A Project Portfolio Management model adapted to non-profit organizations

As they strive towards greater professionalism in carrying out their activities, non-profit organizations (NPOs) have begun paying attention to project management. The non-profit sector (NPS) has also begun to adopt strategic planning techniques, thus making the acceptance of project portfolio management (PPM) methodology a natural consequence. This article aims to propose a project portfolio management model adapted to the context of NPOs

Detection of Contact Binaries Using Sparse High Phase Angle Lightcurves

We show that candidate contact binary asteroids can be efficiently identified from sparsely sampled photometry taken at phase angles >60deg. At high phase angle, close/contact binary systems produce distinctive lightcurves that spend most of the time at maximum or minimum (typically >1mag apart) brightness with relatively fast transitions between the two. This means that a few (~5) sparse observations will suffice to measure the large range of variation and identify candidate contact binary systems. This finding can be used in the context of all-sky surveys to constrain the fraction of contact binary near-Earth objects. High phase angle lightcurve data can also reveal the absolute sense of the spin.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in ApJ

The formation of the solar system

The solar system started to form about 4.56 Gyr ago and despite the long intervening time span, there still exist several clues about its formation. The three major sources for this information are meteorites, the present solar system structure and the planet-forming systems around young stars. In this introduction we give an overview of the current understanding of the solar system formation from all these different research fields. This includes the question of the lifetime of the solar protoplanetary disc, the different stages of planet formation, their duration, and their relative importance. We consider whether meteorite evidence and observations of protoplanetary discs point in the same direction. This will tell us whether our solar system had a typical formation history or an exceptional one. There are also many indications that the solar system formed as part of a star cluster. Here we examine the types of cluster the Sun could have formed in, especially whether its stellar density was at any stage high enough to influence the properties of today's solar system. The likelihood of identifying siblings of the Sun is discussed. Finally, the possible dynamical evolution of the solar system since its formation and its future are considered.Comment: 36 pages, 7 figures, invited review in Physica Script

Quantum critical 5f-electrons avoid singularities in U(Ru,Rh)2Si2

We present specific heat measurements of 4% Rh-doped U(Ru,Rh)2Si2 at magnetic fields above the proposed metamagnetic transition field Hm~34 T, revealing striking similarities to the isotructural Ce analog CeRu2Si2, suggesting that strongly renormalized hybridized band models apply equally well to both systems. The vanishing bandwidths as H --> Hm are consistent with a putative quantum critical point close to Hm. The existence of a phase transition into an ordered phase in the vicinity of Hm for 4% Rh-doped U(Ru,Rh)2Si2, but not for CeRu2Si2, is consistent with a stronger super-exchange in the case of the U 5-f system, with irreversible processes at the transition revealing a strong coupling of the 5f orbitals to the lattice, most suggestive of orbital or electric quadrupolar order.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure