A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Each day, news reports cite instances of older adults across the United States being abused, denied needed care, or financially exploited, often by those they depend on. This report contains information on (1) existing estimates of the extent of elder abuse and their quality, (2) factors associated with elder abuse and its impact on victims, (3) characteristics and challenges of state Adult Protective Services (APS) responsible for addressing elder abuse, and (4) federal support and leadership in this area. To obtain this information, GAO reviewed relevant research; visited six states and surveyed state APS programs; analyzed budgetary and other federal documents; reviewed federal laws and regulations; and interviewed federal officials, researchers, and elder abuse experts."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses the Department of Defense's (DOD) oversight of its Military Tuition Assistance (TA) Program. In fiscal year 2010, the TA Program provided $531 million in tuition assistance to approximately 302,000 service members who elected to pursue off-duty postsecondary education. DOD offers these benefits to service members in order to help them fulfill their academic goals and enhance their professional development. Program oversight for voluntary education programs is the responsibility of the Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. In addition, the military services are responsible for establishing, maintaining, operating, and implementing the programs at 350 education centers on military installations worldwide. Education centers are managed by an education services officer (ESO) and staff, such as education guidance counselors. This testimony discusses (1) DOD's oversight of schools receiving TA funds and (2) the extent to which DOD coordinates with accrediting agencies and the Department of Education (Education) in its oversight activities. This testimony is based on GAO's recent report, titled DOD Education Benefits: Increased Oversight of Tuition Assistance Program Is Needed. Our report and testimony are based on work we performed between August 2010 and February 2011."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses our work on the Making Home Affordable (MHA) program, including the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). Since the Department of the Treasury (Treasury) first announced the framework for its MHA program over 2 years ago, the number of homeowners facing potential foreclosure has remained at historically high levels. HAMP, the key component of MHA, provides financial incentives to servicers and mortgage holders/investors to offer modifications on first-lien mortgages. The modifications are intended to reduce borrowers' monthly mortgage payments to affordable levels to help these homeowners avoid foreclosure and keep their homes. Since HAMP's inception, concerns have been raised that the program is not reaching the expected number of homeowners. In two prior reports, we looked at the implementation of the HAMP first-lien modification program, noted that Treasury faced challenges in implementing it, and made several recommendations intended to address these challenges. In addition, our ongoing work examines the extent to which additional MHA programs have been successful at reaching struggling homeowners, the characteristics of homeowners who have been assisted by the HAMP first-lien modification program, and the outcomes for borrowers who do not complete HAMP …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses ending elder abuse, neglect, and exploitation. Each day, news reports cite instances of older adults across the U.S. being abused and denied needed care, often by those they depend on the most. Neglect and abuse often go hand in hand with financial exploitation, which can rob older adults of the life savings and property they count on to support them in old age. In addition to the physical, psychological, and economic harm elder abuse inflicts on older adults, it can impose an economic burden on all Americans, increasing public expenditures on health care and the demand for a range of supportive services. A 2009 study estimated that 14.1 percent of non-institutionalized older adults nationwide had experienced some form of elder abuse in the past year. In all likelihood, this underestimated the full extent of elder abuse, however, because older adults who are highly cognitively impaired may be underrepresented in this study. States are primarily responsible for protecting older adults from abuse, neglect, and exploitation. In each state, an Adult Protective Services (APS) program aims to identify, investigate, resolve, and prevent such abuse. On the federal …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) overarching mission is to protect human health and the environment by implementing and enforcing the laws intended to improve the quality of the nation's air, water, and lands. EPA's policies and programs affect virtually all segments of the economy, society, and government. As such, it operates in a highly complex and controversial regulatory arena. In recent years, GAO's work has identified several significant and persistent challenges across a range of EPA programs and activities and has proposed corrective actions to enable the agency to more effectively accomplish its mission. Based on this work, this testimony highlights some of the major management challenges facing EPA today, the agency's efforts to address them, and the work GAO believes remains to be done."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In the February 2011 High-Risk Series update, GAO continued designation of Medicare as a high-risk program because its complexity and susceptibility to improper payments, combined with its size, have led to serious management challenges. In 2010, Medicare covered 47 million people and had estimated outlays of $509 billion. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has estimated fiscal year 2010 improper payments for Medicare fee-for-service and Medicare Advantage of almost $48 billion. This statement focuses on the nature of the risk in the program, progress made, and specific actions needed. It is based on GAO work developed by using a variety of methodologies--including analyses of Medicare claims, review of policies, interviews, and site visits--and information from CMS on the status of actions to address GAO recommendations."

This report discusses the current political state of Afghanistan, as well as the Afghan government. This report also discusses Afghanistan's relationship with the United States, particularly U.S. efforts to urge President Hamid Karzai, to address corruption within the Afghan government. The report also includes discussion of election fraud and corruption in Afghanistan.

This report analyzes the relationship between the dollar and the price of oil and how the two might interact. This report provides an assessment of the impact a range of prices of imported oil could have on the U.S. trade deficit.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Bi-weekly student newspaper from Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Mannford, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

This report discusses motivating factors underlying the resurgent interest in nuclear power, the nuclear power industry's current state of affairs, and the interdependence of the various stages of the nuclear fuel cycle. A number of proposals have been offered that are aimed at limiting direct participation in the global nuclear fuel industry by assuring access to nuclear fuel supplies.

This report provides a section-by-section summary of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA), which provides civil protections and rights to individuals based on their service in the Reserve and National Guard military units.

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

Weekly newspaper from Rusk, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with extensive advertising.

Weekly student newspaper from Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, Texas that includes campus and local news along with advertising.

The advancement of computational technology has resulted in the wide-spread availability of powerful radiation transport Monte Carlo codes. Prevailing practices today rely heavily on Monte Carlo codes to provide the basis for assessing the reactivity of various fissile systems for nuclear criticality safety (NCS). In 1958, Weinberg and Wigner expressed their concerns on a 'deplorable trend in reactor design - the tendency to substitute a code for a theory'. Unfortunately, their concerns have largely become a reality in many modern NCS practices. lacking the time or information to understand the underlying neutron physics of the fissile system under consideration is indeed a deplorable trend. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that many features of criticality hand calculation methods are indeed based upon the fundamentals of the density law and that many correlations of important physics parameters can be more easily understood from such a perspective. Historically, the density law was recognized by many pioneers in the field, including during the Manhattan Project. However, it was by and large an 'oral tradition' in that bits and pieces of great physical insights of the pioneers were scattered in many earlier publications. This paper attempts to bring together some of the …

Individual raw datastreams from instrumentation at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility fixed and mobile sites are collected and sent to the Data Management Facility (DMF) at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) for processing in near real-time. Raw and processed data are then sent approximately daily to the ARM Archive, where they are made available to users. For each instrument, we calculate the ratio of the actual number of processed data records received daily at the Archive to the expected number of data records. The results are tabulated by (1) individual datastream, site, and month for the current year and (2) site and fiscal year (FY) dating back to 1998.

It is widely recognized that the results of safety assessment calculations provide an important contribution to the safety arguments for a disposal facility, but cannot in themselves adequately demonstrate the safety of the disposal system. The safety assessment and a broader range of arguments and activities need to be considered holistically to justify radioactive waste disposal at any particular site. Many programs are therefore moving towards the production of what has become known as a Safety Case, which includes all of the different activities that are conducted to demonstrate the safety of a disposal concept. Recognizing the growing interest in the concept of a Safety Case, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is undertaking an intercomparison and harmonization project called PRISM (Practical Illustration and use of the Safety Case Concept in the Management of Near-surface Disposal). The PRISM project is organized into four Task Groups that address key aspects of the Safety Case concept: Task Group 1 - Understanding the Safety Case; Task Group 2 - Disposal facility design; Task Group 3 - Managing waste acceptance; and Task Group 4 - Managing uncertainty. This paper addresses the work of Task Group 4, which is investigating approaches for managing the uncertainties …

The results of a theoretical study of HOCO{sup −} photodetachment are presented, with a view toward understanding the origin of two peaks observed by Lu and Continetti (Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 113005 (2007)) in the photoelectron kinetic energy spectrum very close to threshold. It is shown that the peaks can be attributed to vibrational Feshbach resonances of dipole-bound trans-HOCO{sup −}, and not s- and p-wave shape resonances as previously assumed. Fixed-nuclei variational electron-HOCO scattering calculations are used to compute photodetachment cross sections and laboratory-frame photoelectron angular distributions. The calculations show a broad A′′(#25;{pi}*)-shape resonance several eV above threshold.

The physics program of Run II at the Tevatron includes precision electroweak measurements such as the determination of the top quark and W boson masses; bottom and charm physics including the determination of the B{sub s} and D{sup 0} mixing parameters; studies of the strong interaction; and searches for the Higgs particle, supersymmetric particles, hidden space-time dimensions and quark substructure. All of these measurements benefit from a high-resolution tracking detector. Most of them rely heavily on the efficient identification of heavy flavored B hadrons by detection of displaced secondary vertices, and are enhanced by the capability to trigger on tracks not coming from the primary vertex. This is uniquely provided by CDF's finely-segmented silicon detectors surrounding the interaction region. Thus CDF experiment's physics potential critically depends on the performance of its silicon detectors. The CDF silicon detectors were designed to operate up to 2-3 fb{sup -1} of accumulated pji collisions, with an upgrade planned thereafter. However, the upgrade project was canceled in 2003 and Run II has been extended through 2011, with an expected total delivered integrated luminosity of 12 fb{sup -1} or more. Several preventive measures were taken to keep the original detector operational and maintain its performance. The …

The modification of particle distributions by low amplitude magnetohydrodynamic modes is an important topic for magnetically confined plasmas. Low amplitude modes are known to be capable of producing significant modification of injected neutral beam profiles, and the same can be expected in burning plasmas for the alpha particle distributions. Flattening of a distribution in an island due to phase mixing and portions of phase space becoming stochastic lead to modification of the particle distribution, a process extremely rapid in the time scale of an experiment but still very long compared to the time scale of guiding center simulations. Large amplitude modes can cause profile avalanche and particle loss. Thus it is very valuable to be able to predict the temporal evolution of a particle distribution produced by a given spectrum of magnetohydrodynamic modes. In this paper we further develop and investigate the use of a new method of determining domains of phase space in which good KAM surfaces do not exist and use this method to examine a well documented case of profile modification by instabilities.

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) cause significant economic and ecological damage worldwide. Despite considerable efforts, a comprehensive understanding of the factors that promote these blooms has been lacking because the biochemical pathways that facilitate their dominance relative to other phytoplankton within specific environments have not been identified. Here, biogeochemical measurements demonstrated that the harmful alga Aureococcus anophagefferens outcompeted co-occurring phytoplankton in estuaries with elevated levels of dissolved organic matter and turbidity and low levels of dissolved inorganic nitrogen. We subsequently sequenced the first HAB genome (A. anophagefferens) and compared its gene complement to those of six competing phytoplankton species identified via metaproteomics. Using an ecogenomic approach, we specifically focused on the gene sets that may facilitate dominance within the environmental conditions present during blooms. A. anophagefferens possesses a larger genome (56 mbp) and more genes involved in light harvesting, organic carbon and nitrogen utilization, and encoding selenium- and metal-requiring enzymes than competing phytoplankton. Genes for the synthesis of microbial deterrents likely permit the proliferation of this species with reduced mortality losses during blooms. Collectively, these findings suggest that anthropogenic activities resulting in elevated levels of turbidity, organic matter, and metals have opened a niche within coastal ecosystems that ideally suits the …

Synchrotron or FEL X-ray mirrors are required to deliver an X-ray beam from its source to an experiment location, without contributing significantly to wave front distortion. Accurate mirror figure measurements are required prior to installation to meet this intent. This paper describes how a 300 mm aperture phasing interferometer was calibrated to <1 nm absolute accuracy and used to mount and measure 450 mm long flats for the Linear Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Measuring focus mirrors with an interferometer requires additional calibration, because high fringe density introduces systematic errors from the interferometer's imaging optics. This paper describes how these errors can be measured and corrected. The calibration approaches described here apply equally well to interferometers larger than 300 mm aperture, which are becoming more common in optics laboratories. The objective of this effort was to install LCLS flats with < 10 nm of spherical curvature, and < 2 nm rms a-sphere. The objective was met by measuring the mirrors after fabrication, coating and mounting, using a 300 mm aperture phasing interferometer calibrated to an accuracy < 1 nm. The key to calibrating the interferometer accurately was to sample the error using independent geometries that are …