We report high resolution simultaneous measurements of electrical conductance and force gradient between two sharp gold tips as their separation is varied from the tunneling distance to atomic-size contact. The use of atomically sharp tips minimizes van der Waals interaction, making it possible to identify the short-range metallic adhesion contribution to the total force.

Although the practical importance of investment analysis in long-term energy investments is well understood, choosing the proper method has always been a dilemma. In this regard, classic evaluation methods, with a history of almost a century, are mostly favored, but using them in the valuation of long-lasting energy projects has particular shortcomings, nevertheless. The drawbacks mainly stem f...

The emergence of the Internet has pushed many established companies to explore this radically new distribution channel. Like all market discontinuities, the Internet creates opportunities as well as threats – it can be performance-enhancing as readily as it can be performance-destroying. One industry where this certainly holds is the newspaper industry, where several players have rushed to supp...

The use of space by predators in relation to their prey is a poorly understood aspect of predator-prey interactions. Classic theory suggests that predators should focus their efforts on areas of abundant prey, that is, prey hotspots, whereas game-theoretical models of predator and prey movement suggest that the distribution of predators should match that of their prey's resources. If, however, ...

THERE are no signs that the debate over the chronological data of Genesis 1 is abating. Among those who hold biblical views of the inspiration of the Scriptures certain interpretations of that chronology have, indeed, long been traditional. These may disagree as to the duration of the "days" of Genesis 1 but they have in common the opinion that the order of narration in that chapter coincides w...

In this article, we link an engineering concept, reliability, to a financial and managerial concept, net present value, by exploring the impact of a system’s reliability on its revenue generation capability. The framework here developed for non-repairable systems quantitatively captures the value of reliability from a financial standpoint. We show that traditional present value calculations of ...

In the present article we give geometric generalizations of the estimates from Chapters 5,6,7 from [4], while extending their sharpness to new cases.

A resource investment problem is a project-scheduling problem in which the availability levels of the resources are considered as decision variables and the goal is to find a schedule, and resource requirement levels, such that some objective function optimizes. In this paper, we consider a resource investment problem in which the goal is to maximize the net present value of the project cash fl...