A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The current H1N1 pandemic highlights the threat posed to our nation by an influenza pandemic. The previous administration's Homeland Security Council (HSC) issued the Implementation Plan for the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza (Plan) in May 2006 to help address a pandemic. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) was asked to (1) determine how the HSC and responsible federal agencies monitor the progress and completion of the Plan's action items; and (2) assess the extent to which selected action items have been completed. To do this, GAO interviewed officials from the HSC and the six federal agencies responsible for implementing most of the Plan, and analyzed a random sample of 60 action items. While this report does not assess the response efforts for the H1N1 pandemic, GAO continues to monitor the outbreak and the federal response."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Under contract with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), states conduct surveys at nursing homes to help ensure compliance with federal quality standards. Over the past decade, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has reported on inconsistencies in states' assessment of nursing homes' quality of care, including understatement--that is, when state surveys fail to cite serious deficiencies or cite them at too low a level. In 2008, GAO reported that 9 states had high and 10 had low understatement based on CMS data for fiscal years 2002 through 2007. This report examines the effect on nursing home deficiency understatement of CMS's survey process, workforce shortages and training, supervisory reviews of surveys, and state agency practices. GAO primarily collected data through two Web-based questionnaires sent to all eligible nursing home surveyors and state agency directors, achieving 61 and 98 percent response rates, respectively."

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Bi-weekly student newspaper from Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas that includes campus news and local news of interest to students along with advertising.

Daily student newspaper from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

Weekly student newspaper from the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas that includes campus news and commentaries along with advertising.

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 a school district may expend district funds to pay a civil penalty imposed by a municipality (RQ-0710-GA)

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 under chapter 1102 of the Occupations Code, the Texas Real Estate Commission has jurisdiction to take disciplinary action against a licensed inspector who performs a real estate inspection for a person who is not a buyer or seller of real property (RQ-0804-GA)

This report discusses the United States’ foreign food aid program. Agricultural development has been a component of the United States’ foreign aid program, but U.S. funding for such assistance has declined from about 20% of U.S. official development assistance (ODA) in 1980 to around 5% in 2007.

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Among the different theoretical approaches able to describe fission, microscopic ones can help us in the understanding of this process, as they have the advantage of describing the nuclear structure and the dynamics in a consistent manner. The sole input of the calculations is the nucleon-nucleon interaction. Such a microscopic time-dependent and quantum mechanical formalism has already been used, based on the Gaussian Overlap Approximation of the Generator Coordinate Method with the adiabatic approximation, to analyze the collective dynamics of low-energy fission in {sup 238}U. However, at higher energies, a few MeV above the barrier, the adiabatic approximation doesn't seem valid anymore. Indeed, manifestations of proton pair breaking have been observed in {sup 238}U and {sup 239}U for an excitation energy of 2.3 MeV above the barrier. Taking the intrinsic excitations into account during the fission process will enable us to determine the coupling between collective and intrinsic degrees of freedom, in particular from saddle to scission. Guidelines of the new formalism under development are presented and some preliminary results on overlaps between non excited and excited states are discussed.

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The Savannah River Site (SRS) is currently storing plutonium materials in the K-Area Materials Storage (KAMS) facility. The materials are packaged per the DOE 3013 Standard and transported and stored in KAMS in Model 9975 shipping packages, which include double containment vessels sealed with dual O-rings made of Parker Seals compound V0835-75 (based on Viton{reg_sign} GLT). The outer O-ring of each containment vessel is credited for leaktight containment per ANSI N14.5. O-ring service life depends on many factors, including the failure criterion, environmental conditions, overall design, fabrication quality and assembly practices. A preliminary life prediction model has been developed for the V0835-75 O-rings in KAMS. The conservative model is based primarily on long-term compression stress relaxation (CSR) experiments and Arrhenius accelerated-aging methodology. For model development purposes, seal lifetime is defined as a 90% loss of measurable sealing force. Thus far, CSR experiments have only reached this target level of degradation at temperatures {ge} 300 F. At lower temperatures, relaxation values are more tolerable. Using time-temperature superposition principles, the conservative model predicts a service life of approximately 20-25 years at a constant seal temperature of 175 F. This represents a maximum payload package at a constant ambient temperature of 104 F, …

Baylor University Center for Reservoir and Aquatic Systems Research (CRASR) has conducted a phased, comprehensive evaluation of Lake Whitney to determine its suitability for use as a regional water supply reservoir. The area along the Interstate 35 corridor between Dallas / Fort Worth Metroplex and the Waco / Temple Centroplex represents one of the fastest growth areas in the State of Texas and reliable water supplies are critical to sustainable growth. Lake Whitney is situated midway between these two metropolitan areas. Currently, the City of Whitney as well as all of Bosque and Hill counties obtain their potable water from the Trinity Sands aquifer. Additionally, parts of the adjoining McLennan and Burleson counties utilize the Trinity sands aquifer system as a supplement to their surface water supplies. Population growth coupled with increasing demands on this aquifer system in both the Metroplex and Centroplex have resulted in a rapid depletion of groundwater in these rural areas. The Lake Whitney reservoir represents both a potentially local and regional solution for an area experiencing high levels of growth. Because of the large scope of this project as well as the local, regional and national implications, we have designed a multifaceted approach that will …

This report was prepared to document the physical, chemical and radiological properties of plutonium oxide materials that were processed in the Plutonium Fuel Form Facility (PuFF) in building 235-F at the Savannah River Plant (now known as the Savannah River Site) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. An understanding of these properties is needed to support current project planning for the safe and effective decontamination and deactivation (D&D) of PuFF. The PuFF mission was production of heat sources to power Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) used in space craft. The specification for the PuO{sub 2} used to fabricate the heat sources required that the isotopic content of the plutonium be 83 {+-} 1% Pu-238 due to its high decay heat of 0.57 W/g. The high specific activity of Pu-238 (17.1 Ci/g) due to alpha decay makes this material very difficult to manage. The production process produced micron-sized particles which proved difficult to contain during operations, creating personnel contamination concerns and resulting in the expenditure of significant resources to decontaminate spaces after loss of material containment. This report examines high {sup 238}Pu-content material properties relevant to the D&D of PuFF. These relevant properties are those that contribute to the mobility of …

Methods for the numerical discretization of the Vlasov equation should efficiently use the phase space discretization and should introduce only enough numerical dissipation to promote stability and control oscillations. A new high-order, non-linear, finite-volume algorithm for the Vlasov equation that discretely conserves particle number and controls oscillations is presented. The method is fourth-order in space and time in well-resolved regions, but smoothly reduces to a third-order upwind scheme as features become poorly resolved. The new scheme is applied to several standard problems for the Vlasov-Poisson system, and the results are compared with those from other finite-volume approaches, including an artificial viscosity scheme and the Piecewise Parabolic Method. It is shown that the new scheme is able to control oscillations while preserving a higher degree of fidelity of the solution than the other approaches.

Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Funeral program for Keith Lionel Hays, born May 18, 1961 and died November 14, 2009. The funeral was held November 24, 2009 at Calvary Baptist Church, officiated by Rev. Kevin Nelson. Funeral arrangements were made through M. E. Rodriquez Funeral Home and he was buried in Southern Memorial Park in San Antonio, Texas.

Actinide and the Rare Earth materials exhibit many unique and diverse physical, chemical and magnetic properties, in large part because of the complexity of their f electronic structure. This Topical Conference will focus upon the chemistry, physics and materials science in Lanthanide and Actinide materials, driven by 4f and 5f electronic structure. Particular emphasis will be placed upon 4f/5f magnetic structure, surface science and thin film properties. For the actinides, fundamental actinide science and its role in resolving technical challenges posed by actinide materials will be stressed. Both basic and applied experimental approaches, including synchrotron-radiation-based investigations, as well as theoretical modeling and computational simulations, are planned to be part of the Topical Conference. Of particular importance are the issues related to the potential renaissance in Nuclear Fuels, including synthesis, oxidation, corrosion, intermixing, stability in extreme environments, prediction of properties via benchmarked simulations, separation science, environmental impact and disposal of waste products.

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an interview with Richard Haw. Haw joined the Navy in April of 1943. He completed Hospital Corps and Operating Room technician training. He completed Amphibious Training with the 5th Marine Division at Camp Pendleton in California. In 1945 he traveled with the 5th Marine Division aboard the USS Hansford (APA-106) to participate in the Battle of Iwo Jima. Haw was wounded during the battle by an explosion. From Iwo he participated in the Battle of Okinawa. Haw provides details of his training and aiding the wounded during battles. He was discharged in 1946.

Poster advertising a concert by One O'Clock Lab Band with guest artist John Mosca on November 24, 2009. Poster is signed by John Mosca with a personal note to Steve Wiest.

Algebraic multigrid (AMG) solvers have proven to be extremely efficient on distributed-memory architectures. However, when executed on modern multicore cluster architectures, we face new challenges that can significantly harm AMG's performance. We discuss our experiences on such an architecture and present a set of techniques that help users to overcome the associated problems, including thread and process pinning and correct memory associations. We have implemented most of the techniques in a MultiCore SUPport library (MCSup), which helps to map OpenMP applications to multicore machines. We present results using both an MPI-only and a hybrid MPI/OpenMP model.

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an interview with Richard Haw. Haw joined the Navy in April of 1943. He completed Hospital Corps and Operating Room technician training. He completed Amphibious Training with the 5th Marine Division at Camp Pendleton in California. In 1945 he traveled with the 5th Marine Division aboard the USS Hansford (APA-106) to participate in the Battle of Iwo Jima. Haw was wounded during the battle by an explosion. From Iwo he participated in the Battle of Okinawa. Haw provides details of his training and aiding the wounded during battles. He was discharged in 1946.