Homeownership Counseling: Although Research Suggests Some Benefits, Implementation and Evaluation Challenges Exist (open access)

Homeownership Counseling: Although Research Suggests Some Benefits, Implementation and Evaluation Challenges Exist

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Homeownership counseling can help consumers learn about buying a home and give them tools to deal with setbacks that could keep them from making timely mortgage payments. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) approves and provides grants to housing counseling agencies and has also implemented a requirement that borrowers seeking federally insured reverse mortgages through the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) program receive counseling before taking out a HECM. The U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) has also implemented a counseling requirement as part of its mortgage modification efforts under the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). This statement discusses (1) what research suggests about the effectiveness of homeownership counseling and the challenges of conducting such research, (2) shortcomings that prior GAO work found in federal agencies' implementation of homeownership counseling requirements, and (3) the status of efforts to establish an Office of Housing Counseling within HUD. In preparing this statement, GAO relied on its past work on homeownership counseling, including a review of research and interviews with federal agency staff on implementing and evaluating counseling programs."
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: United States. Government Accountability Office.
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
Joint Strike Fighter: Implications of Program Restructuring and Other Recent Developments on Key Aspects of DOD's Prior Alternate Engine Analyses (open access)

Joint Strike Fighter: Implications of Program Restructuring and Other Recent Developments on Key Aspects of DOD's Prior Alternate Engine Analyses

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "After supporting a Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) acquisition strategy that called for a competitive engine development of the F135 and F136 engines, the Department of Defense (DOD) stopped requesting funding for the F136 alternate engine in its fiscal year 2007 budget request, but the Congress continued to fund it through the 2010 budget. In February 2010, DOD projected that it would cost an additional $2.9 billion through 2016 to support an alternate engine program. DOD decided that an engine competition would not likely generate enough long-term savings to justify this up-front investment and subsequently terminated the alternate engine program. In 2010, at congressional request, we reviewed the basis for DOD's $2.9 billion funding projection and reported that the projection did not include the same level of fidelity and precision normally associated with a detailed, comprehensive cost estimate and that the amount of up-front investment needed could be lower if two key assumptions in DOD's analysis were changed. Moreover, since DOD's projection and our last review, several fundamental changes in the JSF aircraft and engine programs have taken place. We examined the potential implications of these changes to the …
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: United States. Government Accountability Office.
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
Drug Safety: FDA Faces Challenges Overseeing the Foreign Drug Manufacturing Supply Chain (open access)

Drug Safety: FDA Faces Challenges Overseeing the Foreign Drug Manufacturing Supply Chain

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Globalization has placed increasing demands on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in ensuring the safety and effectiveness of drugs marketed in the United States. The pharmaceutical industry has increasingly relied on global supply chains in which each manufacturing step may be outsourced to foreign establishments. As part of its efforts, FDA may conduct inspections of foreign drug manufacturing establishments, but there are concerns that the complexity of the drug manufacturing supply chain and the volume of imported drugs has created regulatory challenges for FDA. FDA has begun taking steps to address some of these concerns, such as the establishment of overseas offices. This statement discusses (1) FDA's inspection of foreign drug manufacturing establishments, (2) the information FDA has on these establishments, and (3) recent FDA initiatives to improve its oversight of the supply chain. The statement presents findings based primarily on GAO reports since 2008 related to FDA's oversight of the supply chain. These reports include Food and Drug Administration: Overseas Offices Have Taken Steps to Help Ensure Import Safety, but More Long-Term Planning Is Needed (GAO-10-960, Sept. 30, 2010) and Drug Safety: FDA Has Conducted More …
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: United States. Government Accountability Office.
Object Type: Text
System: The UNT Digital Library
Intelligence Issues for Congress (open access)

Intelligence Issues for Congress

This report gives an overview of current intelligence issues of interest to the 112th Congress. It includes background and analysis including most recent development, ongoing Congressional concerns, specific issues for the 112th Congress, and a summary of related legislation from the 109th through the 112th Congresses.
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: Best, Richard A., Jr.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Texas Attorney General Opinion: GA-0886 (open access)

Texas Attorney General Opinion: GA-0886

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether chapter 603, Texas Government Code, is applicable to notaries public (RQ-0968-GA)
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: Texas. Attorney-General's Office.
Object Type: Text
System: The Portal to Texas History
THE POTENTIAL OF NANOPARTICLE ENHANCED IONIC LIQUIDS (NEILS) AS ADVANCED HEAT TRANSFER FLUIDS (open access)

THE POTENTIAL OF NANOPARTICLE ENHANCED IONIC LIQUIDS (NEILS) AS ADVANCED HEAT TRANSFER FLUIDS

Interest in capturing the energy of the sun is rising as demands for renewable energy sources increase. One area of developing research is the use of concentrating solar power (CSP), where the solar energy is concentrated by using mirrors to direct the sunlight towards a collector filled with a heat transfer fluid (HTF). The HTF transfers the collected energy into pressurized steam, which is used to generate energy. The greater the energy collected by the HTF, the more efficent the electrical energy production is, thus the overall efficiency is controlled by the thermal fluid. Commercial HTFs such as Therminol{reg_sign} (VP-1), which is a blend of biphenyl and diphenyl oxide, have a significant vapor pressure, especially at elevated temperatures. In order for these volatile compounds to be used in CSP systems, the system either has to be engineered to prevent the phase change (i.e., volatilization and condensation) through pressurization of the system, or operate across the phase change. Over thirty years ago, a class of low-melting organic compounds were developed with negligible vapor pressure. These compounds are referred to as ionic liquids (ILs), which are organic-based compounds with discrete charges that cause a significant decrease in their vapor pressure. As a …
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: Fox, E.; Bridges, N. & Visser, A.
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library
Mechanical Design of the HER Synchrotron Light Monitor Primary Mirror (open access)

Mechanical Design of the HER Synchrotron Light Monitor Primary Mirror

This paper describes the mechanical design of the primary mirror that images the visible portion of the synchrotron radiation (SR) extracted from the High Energy Ring (HER) of the PEP-II B-Factory. During off-axis operation, the water-cooled GlidCop mirror is subjected to a heat flux in excess of 2000 W/cm2. When on-axis imaging occurs, the heat flux due to scattered SR, resistive wall losses and Higher-Order-Mode (HOM) heating is estimated at 1 W/cm2. The imaging surface is plated with Electroless Nickel to improve its optical characteristics. The design requirements for the primary mirror are listed and discussed. Calculated mechanical distortions and stresses experienced by the mirror during on-axis and off-axis operation will be presented.
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: Daly, Edward F.; Fisher, Alan S.; Kurita, Nadine R. & Langton, J.
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library
Event-by-event study of neutron observables in spontaneous and thermal fission (open access)

Event-by-event study of neutron observables in spontaneous and thermal fission

The event-by-event fission model FREYA is extended to spontaneous fission of actinides and a variety of neutron observables are studied for spontaneous fission and fission induced by thermal neutrons with a view towards possible applications for SNM detection. We have shown that event-by-event models of fission, such as FREYA, provide a powerful tool for studying fission neutron correlations. Our results demonstrate that these correlations are significant and exhibit a dependence on the fissioning nucleus. Since our method is phenomenological in nature, good input data are especially important. Some of the measurements employed in FREYA are rather old and statistics limited. It would be useful to repeat some of these studies with modern detector techniques. In addition, most experiments made to date have not made simultaneous measurements of the fission products and the prompt observables, such as neutron and photons. Such data, while obviously more challenging to obtain, would be valuable for achieving a more complete understanding of the fission process.
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: Vogt, R & Randrup, J
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library
Study of the Power Supply Ripple Effect on teh Dynamics at SPEAR (open access)

Study of the Power Supply Ripple Effect on teh Dynamics at SPEAR

For long term stability analysis time variation of tunes is important. We have proposed and tested a technique for measuring the magnitude of this variation. This was made possible by using tune extraction algorithms that require small number of turns thus giving an instantaneous tune of the machine. In this paper we demonstrate the measured effect of the tune modulation with 60 Hz power supplies ripple, power line interference from SLAC linac operating at 30 Hz repetition rate, and nonperiodic variation.
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: Terebilo, A.; Pellegrini, C.; Cornacchia, M.; Corbett, J. & Martin, D.
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library
Efficient scalable algorithms for hierarchically semiseparable matrices (open access)

Efficient scalable algorithms for hierarchically semiseparable matrices

Hierarchically semiseparable (HSS) matrix algorithms are emerging techniques in constructing the superfast direct solvers for both dense and sparse linear systems. Here, we develope a set of novel parallel algorithms for the key HSS operations that are used for solving large linear systems. These include the parallel rank-revealing QR factorization, the HSS constructions with hierarchical compression, the ULV HSS factorization, and the HSS solutions. The HSS tree based parallelism is fully exploited at the coarse level. The BLACS and ScaLAPACK libraries are used to facilitate the parallel dense kernel operations at the #12;ne-grained level. We have appplied our new parallel HSS-embedded multifrontal solver to the anisotropic Helmholtz equations for seismic imaging, and were able to solve a linear system with 6.4 billion unknowns using 4096 processors, in about 20 minutes. The classical multifrontal solver simply failed due to high demand of memory. To our knowledge, this is the #12;first successful demonstration of employing the HSS algorithms in solving the truly large-scale real-world problems. Our parallel strategies can be easily adapted to the parallelization of the other rank structured methods.
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: Wang, Shen; Xia, Jianlin; Situ, Yingchong & Hoop, Maarten V. de
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library
Analysis and correction of vertical dispersion in RHIC (open access)

Analysis and correction of vertical dispersion in RHIC

In the context of preserving the polarization of proton beams, the source of vertical dispersion in RHIC is analyzed. Contributions to dispersion from non-coupling sources and coupling sources are compared. Based on the analysis of sources for dispersion, the right actuator for correcting dispersion is determined and a corresponding algorithm is developed.
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: Liu, C. & Minty, M.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Study of B Decays to Open Charm Final States With the BaBar Experiment (open access)

Study of B Decays to Open Charm Final States With the BaBar Experiment

Recent results from the BaBar Collaboration in the sector of B decays to open Charm are presented. Some of the results represent new precision measurements and QCD tests, some other analysis is aimed to the study of rare decays and search for new physics. Branching fractions for the modes observed for the first time are highlighted. A few results are presented also in the baryon sector.
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: Calderini, Giovanni & /INFN, Pisa /Pisa U.
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library
Novel polymer membrane process for pre-combustion CO{sub 2} capture from coal-fired syngas (open access)

Novel polymer membrane process for pre-combustion CO{sub 2} capture from coal-fired syngas

This final report describes work conducted for the Department of Energy (DOE NETL) on development of a novel polymer membrane process for pre-combustion CO{sub 2} capture from coalfired syngas (award number DE-FE0001124). The work was conducted by Membrane Technology and Research, Inc. (MTR) from September 15, 2009, through December 14, 2011. Tetramer Technologies, LLC (Tetramer) was our subcontract partner on this project. The National Carbon Capture Center (NCCC) at Wilsonville, AL, provided access to syngas gasifier test facilities. The main objective of this project was to develop a cost-effective membrane process that could be used in the relatively near-term to capture CO{sub 2} from shifted syngas generated by a coal-fired Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) power plant. In this project, novel polymeric membranes (designated as Proteus™ membranes) with separation properties superior to conventional polymeric membranes were developed. Hydrogen permeance of up to 800 gpu and H{sub 2}/CO{sub 2} selectivity of >12 was achieved using a simulated syngas mixture at 150°C and 50 psig, which exceeds the original project targets of 200 gpu for hydrogen permeance and 10 for H{sub 2}/CO{sub 2} selectivity. Lab-scale Proteus membrane modules (with a membrane area of 0.13 m{sup 2}) were also developed using scaled-up Proteus …
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: Merkel, Tim
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
United States-Canada Trade and Economic Relationship: Prospects and Challenges (open access)

United States-Canada Trade and Economic Relationship: Prospects and Challenges

This report discusses trade and economic relationship between the United States and Canada, which conduct the world’s largest bilateral trade relationship.
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: Fergusson, Ian F.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
The Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator's RF Pulse Compression And Transmission (open access)

The Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator's RF Pulse Compression And Transmission

The overmoded rf transmission and pulsed power compression system for SLAC's Next Linear Collider (NLC) program requires a high degree of transmission efficiency and mode purity to be economically feasible. To this end, a number of new, high power components and systems have been developed at X-band, which transmit rf power in the low loss, circular TE01 mode with negligible mode conversion. In addition, a highly efficient SLED-II* pulse compressor has been developed and successfully tested at high power. The system produced a 200 MW, 250 ns wide pulse with a near-perfect flat-top. In this paper we describe the design and test results of the high power pulse compression system using SLED-II. The NLC rf systems use low loss highly over-moded circular waveguides operating in the TE01 mode. The efficiency of the systems is sensitive to the mode purity of the mode excited inside these guides. We used the so called flower petal mode transducer [2] to excite the TE01 mode. This type of mode transducer is efficient, compact and capable of handling high levels of power. To make more efficient systems, we modified this device by adding several mode selective chokes to act as mode purifiers. To manipulate the …
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: Tantawi, S. G.; Adelphson, C.; Holmes, S.; Lavine, Theodore L.; Loewen, R. J.; Nantista, C. et al.
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library

Indirect Charged Higgs Constraints from BaBar

The high-statistics data samples from the BABAR and Belle B-Factory experiments provide stringent constraints on charged Higgs bosons within the context of specific New Physics models. These constraints are obtained by comparing Standard Model predictions with experimental observations in rare B decays with potential sensitivity to contributions mediated by a virtual H{sup {+-}} in tree or loop diagrams. Recent experimental results on the decays B{sup +} {yields} {mu}{sup +}{nu}, B{sup +} {yields} {tau}{sup +}{nu} and inclusive B {yields} X{sub s}{gamma} are described and the implications of these measurements for charged Higgs bosons is discussed.
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: Robertson, Steven H.
Object Type: Presentation
System: The UNT Digital Library
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Environmental Report 2010 (open access)

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Environmental Report 2010

The purposes of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Environmental Report 2010 are to record Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL's) compliance with environmental standards and requirements, describe LLNL's environmental protection and remediation programs, and present the results of environmental monitoring at the two LLNL sites - the Livermore site and Site 300. The report is prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) by LLNL's Environmental Protection Department. Submittal of the report satisfies requirements under DOE Order 231.1A, Environmental Safety and Health Reporting, and DOE Order 5400.5, Radiation Protection of the Public and Environment. The report is distributed electronically and is available at https://saer.llnl.gov/, the website for the LLNL annual environmental report. Previous LLNL annual environmental reports beginning in 1994 are also on the website. Some references in the electronic report text are underlined, which indicates that they are clickable links. Clicking on one of these links will open the related document, data workbook, or website that it refers to. The report begins with an executive summary, which provides the purpose of the report and an overview of LLNL's compliance and monitoring results. The first three chapters provide background information: Chapter 1 is an overview of the location, meteorology, and hydrogeology …
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: Jones, H. E.; Bertoldo, N. A.; Campbell, C. G.; Cerruti, S. J.; Coty, J. D.; Dibley, V. R. et al.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
NEPHELINE NUCLEATION AND CRYSTAL GROWTH IN WASTE GLASSES: INTERIM REPORT (open access)

NEPHELINE NUCLEATION AND CRYSTAL GROWTH IN WASTE GLASSES: INTERIM REPORT

None
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: Amoroso, J.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
The Deuteron and Exotic Two-Body Bound States from Lattice QCD (open access)

The Deuteron and Exotic Two-Body Bound States from Lattice QCD

Results of a high-statistics,multi-volume Lattice QCD exploration of the deuteron, the di-neutron, the H-dibaryon are presented.
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: Beane, S.; Chang, E.; Detmold, W.; Lin, H. W.; Luu, T.; Orginos, K. et al.
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library
Present Constraints on the H-dibaryon at the Physical Pointfrom Lattice QCD (open access)

Present Constraints on the H-dibaryon at the Physical Pointfrom Lattice QCD

None
Date: September 14, 2011
Creator: Beane, S.; Chang, E.; Detmold, W.; Joo, B.; Lin, H. W.; Luu, T. et al.
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library