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This study briefly reviews the application of Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) in geotechnical engineering since GA and PSO are widely used in civil engineering. The application of GA and PSO is studied in three popular families of geotechnical problems including unconfined seepage analysis, slope stability analysis, and foundation design. In each category the available results from different studies are reviewed and compared. The comparison of results shows the desirable accuracy in the predicting of optimal values in the process of analysis and design. The presented methods perform successfully in the reviewed problems. However, PSO predicts the optimum values in fewer numbers of iterations, which suggests higher performance in term of implementation/application.

lacking on the influence of foreign acquisitions on wage levels. This may be in part because domestic acquisitions account for a substantial share of total US acquisitions. However, the enhanced presence of foreign acquisitions in the 1980s suggests a need for such a focus. Indeed, the percentage of foreign acquisitions of US companies rose steadily from 7.6 percent of the total value of US acquisitions to 28.6 percent over the period covering 1982 to 1990 [1].Previous studies suggest that expected profit enhancement by abrogating union contracts may provide a motive for domestic acquisition (Brown and Medoff, 1988;Shleifer and Summers, 1988). Foreign owners, however, may avoid confrontations with unions and instead seek to become more competitive by acquiring firms in industries that employ highly skilled workers. Thus, the premise of this paper is that the likelihood of domestic and foreign owners having different acquisition criteria may lead to wage rates differing by acquisition type. We therefore use industry and individual information to investigate the wage effect of foreign and domestic acquisition activity. Specifically, we measure the wage effect of both types of acquisitions for union and non-union workers. Such an approach considers the possibility of acquiring owners seeking to extract union rents by paying lower union wages. In addition, this study estimates wage equations that reveal whether differences in industry characteristics between domestic and foreign acquisitions lead to differences in union wage premiums. These tests are the first to focus on the wage effect of the increasingly common and important phenomenon of the foreign acquisition of US corporations.