The thermal stability of an a-Ti film in contact with a d-TiN film in the structure of a TiN/Ti/TiN film stack on SiO2 substrates was studied by in situ sheet resistance (Rs) measurement, Auger electron spectroscopy, glancing angle x-ray diffractometry, cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and atomic force microscopy. It was found that nitrogen dissolv...

In a symmetric independent private values setting a sealed-bid double auction dissolves a partnership e¢ciently. This well known result remains valid in a model with interdependent valuations. However, if the interdependent components of valuations are large agents might prefer not to participate in a double auction. Therefore a simple extention of the rules of double-auctions is suggested that...

There is a tension between libertarians’ optimism about private supply of public goods and skepticism of the viability of voluntary collusion (Cowen 1992, Cowen and Sutter 1999). Playing off this asymmetry, Cowen (1992) advances the novel argument that the “free market in defense services” favored by anarcho-capitalists is a network industry where collusion is especially feasible. The current a...

Background Considerable effort has been devoted to the development of reservoir simulation tools for the oil industry, and there are high-quality simulators available that handle effectively many of the flow problems appropriate to oil and gas reservoirs. One area where simulator development is continuing, however, is in the simulation of processes in which multiple components transfer between ...

The unexpected frequency shift observed by the Pioneer team, usually described as an anomalous acceleration, is discussed from the perspective of two alternative assumptions on the origin of cosmological redshift (Hubble effect). One is the standard assumption of an “expanding space”, the other is the assumption of an energy loss of photons without expanding space sections (“downscaling photons...

INTRODUCTION Down-flow hanging sponge (DHS) reactors employ polyurethane sponge media to retain biomass. Wastewater is trickled from the top of the reactor and purified by microorganisms within and on the surface of the sponge media as influent flows vertically downward through the reactor. Since the sponge media of DHS reactors are exposed to the atmosphere, oxygen dissolves continually into t...

Mathias Frisch has argued that the requirement that electromagnetic dispersion processes are causal adds empirical content not found in electrodynamic theory. I urge that this attempt to reconstitute a local principle of causality in physics fails. An independent principle is not needed to recover the results of dispersion theory. The use of ‘causality conditions’ proves to be the mere adding o...

Zoom interacts strongly with both vision and control processes in an active visual system, causing problems for many commonly used tracking methods. This paper demonstrates the use of affine transfer to track while zooming, using clusters of corner features. Affine transfer not only is fundamentally invariant to zoom but also provides a natural mechanism to allow features to appear and disappea...

Perception: Intuitively, perception is the process of becoming aware of physical objects or phenomena through the senses. However, to define it as an observable phenomenon without resorting to a highly subjective concept such as awareness, one must include additional measurable criteria. A less involved and more up to date view is that perception is the mental function by means of which the phy...

Quantum gravity has matured over the last decade to a theory which can tell in a precise and explicit way how cosmological singularities of general relativity are removed. A branch of the universe “before” the classical big bang is obtained which is connected to ours by quantum evolution through a region around the singularity where the classical space-time dissolves. We discuss the basic mecha...