Navigating Uncharted Waters: Alaska Native Corporations in a New Era of 8(a) Contracting

The highly anticipated finalized rule changes to the Small Business Administration 8(a) Business Development Program will have a prominent impact on 8(a) certified Alaska Native Corporations (ANCs). This Article evaluates the weaknesses in the previous regulations and analyzes how the revisions will effect ANC participation. The Article argues that the revisions address a number of ambiguities in the original regulations without limiting ANC participation in the 8(a) Business Development Program, but other factors may prove critical to future ANC contract procurement

Influence of external magnetic fields on growth of alloy nanoclusters

Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations are performed to study the influence of external magnetic fields on the growth of magnetic fcc binary alloy nanoclusters with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy. The underlying kinetic model is designed to describe essential structural and magnetic properties of CoPt_3-type clusters grown on a weakly interacting substrate through molecular beam epitaxy. The results suggest that perpendicular magnetic anisotropy can be enhanced when the field is applied during growth. For equilibrium bulk systems a significant shift of the onset temperature for L1_2 ordering is found, in agreement with predictions from Landau theory. Stronger field induced effects can be expected for magnetic fcc-alloys undergoing L1_0 ordering.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Short-Term Memory in Orthogonal Neural Networks

We study the ability of linear recurrent networks obeying discrete time dynamics to store long temporal sequences that are retrievable from the instantaneous state of the network. We calculate this temporal memory capacity for both distributed shift register and random orthogonal connectivity matrices. We show that the memory capacity of these networks scales with system size.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev. Let