to the calculations involved in the design process. To understand the behavior of the turbine blade, the QBlade program was used to design and simulate the turbine rotor blade during working conditions. The design variables suc