We present modeled neutron capture cross sections relevant to stellar production of {sup 60}Fe. Systematics for the input parameters required by the Hauser-Feshbach statistical model are developed based on measured data in the local region of the isotopic plane (20 {le} Z {le} 29, 43 {le} A {le} 65). These parameters and used to calculate reaction cross sections and rates for select target isotopes. Modeled cross sections are compared to experimental data where available. The {sup 59}Fe(n,{gamma}){sup 60}Fe and {sup 60}Fe(n, {gamma}){sup 61}Fe rates are compared to previous calculations. A brief discussion of errors related to the modeling is provided. We conclude by investigating the sensitivity of stellar production of {sup 26}Al and {sup 60}Fe to the {sup 59}Fe(n,{gamma}){sup 60}Fe and {sup 60}Fe(n,{gamma})61Fe reaction rates using a single zone model.

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

This report discusses the ongoing debate about whether or not to approve energy development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Current law forbids energy leasing in the Refuge. This report addresses several legislative options on the issue, as well as policymakers' arguments for and against development, especially in the wake of increasing terrorism since 2000-2001.

This report is on Balkan Cooperation on War Crimes Issues: 2005 Update.

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

This report evaluates that assertion, and considers other effects China’s peg has on the U.S. economy. These include the beneficial effects on consumption, interest rates, and investment spending. Nationwide, these effects should offset job loss in the trade sector, at least in the medium term. Several bills have been introduced in the 109th Congress to address China’s currency policy, including H.R. 1216, H.R. 1498, H.R. 1575, S. 14, S. 295, S. 377, and S. 593; some would impose trade sanctions against China unless it accepted a market-based system of currency valuation.

China’s economy continues to be a concern to U.S. policymakers. On the one hand, China’s economic growth presents huge opportunities for U.S. exporters. On the other hand, the surge in Chinese exports to the United States has put competitive pressures on many U.S. industries. Many U.S. policymakers have argued that greater efforts should be made to pressure China to fully implement its WTO commitments and to change various economic policies deemed harmful to U.S. economic interests, such as its currency peg and its use of subsidies to support its SOEs. In addition, recent bids by Chinese state-owned firms to purchase various U.S. firms have raised concerns among Members over the impact such acquisitions could have on U.S. national and economic security.

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In the last few years, it was clearly shown that cross-field transport in the far SOL could be significantly faster than previously thought and that this transport exhibited convective rather then diffusive features. As a result, in high density cases the plasma coming into the SOL from the core recycled at the wall of the tokamak main chamber, rather than flowing into the divertor and recycling there, as the conventional picture of edge plasma flows would suggest. It was also shown that coherent structures, often called ''blobs'', played very important roles in the particle and energy transport inside the SOL region for both L and H confinement modes. The blobs seen in the SOL are extended along the magnetic field lines and have a plasma density two to three times higher than the ambient SOL plasma density and poloidal and radial scales of about 1 cm. In experimental measurements, the blobs propagated in radial direction towards the chamber wall with a velocity {approx} 10{sup 5} cm/s, and the contribution of non-diffusive flux associated with transport of blobs to the total particle flux in the far SOL attained 70-90%. In addition, recent assessment of experimental data and theoretical models shows that …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In accordance with the President's Management Agenda, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has sponsored initiatives to promote electronic government--the use of information technology, such as Web-based Internet applications, to enhance government services. Generally, these "e-gov" initiatives do not have direct appropriations but depend on a variety of funding sources, including monetary contributions from participating agencies. GAO was asked to review the funding of e-gov initiatives that relied on such contributions: specifically, to determine, for fiscal years 2003 and 2004, whether agencies made contributions in the amounts planned and to determine the timing of these contributions."

Daily newspaper from Chickasha, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Gravity waves arise in gravitationally stratified compressible flows at low Mach and Froude numbers. These waves can have a negligible influence on the overall dynamics of the fluid but, for numerical methods where the acoustic waves are treated implicitly, they impose a significant restriction on the time step. A way to alleviate this restriction is to filter out the modes corresponding to the fastest gravity waves so that a larger time step can be used. This paper presents a filtering strategy of the fully compressible equations based on normal mode analysis that is used throughout the simulation to compute the fast dynamics and that is able to damp only fast gravity modes.

Student magazine from San Antonio College in San Antonio, Texas that includes works by journalism students along with advertising.

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A stabilized, nodally integrated linear tetrahedral is formulated and analyzed. It is well known that linear tetrahedral elements perform poorly in problems with plasticity, nearly incompressible materials, and acute bending. For a variety of reasons, linear tetrahedral elements are preferable to quadratic tetrahedral elements in most nonlinear problems. Whereas, mixed methods work well for linear hexahedral elements, they don't for linear tetrahedrals. On the other hand, automatic mesh generation is typically not feasible for building many 3D hexahedral meshes. A stabilized, nodally integrated linear tetrahedral is developed and shown to perform very well in problems with plasticity, nearly incompressible materials and acute bending. Furthermore, the formulation is analytically and numerically shown to be stable and optimally convergent. The element is demonstrated to perform well in several standard linear and nonlinear benchmarks.

The HPC Challenge benchmark suite has been released by the DARPA HPCS program to help define the performance boundaries of future Petascale computing systems. HPC Challenge is a suite of tests that examine the performance of HPC architectures using kernels with memory access patterns more challenging than those of the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark used in the Top500 list. Thus, the suite is designed to augment the Top500 list, providing benchmarks that bound the performance of many real applications as a function of memory access characteristics e.g., spatial and temporal locality, and providing a framework for including additional tests. In particular, the suite is composed of several well known computational kernels (STREAM, HPL, matrix multiply--DGEMM, parallel matrix transpose--PTRANS, FFT, RandomAccess, and bandwidth/latency tests--b{sub eff}) that attempt to span high and low spatial and temporal locality space. By design, the HPC Challenge tests are scalable with the size of data sets being a function of the largest HPL matrix for the tested system.

We demonstrate that the Qbox code supports unprecedented large-scale First-Principles Molecular Dynamics (FPMD) applications on the BlueGene/L supercomputer. Qbox is an FPMD implementation specifically designed for large-scale parallel platforms such as BlueGene/L. Strong scaling tests for a Materials Science application show an 86% scaling efficiency between 1024 and 32,768 CPUs. Measurements of performance by means of hardware counters show that 37% of the peak FPU performance can be attained.

Letter from Edward D. Garza, mayor of San Antonio, to Sterling Houston, prominent San Antonio playwright. He writes to thank him for his participating in the Steering Committee for The Cultural Collaborative (TCC): A Plan for San Antonio's Creative Economy. The committee was put in place to find solutions to support art and cultural programs in the city. With its planning stage over, he discusses the future of the committee, including a new committee to be formed. He invites him to submit nominations for members.

Letter from Mark E. Souder to Anthony Principi requesting that Fort Wayne be permitted to retain the 122nd Air National Guard Fighter Wing.

Newsletter of Congregation Beth Yeshurun in Houston, including news and events, upcoming services, member announcements, editorials, and other information of interest to congregants.

The Hybrid Spectrometer (HYSPEC), under construction at the SNS on beam line 14B, is the only inelastic scattering instrument designed to enable polarization of the incident and the scattered neutron beams. A Heusler monochromator will replace the graphite crystal for producing polarized neutrons. In the scattered beam it is planned to use a collimator--multi-channel supermirror bender array to analyze the polarization of the scattered beam over the final energy range from 5-20 meV. Other methods of polarization analysis under consideration such as transmission filters using He{sup 3}, Sm, and polarized protons are considered. Their performance is estimated and a comparison of the various methods of polarization is made.

The exit from mitosis is the last critical decision a cell has to make during a division cycle. A complex regulatory system has evolved to evaluate the success of mitotic events and control this decision. Whereas outstanding genetic work in yeast has led to rapid discovery of a large number of interacting genes involved in the control of mitotic exit, it has also become increasingly difficult to comprehend the logic and mechanistic features embedded in the complex molecular network. Our view is that this difficulty stems in part from the attempt to explain mitotic exit control using concepts from traditional top-down engineering design, and that exciting new results from evolutionary engineering design applied to networks and electronic circuits may lend better insights. We focus on four particularly intriguing features of the mitotic exit control system: the two-stepped release of Cdc14; the self-activating nature of Tem1 GTPase; the spatial sensor associated with the spindle pole body; and the extensive redundancy in the mitotic exit network. We attempt to examine these design features from the perspective of evolutionary design and complex system engineering.

The construction of the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC), with an estimated construction cost of $128 million, will be the The first Department of Homeland Security laboratory specifically focused on biodefense. Its programmatic contents and component organization are unclear, as conflicting the information has been provided during each of the past three budget cycles. Congressional oversight of programs, especially those performed in federal facilities for homeland security purposes, is considered key to maintaining transparency in biodefense. Policy issues that may interest Congress include funding for the construction of the NBACC facility, transparency of research activities performed through the center, and the potential for duplication of effort between the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies. This report will be updated as circumstances warrant.

The growth of laser development & technology has been remarkable. Unfortunately, a number of traps or obstacles to laser safety have also developed with that growth. The goal of this article is to highlight those traps, in the hope that an aware laser user will avoid them. These traps have been the cause or contributing factor of many a preventable laser accident.