A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO previously reported on how large information resellers like consumer reporting agencies obtain and use Social Security numbers (SSNs). Less is known about information resellers that offer services to the general public over the Internet. Because these resellers provide access to personal information, SSNs could be obtained over the Internet. GAO was asked to examine (1) the types of readily identifiable Internet resellers that have SSN-related services and characteristics of their businesses, (2) the extent to which these resellers sell SSNs, and (3) the applicability of federal privacy laws to Internet resellers."

A statement of record issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) is responsible for about 2 million active personnel security clearances. About one-third of the clearances are for industry personnel working on contracts for DOD and more than 20 other executive agencies. Delays in determining eligibility for a clearance can heighten the risk that classified information will be disclosed to unauthorized sources and increase contract costs and problems attracting and retaining qualified personnel. On April 28, 2006, DOD announced it had stopped processing security clearance applications for industry personnel because of an overwhelming volume of requests and funding constraints. GAO has reported problems with DOD's security clearance processes since 1981. In January 2005, GAO designated DOD's program a high-risk area because of longstanding delays in completing clearance requests and an inability to accurately estimate and eliminate its clearance backlog. For this statement GAO addresses: (1) key points in the billing dispute between DOD and OPM and (2) some of the major impediments affecting clearances for industry personnel."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This letter responds to Congress's April 26, 2006, request that we address questions submitted for the record by Members of Congress related to the March 29, 2006, hearing entitled The Future of Air Traffic Control: The R&D Agenda. Our responses are based on our previous and ongoing work and our knowledge of the areas addressed by the questions."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) is responsible for about 2 million active personnel security clearances. About one-third of the clearances are for industry personnel working on contracts for DOD and more than 20 other executive agencies. Delays in determining eligibility for a clearance can heighten the risk that classified information will be disclosed to unauthorized sources and increase contract costs and problems attracting and retaining qualified personnel. Long-standing delays in completing hundreds of thousands of clearance requests and numerous impediments that hinder DOD's ability to accurately estimate and eliminate its clearance backlog led GAO to declare DOD's personnel security clearance program a high-risk area in January 2005. This testimony presents GAO's (1) preliminary observations from its ongoing review of the timeliness and completeness of clearances, (2) concerns about the upcoming expiration of an executive order that has resulted in high level commitment to improving the governmentwide clearance process, and (3) views on factors underlying DOD's decision to stop accepting clearance requests for industry personnel."

We outline a method to study the spatial and orientation statistics of dynamical dislocation systems by modeling the dislocations as a stochastic fiber process. Statistical measures have been introduced for the density, velocity, and flux of dislocations, and the connection between these measures and the dislocation state and plastic distortion rate in the crystal is explained. A dislocation dynamics simulation model has been used to extract numerical data to study the evolution of these statistical measures numerically in a body-centered cubic crystal under deformation. The orientation distribution of the dislocation density, velocity and dislocation flux, as well as the dislocation correlations have been computed. The importance of the statistical measures introduced here in building continuum models of dislocation systems is highlighted.

We present results from experiments, numerical simulations and analytic modeling, demonstrating enhanced hohlraum performance. Care in the fabrication and handling of hohlraums with walls consisting of high-Z mixtures (cocktails) has led to our demonstration, for the first time, of a significant increase in radiation temperature (up to +7eV at 300 eV) compared to a pure Au hohlraum, in agreement with predictions and ascribable to reduced wall losses. The data extrapolated to full NIF suggest we can expect an 18% reduction in wall loss for the current ignition design by switching to cocktail hohlraums, consistent with requirements for ignition with 1MJ laser energy.

This report summarizes the accomplishments toward project goals during the first six months of the third year of the project to assess the properties and performance of coal based products. These products are in the gasoline, diesel and fuel oil range and result from coal based jet fuel production from an Air Force funded program. Specific areas of progress include generation of coal based material that has been fractionated into the desired refinery cuts, acquisition and installation of a research gasoline engine, and modification of diesel engines for use in evaluating diesel produced in the project. Characterization of the gasoline fuel indicates a dominance of single ring alkylcycloalkanes that have a low octane rating; however, blends containing these compounds do not have a negative effect upon gasoline when blended in refinery gasoline streams. Characterization of the diesel fuel indicates a dominance of 3-ring aromatics that have a low cetane value; however, these compounds do not have a negative effect upon diesel when blended in refinery diesel streams. The desulfurization of sulfur containing components of coal and petroleum is being studied so that effective conversion of blended coal and petroleum streams can be efficiently converted to useful refinery products. Equipment is …

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

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

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

Monthly report written by the Texas Daily Newspaper Association's (TDNA's) office manager, Darla Thompson, to Ken Whalen providing a summary of revenues and account balances, programs, meetings, and other activities in the office during the previous months.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

OpenMP [1] is an important API for shared memory programming, combining shared memory's potential for performance with a simple programming interface. Unfortunately, OpenMP lacks a critical tool for demonstrating whether programs are correct: a formal memory model. Instead, the current official definition of the OpenMP memory model (the OpenMP 2.5 specification [1]) is in terms of informal prose. As a result, it is impossible to verify OpenMP applications formally since the prose does not provide a formal consistency model that precisely describes how reads and writes on different threads interact. This paper focuses on the formal verification of OpenMP programs through a proposed formal memory model that is derived from the existing prose model [1]. Our formalization provides a two-step process to verify whether an observed OpenMP execution is conformant. In addition to this formalization, our contributions include a discussion of ambiguities in the current prose-based memory model description. Although our formal model may not capture the current informal memory model perfectly, in part due to these ambiguities, our model reflects our understanding of the informal model's intent. We conclude with several examples that may indicate areas of the OpenMP memory model that need further refinement however it is specified. …

Windows in the U.S. consume 30 percent of building heating and cooling energy, representing an annual impact of 4.1 quadrillion BTU (quads) of primary energy. Windows have an even larger impact on peak energy demand and on occupant comfort. An additional 1 quad of lighting energy could be saved if buildings employed effective daylighting strategies. The ENERGY STAR{reg_sign} program has made standard windows significantly more efficient. However, even if all windows in the stock were replaced with today's efficient products, window energy consumption would still be approximately 2 quads. However, windows can be ''net energy gainers'' or ''zero-energy'' products. Highly insulating products in heating applications can admit more useful solar gain than the conductive energy lost through them. Dynamic glazings can modulate solar gains to minimize cooling energy needs and, in commercial buildings, allow daylighting to offset lighting requirements. The needed solutions vary with building type and climate. Developing this next generation of zero-energy windows will provide products for both existing buildings undergoing window replacements and products which are expected to be contributors to zero-energy buildings. This paper defines the requirements for zero-energy windows. The technical potentials in terms of national energy savings and the research and development (R&D) status …

None

Chemical kinetic modeling has been used for many years in process optimization, estimating real-time material performance, and lifetime prediction. Chemists have tended towards developing detailed mechanistic models, while engineers have tended towards global or lumped models. Many, if not most, applications use global models by necessity, since it is impractical or impossible to develop a rigorous mechanistic model. Model fitting acquired a bad name in the thermal analysis community after that community realized a decade after other disciplines that deriving kinetic parameters for an assumed model from a single heating rate produced unreliable and sometimes nonsensical results. In its place, advanced isoconversional methods (1), which have their roots in the Friedman (2) and Ozawa-Flynn-Wall (3) methods of the 1960s, have become increasingly popular. In fact, as pointed out by the ICTAC kinetics project in 2000 (4), valid kinetic parameters can be derived by both isoconversional and model fitting methods as long as a diverse set of thermal histories are used to derive the kinetic parameters. The current paper extends the understanding from that project to give a better appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of isoconversional and model-fitting approaches. Examples are given from a variety of sources, including the former …

The detection of moving objects in complex scenes is the basis of many applications in surveillance, event detection, and tracking. Complex scenes are difficult to analyze due to camera noise and lighting conditions. Currently, moving objects are detected primarily using background subtraction algorithms, with block matching techniques as an alternative. In this paper, we complement our earlier work on the comparison of background subtraction methods by performing a similar study of block matching techniques. Block matching techniques first divide a frame of a video into blocks and then determine where each block has moved from in the preceding frame. These techniques are composed of three main components: block determination, which specifies the blocks; search methods, which specify where to look for a match; and, the matching criteria, which determine when a good match has been found. In our study, we compare various options for each component using publicly available video sequences of a traffic intersection taken under different traffic and weather conditions. Our results indicate that a simple block determination approach is significantly faster with minimum performance reduction, the three step search method detects more moving objects, and the mean-squared-difference matching criteria provides the best performance overall.

OpenMP provides a portable programming interface for shared memory parallel computers (SMPs). Although this interface has proven successful for small SMPs, it requires greater flexibility in light of the steadily growing size of individual SMPs and the recent advent of multithreaded chips. In this paper, we describe two application development experiences that exposed these expressivity problems in the current OpenMP specification. We then propose mechanisms to overcome these limitations, including thread subteams and thread topologies. Thus, we identify language features that improve OpenMP application performance on emerging and large-scale platforms while preserving ease of programming.

The hadronic cascade description developed in an earlierpaper is extended to the response of an idealized fine-sampling hadroncalorimeter. Calorimeter response is largely determined by the transferof energy E_e from the hadronic to the electromagnetic sector via \pi0production. Fluctuations in this quantity produce the "constant term" inhadron calorimeter resolution. The increase of its fractional mean, f_\rmem^0= \vevE_e/E, with increasing incident energy E causes the energydependence of the \pi/e ratio in a noncompensating calorimeter. The meanhadronic energy fraction, f_h0 = 1-f_\rm em0, was shown to scaleverynearly as a power law in E: f_h0 = (E/E_0)m-1, where E_0\approx1~;GeV forpions, and m\approx0.83. It follows that \pi/e=1-(1-h/e)(E/E_0)m-1, whereelectromagnetic and hadronic energy deposits are detected withefficiencies e and h, respectively. Fluctuations in these quantities,along with sampling fluctuations, are in corporated to give an overallunderstanding of resolution, which is different from the usual treatmentsin interesting ways. The conceptual framework is also extended to theresponse to jets and the difference between pi and presponse.

Recent nanomechanical tests on submicron metal columns and wires have revealed a dramatic increase in yield strength with decreasing sample size. This effect seems to be related to the increased strength observed in metals on decreasing grain size or film thickness, and has been explained by a dislocation nucleation/activation controlled plasticity regime in small sample volumes. The question arises whether one can utilize this new size effect to design materials with improved bulk properties. Here, we demonstrate that nanoporous metal foams can be envisioned as a three-dimensional network of ultrahigh-strength nanocolumns/wires, thus bringing together two seemingly conflicting properties: high strength and high porosity. Specifically, we studied the mechanical properties of nanoporous (np) Au using a combination of nanoindentation and column microcompression tests, as well as supplemental molecular dynamics simulations. We find that np-Au can be as strong as bulk Au, despite being a highly porous material, and that the ligaments in np-Au approach the theoretical yield strength of Au. The combination of high yield strength and high porosity can be used to design a new generation of energy absorbing materials for various engineering applications.

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

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

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Advances in information technology make it easier than ever for the federal government to obtain and process personal information about citizens and residents in many ways and for many purposes. To ensure that the privacy rights of individuals are respected, this information must be properly protected in accordance with current law, particularly the Privacy Act and the E-Government Act of 2002. These laws prescribe specific activities that agencies must perform to protect privacy, and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has developed guidance on how and in what circumstances agencies are to carry out these activities. Many agencies designate officials as focal points for privacy-related matters, and increasingly, many have created senior positions, such as chief privacy officer, to assume primary responsibility for privacy policy, as well as dedicated privacy offices. GAO was asked to testify on key challenges facing agency privacy officers. To address this issue, GAO identified and summarized issues raised in its previous reports on privacy."