A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 (MHPAEA) requires that employers who offer health insurance coverage for mental health conditions and substance use disorders (MH/SU) provide coverage that is no more restrictive than that offered for medical and surgical conditions. Employers were required to comply with the law for coverage that began on or after October 3, 2009. The Department of Labor (DOL), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Department of the Treasury share oversight for MHPAEA. MHPAEA also requires GAO to examine trends in health insurance coverage of MH/SU. This report describes (1) the extent to which employers cover MH/SU through private health insurance plans, and how this coverage has changed since 2008; and (2) what is known about the effect of health insurance coverage for MH/SU on enrollees' health care expenditures; access to, or use of, MH/SU services; and health status. GAO surveyed a random sample of employers about their MH/SU coverage for the most current plan year and for 2008. GAO received usable responses from 168 employers--a 24 percent response rate. …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Under the Competition in Contracting Act of 1984, GAO is required to consider protests filed by interested parties concerning the terms of solicitations or contract awards. In deciding protests, GAO makes a determination of whether the agency's actions complied with procurement statutes and regulations. Aldevera, an SDVOSB concern, argued that two solicitations issued by the Veterans Administration should have been set aside for SDVOSB concerns."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "After the Small Business Administration (SBA) was widely criticized for its performance following the 2005 Gulf Coast hurricanes, the agency took steps to reform its Disaster Loan Program. Congress also enacted the Small Business Disaster Response and Loan Improvements Act of 2008 (Act), which places new requirements on SBA to better ensure it is prepared to respond to catastrophic disasters. This testimony discusses SBA's progress in addressing certain requirements of the Act and recommendations in a 2009 GAO report to improve the Disaster Loan Program. In completing this statement, GAO reviewed and updated, as appropriate, the July 2009 report, Small Business Administration: Additional Steps Should Be Taken to Address Reforms to the Disaster Loan Program and Improve the Application Process for Future Disasters (GAO-09-755). In that report, GAO recommended that SBA should fulfill the Act's region-specific marketing and outreach requirements; complete its annual report to Congress; issue an updated Disaster Recovery Plan; develop an implementation plan for remaining requirements; and develop procedures to further improve the application process for the Disaster Loan Program. SBA generally agreed with the recommendations and stated the agency's plan to incorporate them into …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The United States has historically provided assistance to support development in Haiti. Over the last several years, Congress has attempted to promote Haiti's economic development through the use of trade preferences for Haitian products. In 2000, Congress extended preferences under the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act to allow for duty-free treatment of apparel through the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act (CBTPA). In 2006, Congress passed the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement (HOPE) Act, giving preferential access to U.S. imports of Haitian apparel. In 2008, Congress amended HOPE (now known as HOPE II), expanding trade preference provisions already in place and creating new ones to further support the growth of the apparel industry in Haiti. It was the intent of Congress that HOPE II would help Haiti attract new investment and create jobs while simultaneously providing incentives to encourage the use of inputs manufactured by U.S. companies. Most recently, in an effort to support Haiti's recovery from the devastating earthquake that hit the country in January 2010, Congress passed the Haiti Economic Lift Program (HELP) Act of 2010, expanding and modifying several trade preference provisions under HOPE II. …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) is intended to preserve and create jobs and promote economic recovery, among other things. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2011 that the Recovery Act would cost $840 billion, including more than $40 billion in science-related activities at the Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Commerce, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). These activities support fundamental research, demonstrate and deploy advanced energy technologies, purchase scientific instrumentation and equipment, and construct or modernize research facilities. The Recovery Act assigned GAO with a range of responsibilities, such as bimonthly reviews of how selected states and localities used funds, including for science-related activities. This statement updates the status of science-related Recovery Act funding for DOE, Commerce, NASA, and NSF and provides the status of prior recommendations from GAO's Recovery Act reports. This testimony is based on prior GAO work updated with agency data as of September 30, 2011."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses the fraud prevention controls within the Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) program at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Today's testimony summarizes our report, released today, on the design of VA's fraud prevention controls within the SDVOSB verification program, including recent improvements in controls. The SDVOSB program is intended to provide federal set-aside and sole-source contracts to small businesses owned and controlled by one or more service-disabled veterans. About $10.8 billion in contracts were awarded in fiscal year 2010 to firms that self-certified as SDVOSBs in the Central Contractor Registration (CCR), according to the Small Business Administration (SBA). VA's SDVOSB contracts accounted for $3.2 billion, or about 30 percent of the $10.8 billion in governmentwide SDVOSB contracts during fiscal year 2010. As of October 2011, VA's VetBiz Vendor Information Pages database shows that the agency has verified the eligibility of more than 5,000 SDVOSB firms. In addition, more than 15,000 firms also self-certified their SDVOSB eligibility in CCR. In audits of the SDVOSB program conducted in 2009 and 2010, we identified weaknesses in fraud prevention controls that allowed ineligible firms to receive about $100 million …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Compact of Free Association between the United States and the Republic of Palau, which entered into force in 1994, provided for several types of assistance aimed at promoting Palau's self-sufficiency and economic advancement. Included were 15 years of direct assistance to the Palau government; contributions to a trust fund meant to provide Palau $15 million each year in fiscal years 2010 through 2044; construction of a road system, known as the Compact Road; and federal services such as postal, weather, and aviation. U.S. agencies also provided discretionary federal programs related to health, education, and infrastructure. In 2008, GAO projected that total assistance in fiscal years 1994 though 2009 would exceed $852 million. In September 2010, the United States and Palau signed an agreement (the Agreement) that would, among other things, provide for additional assistance to Palau beginning in fiscal year 2011 and modify its trust fund. A bill, now pending, was introduced in the Senate on February 14, 2011, to approve the Agreement and appropriate funds to implement it. In this testimony, GAO updates a June 2011 testimony on (1) the Agreement's provisions for economic assistance to …

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This report is an overview of FY2012 appropriations related to Status of Discretionary Appropriations Legislation.

The understanding of the instrumental response of the GLAST Burst Monitor BGO detectors at energies above the energy range which is accessible by common laboratory radiation sources (< 4.43 MeV), is important, especially for the later cross-calibration with the LAT response in the overlap region between {approx}20 MeV to 30 MeV. In November 2006 the high-energy calibration of the GBM-BGO spare detector was performed at the small Van-de-Graaff accelerator at SLAC. High-energy gamma-rays from excited {sup 8}Be* (14.6 MeV and 17.5 MeV) and {sup 16}O* (6.1 MeV) were generated through (p, {gamma})-reactions by irradiating a LiF-target. For the calibration at lower energies radioactive sources were used. The results, including spectra, the energy/channel-relation and the dependence of energy resolution are presented.

Organic semiconductors have evolved rapidly over the last decades and currently are considered as the next-generation technology for many applications, such as organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) in flat-panel displays (FPDs) and solid state lighting (SSL), and organic solar cells (OSCs) in clean renewable energy. This dissertation focuses mainly on OLEDs. Although the commercialization of the OLED technology in FPDs is growing and appears to be just around the corner for SSL, there are still several key issues that need to be addressed: (1) the cost of OLEDs is very high, largely due to the costly current manufacturing process; (2) the efficiency of OLEDs needs to be improved. This is vital to the success of OLEDs in the FPD and SSL industries; (3) the lifetime of OLEDs, especially blue OLEDs, is the biggest technical challenge. All these issues raise the demand for new organic materials, new device structures, and continued lower-cost fabrication methods. In an attempt to address these issues, we used solution-processing methods to fabricate highly efficient small molecule OLEDs (SMOLEDs); this approach is costeffective in comparison to the more common thermal vacuum evaporation. We also successfully made efficient indium tin oxide (ITO)-free SMOLEDs to further improve the efficiency of …

As the relationship between the national building stock and various global energy issues becomes a greater concern, it has been deemed necessary to develop a system of predicting the energy consumption of large groups of buildings. Ideally this system is to take advantage of the most advanced energy simulation software available, be able to execute runs quickly, and provide concise and useful results at a level of detail that meets the users needs without inundating them with data. The resulting methodology that was developed allows the user to quickly develop and execute energy simulations of many buildings simultaneously, taking advantage of parallel processing to greatly reduce total simulation times. The result of these simulations can then be rapidly condensed and presented in a useful and intuitive manner.

We have built a prototype germanium detector with a Compton veto that is optimized for high sensitivity in the low-energy range around {approx}100 keV. It is specifically designed to address the problem to directly detect plutonium gamma emissions in spent nuclear fuel by non-destructive assay. This is not possible with current detectors due to the large low-energy background of Compton-scattered high-energy radiation from the fission products, whose gamma flux is at least 6 to 7 orders of magnitude higher than the Pu signal. Our instrument is designed to assess the feasibility to selectively suppress the background in the low-energy region around {approx}100 keV with the strongest Pu X-ray and gamma emissions lines. It employs a thin Ge detector with a large Compton veto directly behind it to suppress the background from forward-scattered radiation by anti-coincidence vetoing. This report summarizes the design considerations and the performance of the instrument.

Kinetic (aka dynamic) Monte Carlo (KMC) is a powerful method for numerical simulations of time dependent evolution applied in a wide range of contexts including biology, chemistry, physics, nuclear sciences, financial engineering, etc. Generally, in a KMC the time evolution takes place one event at a time, where the sequence of events and the time intervals between them are selected (or sampled) using random numbers. While details of the method implementation vary depending on the model and context, there exist certain common issues that limit KMC applicability in almost all applications. Among such is the notorious 'flicker problem' where the same states of the systems are repeatedly visited but otherwise no essential evolution is observed. In its simplest form the flicker problem arises when two states are connected to each other by transitions whose rates far exceed the rates of all other transitions out of the same two states. In such cases, the model will endlessly hop between the two states otherwise producing no meaningful evolution. In most situation of practical interest, the trapping cluster includes more than two states making the flicker somewhat more difficult to detect and to deal with. Several methods have been proposed to overcome or …

KGS Buildings LLC (KGS) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have developed a simplified control algorithm and prototype low-lift chiller controller suitable for model-predictive control in a demonstration project of low-lift cooling. Low-lift cooling is a highly efficient cooling strategy conceived to enable low or net-zero energy buildings. A low-lift cooling system consists of a high efficiency low-lift chiller, radiant cooling, thermal storage, and model-predictive control to pre-cool thermal storage overnight on an optimal cooling rate trajectory. We call the properly integrated and controlled combination of these elements a low-lift cooling system (LLCS). This document is the final report for that project.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Order 458.1 requires independent verification (IV) of DOE cleanup projects (DOE 2011). The Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) has been designated as the responsible organization for IV of the High Flux Beam Reactor (HFBR) Stack and Grounds area at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, New York. The IV evaluation may consist of an in-process inspection with document and data reviews (Type A Verification) or a confirmatory survey of the site (Type B Verification). DOE and ORISE determined that a Type A verification of the documents and data for the HFBR Stack and Grounds: Survey Units (SU) 6, 7, and 8 was appropriate based on the initial survey unit classification, the walkover surveys, and the final analytical results provided by the Brookhaven Science Associates (BSA).

Fermilab and CERN started the development of 11 T 11-m long Nb{sub 3}Sn dipoles to replace few regular LHC NbTi dipoles and free space for cold collimators in LHC DS areas. An important step in the design of these magnets is the development of the high aspect ratio Nb{sub 3}Sn cable to achieve the nominal field of 11 T at the nominal LHC operating current of 11.85 kA with 20% margin. The keystoned cables 14.7 mm wide with and without a stainless steel core were made out of hard Cu wires and Nb{sub 3}Sn RRP strand 0.7 mm nominal diameter. The cable optimization process was aimed at achieving both mechanical stability and minimal damage to the delicate internal architecture of the Restacked-Rod-Process (RRP) Nb{sub 3}Sn strands with 127 restack design to be used in the magnet short models. Each cable was characterized electrically for transport properties degradation at high field and for low field stability, and metallographically for internal damage.

I report on recent measurements from the Belle and BABAR collaborations on the decay of the B meson to hadronic final states without a charm quark. The study of the branching fractions and angular distributions of B meson decays to hadronic final states without a charm quark probes the dynamics of both the weak and strong interactions, and plays an important role in understanding CP Violation (CPV) in the quark sector. CP Violation at the B factories is described graphically by a triangle with sides formed from the CKM matrix elements V{sub qd}V*{sub qb} (q = u, c, t) and internal angles {alpha}, {beta} {gamma} (or {phi}{sub 2}, {phi}{sub 1}, {phi}{sub 3}). Discrepancies in the measured values of the sides and angles could be an indication of New Physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) due to enhanced branching fractions or modified CP asymmetries. The experimental measurements of branching fractions, CP asymmetries, polarization and phases (both weak and strong) can be compared to theoretical models based on, for example, QCD factorization, SU(3) symmetry and Lattice QCD.

The program, entitled “Development of Protective Coatings for Co-Sequestration Processes and Pipelines”, examined the sensitivity of existing coating systems to supercritical carbon dioxide (SCCO2) exposure and developed new coating system to protect pipelines from their corrosion under SCCO2 exposure. A literature review was also conducted regarding pipeline corrosion sensors to monitor pipes used in handling co-sequestration fluids. Research was to ensure safety and reliability for a pipeline involving transport of SCCO2 from the power plant to the sequestration site to mitigate the greenhouse gas effect. Results showed that one commercial coating and one designed formulation can both be supplied as potential candidates for internal pipeline coating to transport SCCO2.

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Di-carboxylic acids have the potential to replace petrochemicals used in the polymer industry (Werpy and Petersen, 2004). MBI developed a process for the production of succinic acid using a proprietary organism. During this work MBI assessed the feasibility to produce other carboxylic acids either using A. succinogenes or other organisms. The development of recombinant A. succinogenes strain derivatives for a mono-carboxylic acid through over-expression of enzymatic activities was successful. Fermentations achieved titers of 58 g/L for this organic acid. Recombinant strains that produced the same acid, but a different stereoisomer, reached titers of 10 g/L. Attempts to increase the titers for this isomer as well as other organic acids were unsuccessful. MBI is looking for commercial partners to pursue the development of recombinant A. succinogenes strains for the production of other organic acids. Attempts to develop recombinant strains of A. succinogenes for fumaric acid production through introduction of various antisense RNA constructs were unsuccessful. Alternative suitable organisms were evaluated and Rhizopus oryzae, a natural fumaric acid producer with potential for process improvements, was selected. A novel fermentation and one-step recovery process was developed that allowed capture of IP, produced titers of >80 g/L with a productivity of 1.8 g/L-h and …