This document provides information on customer service at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

This manual is a records management and archives manual for Texas legislators.

PTRANSP, which is the predictive version of the TRANSP code, was developed in a collaborative effort involving the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, General Atomics Corporation, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Lehigh University. The PTRANSP/TRANSP suite of codes is the premier integrated tokamak modeling software in the United States. A production service for PTRANSP/TRANSP simulations is maintained at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory; the server has a simple command line client interface and is subscribed to by about 100 researchers from tokamak projects in the US, Europe, and Asia. This service produced nearly 13000 PTRANSP/TRANSP simulations in the four year period FY 2005 through FY 2008. Major archives of TRANSP results are maintained at PPPL, MIT, General Atomics, and JET. Recent utilization, counting experimental analysis simulations as well as predictive simulations, more than doubled from slightly over 2000 simulations per year in FY 2005 and FY 2006 to over 4300 simulations per year in FY 2007 and FY 2008. PTRANSP predictive simulations applied to ITER increased eight fold from 30 simulations per year in FY 2005 and FY 2006 to 240 simulations per year in FY 2007 and FY 2008, accounting for more than half of combined PTRANSP/TRANSP service CPU resource …

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance is a member organization whose mission is to establish, maintain, and advance the capacity to preserve our nation's digital resources for the benefit of present and future generations. From October 3 through October 31, 2011, the Content Working Group conducted a survey of organizations in the United States that are actively involved in, or planning to start, programs to archive content from the web. The goal of the survey was to better understand the landscape of web archiving activities in the United States, including identifying the organizations or individuals involved, the types of web content being preserved, the tools and services being used, and the types of access being provided. This summary report examines participant responses for the purposes of discerning trends, themes, and emerging practices and challenges in web-based content acquisition and preservation.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Justice’s (Justice) website called FOIA.gov presents data from agencies’ annual Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reports. Agencies submit their annual reports to Justice in print and in electronic form and Justice posts the electronic data onto the website. For fiscal year 2010, the data GAO reviewed on the website were generally consistent with the data in the agencies’ print versions. According to Justice officials, the department has taken steps to ensure accuracy and consistency of the data. These steps include providing annual training to agency personnel who are responsible for preparation of the FOIA annual reports and posting guidance for report completion and submission on the Office of Information Policy website. In addition, the department has implemented checks to ensure data consistency between the two report versions. Specifically, it has developed and provided agencies with a tool to be used in creating the electronic version for the website. The tool contains features that assist agencies in compiling their data and math checks to help ensure consistency. Further, Justice officials have a checklist they use as a guide for checking the consistency of the …

This CRS report, updated as warranted, discusses policy issues regarding military-to-military (mil-to-mil) contacts with the People's Republic of China (PRC) and provides a record of major contacts and crises since 1993.

This report provides information on the effort to identify, determine locations, and scan geophysical logs that could be used to help characterize brackish groundwater resources of Texas, enter key attributes of those geophysical logs in a database designed by Texas Water Development Board (TWDB) , and deliver the scans and database to TWDB as part of the Brackish Resources Aquifer Characterization System (BRACS) effort. (p. 1).

This report looks at Kuwait's relationships with its neighbors in the Persian Gulf, and its own political system which has been in turmoil since 2006.

This report looks at Kuwait's relationships with its neighbors in the Persian Gulf, and its own political system which has been in turmoil since 2006.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) does not consistently follow HHS regulations and guidance in its oversight of Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act of 1990 (CARE Act) grantees when conducting key elements of grantee oversight, including routine monitoring and implementing restrictive drawdowns. Additionally, HRSA did not demonstrate a risk-based strategy for selecting grantees for site visits. Project officers (POs) do not consistently document routine monitoring or follow up on that monitoring to help grantees address problems, as required by HHS and HRSA guidance. The purpose of routine monitoring is to enable POs to answer grantee questions about program requirements, provide technical assistance (TA), and follow up on grantee corrective actions in response to previously provided TA. However, GAO found that most POs did not document routine monitoring calls with grantees—only 4 of the 25 PO files GAO reviewed from 2010 and 8 of the 25 files GAO reviewed from 2011 contained documentation of monitoring calls at least quarterly. HRSA often did not follow HHS regulations and guidance in implementing restrictive drawdowns, a special award condition HRSA …

This report looks at the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) entered into by the secretaries of Energy, Agriculture, and the Navy in order to “assist the development and support of a sustainable commercial biofuels industry.” The report specifically discusses how and why this understanding should be funded and why it is important for the U.S.

This report looks at the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to “assist the development and support of a sustainable commercial biofuels industry" which was entered into by the Secretaries of Energy, Agriculture, and the Navy. It raises issues and concerns for Congress to consider when deciding how to fund MOU.

This report aims to inform consideration of H.R. 890 and S. 466 and possible alternatives by providing; background on Holocaust-era compensation and restitution issues; an overview of ICHEIC, including criticism and support of its claims process and Administration policy on ICHEIC; and an overview of litigation on Holocaust-era insurance claims and the proposed legislation.

This report provides a description of FDA's medical device review process divided into two parts: pre market requirements and post market requirements. Appendix A provides a brief history of laws governing medical device regulation and Appendix B provides a table of acronyms used in the report.

This report looks at the background and current status of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), which was formed to increase international cooperation in interdicting shipments of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

This report provides an overview of Guatemala's current political and economic conditions, relations with the United States, and several issues likely to figure in future decisions by Congress and the Administration regarding Guatemala. With respect to continued cooperation and foreign assistance, these issues include security and governance; protection of human rights and human rights conditions on some U.S. military aid to Guatemala; support for the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala; combating narcotics trafficking and organized crime; trade relations; and intercountry adoption.

Achieving efficient and correct synchronization of multiple threads is a difficult and error-prone task at small scale and, as we march towards extreme scale computing, will be even more challenging when the resulting application is supposed to utilize millions of cores efficiently. Transactional Memory (TM) is a promising technique to ease the burden on the programmer, but only recently has become available on commercial hardware in the new Blue Gene/Q system and hence the real benefit for realistic applications has not been studied, yet. This paper presents the first performance results of TM embedded into OpenMP on a prototype system of BG/Q and characterizes code properties that will likely lead to benefits when augmented with TM primitives. We first, study the influence of thread count, environment variables and memory layout on TM performance and identify code properties that will yield performance gains with TM. Second, we evaluate the combination of OpenMP with multiple synchronization primitives on top of MPI to determine suitable task to thread ratios per node. Finally, we condense our findings into a set of best practices. These are applied to a Monte Carlo Benchmark and a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method. In both cases an optimized TM version, …

This report gives an overview of the current government in Haiti and status of recovery efforts following the 2010 earthquake. The Haitian government and the international donor community are implementing a 10-year recovery plan focusing on territorial, economic, social, and institutional rebuilding. The main priorities for U.S. policy regarding Haiti are to strengthen fragile democratic processes, continue to improve security, and promote economic development. Other concerns include the cost and effectiveness of U.S. aid; protecting human rights; combating narcotics, arms, and human trafficking; and alleviating poverty. Congressional concerns include the pace and effectiveness of reconstruction; respect for human rights, particularly for women; counternarcotics efforts; and security issues.

This report is a primer on drug approval and regulation: it describes how drugs are approved and come to the market, including FDA's role in that process and FDA and industry roles once drugs are on the pharmacy shelves.

This report gives an overview of the current government in Haiti and status of recovery efforts following the 2010 earthquake. The Haitian government and the international donor community are implementing a 10-year recovery plan focusing on territorial, economic, social, and institutional rebuilding. The main priorities for U.S. policy regarding Haiti are to strengthen fragile democratic processes, continue to improve security, and promote economic development. Other concerns include the cost and effectiveness of U.S. aid; protecting human rights; combating narcotics, arms, and human trafficking; and alleviating poverty. Congressional concerns include the pace and effectiveness of reconstruction; respect for human rights, particularly for women; counternarcotics efforts; and security issues.

This report looks at issues arising from disputes between Congress and the executive branch. It begins by providing a general background on the types of international agreements that are binding upon the United States, as well as considerations affecting whether they take the form of a treaty or an executive agreement. Next, the report discusses historical precedents as to the role that security agreements have taken, with specific attention paid to past agreements entered with Afghanistan, Germany, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Iraq. The report discusses the oversight role that Congress exercises with respect to entering and implementing international agreements involving the United States.

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The project supported the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in identifying and evaluating the regulatory implications concerning the control and protection systems proposed for use in the Department of Energy's (DOE) Next-Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP). The NGNP, using modular high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) technology, is to provide commercial industries with electricity and high-temperature process heat for industrial processes such as hydrogen production. Process heat temperatures range from 700 to 950 C, and for the upper range of these operation temperatures, the modular HTGR is sometimes referred to as the Very High Temperature Reactor or VHTR. Initial NGNP designs are for operation in the lower temperature range. The defining safety characteristic of the modular HTGR is that its primary defense against serious accidents is to be achieved through its inherent properties of the fuel and core. Because of its strong negative temperature coefficient of reactivity and the capability of the fuel to withstand high temperatures, fast-acting active safety systems or prompt operator actions should not be required to prevent significant fuel failure and fission product release. The plant is designed such that its inherent features should provide adequate protection despite operational errors or equipment failure. Figure 1 shows an example modular HTGR …

In fiscal year 2005, the Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to undertake a broad array of tasks to either directly or indirectly address the barriers that faced much of the Great Plains states and their efforts to produce and transmit wind energy at the time. This program, entitled Great Plains Wind Energy Transmission Development Project, was focused on the central goal of stimulating wind energy development through expansion of new transmission capacity or development of new wind energy capacity through alternative market development. The original task structure was as follows: Task 1 - Regional Renewable Credit Tracking System (later rescoped to Small Wind Turbine Training Center); Task 2 - Multistate Transmission Collaborative; Task 3 - Wind Energy Forecasting System; and Task 4 - Analysis of the Long-Term Role of Hydrogen in the Region. As carried out, Task 1 involved the creation of the Small Wind Turbine Training Center (SWTTC). The SWTTC, located Grand Forks, North Dakota, consists of a single wind turbine, the Endurance S-250, on a 105-foot tilt-up guyed tower. The S-250 is connected to the electrical grid on the 'load side' of the electric meter, and the power …