Mineral Exploration Funds

While independent mineral operators have traditionally been confronted with a scarcity of risk capital for mineral development, willing investors have often experienced equal difficulty in locating responsible mineral operations in which to invest. The exploration fund, a means of channeling risk capital furnished by high-bracket taxpayers into mineral exploration, is one answer to this dilemma. In this article the author deals extensively with the mineral, tax, business association, and securities law problems involved in the organization and operation of such a fund

The Revised Model State Administrative Procedure Act—Reform or Retrogression?

In this contribution, we deal with the deterministic dominance of the probability moments of stochastic processes. More precisely, given a positive stochastic process, we propose to dominate its probability moment sequence by the trajectory of appropriate lower and upper dominating deterministic processes. The analysis of the behavior of the original stochastic process is then transferred to the stability analysis of the deterministic dominating processes. The result is applied to a nonstationary auto-regressive process that appears in the system identification literature.

Surface Effects on the Piezoelectricity of ZnO Nanowires

We utilize classical molecular dynamics to study surface effects on the piezoelectric properties of ZnO nanowires as calculated under uniaxial loading. An important point to our work is that we have utilized two types of surface treatments, those of charge compensation and surface passivation, to eliminate the polarization divergence that otherwise occurs due to the polar (0001) surfaces of ZnO. In doing so, we find that if appropriate surface treatments are utilized, the elastic modulus and the piezoelectric properties for ZnO nanowires having a variety of axial and surface orientations are all reduced as compared to the bulk value as a result of polarization-reduction in the polar [0001] direction. The reduction in effective piezoelectric constant is found to be independent of the expansion or contraction of the polar (0001) surface in response to surface stresses. Instead, the surface polarization and thus effective piezoelectric constant is substantially reduced due to a reduction in the bond length of the Zn-O dimer closest to the polar (0001) surface. Furthermore, depending on the nanowire axial orientation, we find in the absence of surface treatment that the piezoelectric properties of ZnO are either effectively lost due to unphysical transformations from the wurtzite to non-piezoelectric d-BCT phases, or also become smaller with decreasing nanowire size. The overall implication of this study is that if enhancement of the piezoelectric properties of ZnO is desired, then continued miniaturization of square or nearly square cross section ZnO wires to the nanometer scale is not likely to achieve this result