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

This report provides information about environmental programs during 2002 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). Seasonal activities that span calendar years are also included. Production of an annual site environmental report (ASER) is a requirement established by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) for all management and operating (M&O) contractors throughout the DOE complex. SLAC is a federally-funded, research and development center with Stanford University as the M&O contractor. The most noteworthy information in this report is summarized in this section. This summary demonstrates the effective application of SLAC environmental management in meeting the site's integrated safety management system (ISMS) goals. For normal daily activities, all SLAC managers and supervisors are responsible for ensuring that proper procedures are followed so that worker safety and health are protected; the environment is protected; and compliance is ensured. Throughout 2002, SLAC focused on these activities through the SLAC management systems (described in Chapter 3). These systems were also the way SLAC approached implementing ''greening of the government'' initiatives such as Executive Order 13148. The management systems at SLAC are effective, supporting compliance with all relevant statutory and regulatory requirements. SLAC did not receive any notices of violation during 2002. In addition, …

This report provides information about environmental programs during 2003 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). Seasonal activities that span calendar years are also included. Production of an annual site environmental report (ASER) is a requirement established by the DOE for all management and operating (M&O) contractors throughout the DOE complex. This summary demonstrates the effective application of SLAC environmental management to meet the site's integrated safety management system (ISMS) goals. For normal daily activities, all SLAC managers and supervisors are responsible for ensuring proper procedures are followed so that worker safety and health are protected; the environment is protected; and compliance is ensured. Throughout 2003, SLAC focused on these activities through the SLAC management systems (described in Chapter 3). These systems were utilized by SLAC to implement such ''greening of the government'' initiatives like Executive Order 13148. The management systems at SLAC are effective, supporting compliance with all relevant statutory and regulatory requirements. There were no reportable releases to the environment from SLAC operations during 2003. In addition, many improvements were continued during 2003 in waste minimization, recycling, decreasing air emission rates, stormwater drain system, groundwater restoration, and planning for a system to better manage chemical use. Program-specific details …

This report provides information about environmental programs during 2004 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). Seasonal activities that span calendar years are also included. Production of an annual site environmental report (ASER) is a requirement established by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) for all management and operating (M&O) contractors throughout the DOE complex. SLAC is a federally-funded, research and development center with Stanford University as the M&O contractor. The most noteworthy information in this report is summarized in this section. This summary demonstrates the effective application of SLAC environmental management in meeting the site's integrated safety management system (ISMS) goals. For normal daily activities, all SLAC managers and supervisors are responsible for ensuring that proper procedures are followed so that worker safety and health are protected; the environment is protected; and compliance is ensured. Throughout 2004, SLAC focused on these activities through the SLAC management systems (described in Chapter 3). These systems were also the way SLAC approached implementing ''greening of the government'' initiatives such as Executive Order 13148. The management systems at SLAC are effective, supporting compliance with all relevant statutory and regulatory requirements. There were no reportable releases to the environment from SLAC operations during …

This report briefly discusses the Arab League's boycott of Israeli companies and Israeli-made goods since Israel's founding in 1948, as well as U.S. efforts to end the boycott and prevent U.S. firms in participating in the boycott.

The attenuation of very high energy gamma rays by pair production on the Galactic interstellar radiation field has long been thought of as negligible. However, a new calculation of the interstellar radiation field consistent with multi-wavelength observations by DIRBE and FIRAS indicates that the energy density of the Galactic interstellar radiation field is higher, particularly in the Galactic center, than previously thought. We have made a calculation of the attenuation of very high energy gamma rays in the Galaxy using this new interstellar radiation field which takes into account its nonuniform spatial and angular distributions. We find that the maximum attenuation occurs around 100 TeV at the level of about 25% for sources located at the Galactic center, and is important for both Galactic and extragalactic sources.

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

The proposed experiment E-166 at SLAC is designed to demonstrate the possibility of producing longitudinally polarized positrons from circularly polarized photons to be used in future Linear Collider. The experimental set-up utilizes a low emittance 50 GeV electron beam passing through a helical undulator in the Final Focus Test Beam line of the SLAC accelerator. Circularly polarized photons generated by the electron beam in the undulator hit a target and produce electron-positron pairs. The purpose of the post-target spectrometer is to select the positron beam and to deliver it to a polarimeter whilst keeping the positron beam polarization as high as possible. This paper analyzes positron transmission and polarization in the E-166 spectrometer experiment. The positron transmission has a maximum value of 7% for a positron beam energy of 5.5 MeV, while positron polarization is approximately 60%.

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

Weekly student newspaper published in Hurst, Texas serving the Tarrant County College District that includes school news and information along with advertising.

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

Evaluation of the performance of innovative thermal barrier coating systems for applications at high temperatures in advanced industrical gas turbines.

File system designers continue to look to new architectures to improve scalability. Object-based storage diverges from server-based (e.g. NFS) and SAN-based storage systems by coupling processors and memory with disk drives, delegating low-level allocation to object storage devices (OSDs) and decoupling I/O (read/write) from metadata (file open/close) operations. Even recent object-based systems inherit decades-old architectural choices going back to early UNIX file systems, however, limiting their ability to effectively scale to hundreds of petabytes. We present Ceph, a distributed file system that provides excellent performance and reliability with unprecedented scalability. Ceph maximizes the separation between data and metadata management by replacing allocation tables with a pseudo-random data distribution function (CRUSH) designed for heterogeneous and dynamic clusters of unreliable OSDs. We leverage OSD intelligence to distribute data replication, failure detection and recovery with semi-autonomous OSDs running a specialized local object storage file system (EBOFS). Finally, Ceph is built around a dynamic distributed metadata management cluster that provides extremely efficient metadata management that seamlessly adapts to a wide range of general purpose and scientific computing file system workloads. We present performance measurements under a variety of workloads that show superior I/O performance and scalable metadata management (more than a quarter million metadata …

The Soft Gamma-ray Detector (SGD) on board the NeXT (Japanese future high energy astrophysics mission) is a Compton telescope with narrow field of view (FOV), which utilizes Compton kinematics to enhance its background rejection capabilities. It is realized as a hybrid semiconductor gamma-ray detector which consists of silicon and CdTe (cadmium telluride) detectors. It can detect photons in a wide energy band (0.05-1 MeV) at a background level of 5 x 10{sup -7} counts/s/cm{sup 2}/keV; the silicon layers are required to improve the performance at a lower energy band (<0.3 MeV). Excellent energy resolution is the key feature of the SGD, allowing it to achieve both high angular resolution and good background rejection capability. An additional capability of the SGD, its ability to measure gamma-ray polarization, opens up a new window to study properties of astronomical objects. We will present the development of key technologies to realize the SGD: high quality CdTe, low noise front-end ASIC and bump bonding technology. Energy resolutions of 1.7 keV (FWHM) for CdTe pixel detectors and 1.1 keV for Si strip detectors have been measured. We also present the validation of Monte Carlo simulation used to evaluate the performance of the SGD.

The role of an event reconstruction capability in a case of an atmospheric release is to characterize the source by answering the critical questions--How much material was released? When? Where? and What are the potential consequences? Accurate estimation of the source term is essential to accurately predict plume dispersion, effectively manage the emergency response, and mitigate consequences in a case of an atmospheric release of hazardous material. We are developing a capability that seamlessly integrates observational data streams with predictive models in order to provide probabilistic estimates of unknown source term parameters consistent with both data and model predictions. Our approach utilizes Bayesian inference with stochastic sampling using Markov Chain and Sequential Monte Carlo methodology. The inverse dispersion problem is reformulated into a solution based on efficient sampling of an ensemble of predictive simulations, guided by statistical comparisons with data. We are developing a flexible and adaptable data-driven event-reconstruction capability for atmospheric releases that provides (1) quantitative probabilistic estimates of the principal source-term parameters (e.g., the time-varying release rate and location); (2) predictions of increasing fidelity as an event progresses and additional data become available; and (3) analysis tools for sensor network design and uncertainty studies. Our computational framework incorporates …

Email from Catherine A. Murphy to her friends advising them of her new contact information.

The BABAR experiment at SLAC successfully collects physics data since 1999. One of the major parts of its on-line system is the configuration database which provides other parts of the system with the configuration data necessary for data taking. Originally the configuration database was implemented in the Objectivity/DB ODBMS. Recently BABAR performed a successful migration of its event store from Objectivity/DB to ROOT and this prompted a complete phase-out of the Objectivity/DB in all other BABAR databases. It required the complete redesign of the configuration database to hide any implementation details and to support multiple storage technologies. In this paper we describe the process of the migration of the configuration database, its new design, implementation strategy and details.

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

This report provides background information about the establishment and evolution of federal emergency management and related homeland security organization since 1950. Post-Katrina assessments of current arrangements by Congress and the White House are also discussed. Finally, the report provides a brief summary of related legislation that had been introduced as of July 17, 2006.

Current and next generation experiments in nuclear and elementary particle physics require detectors with high spatial resolution, fast response, and accurate energy information. Such detectors are required for spectroscopy, and imaging of optical and high-energy photons, charged particles, and neutrons, and are of interest not only in nuclear and high-energy physics, but also in other areas such as medical imaging, diffraction, astronomy, nuclear treaty verification, non-destructive evaluation, and geological exploration.

The objective of this grant was to understand how molecular vibrational states (geometry distortions) are involved in photoinduced electron transfer rates of molecules. This subject is an important component of understanding how molecular absorbers of light convert that energy into charge separation. This is important because the absorption usually excites molecular vibrations in a new electronic state prior to electron transfer to other molecules or semiconductor nanoparticles, as in some types of solar cells. The speeds of charge separation and charge recombination are key parameters that require experiments such as those in this work to test the rules governing electron transfer rates. Major progress was made on this goal. Some of the molecular structures selected for developing experimental data were bimolecular charge transfer complexes that contained metals of cobalt or vanadium. The experiments used the absorption of an ultrafast pulse of light to directly separate charges onto the two different molecular parts of the complex. The charge recombination then proceeds naturally, and one goal was to measure the speed of this recombination for different types of molecular vibrations. We used picosecond and femtosecond duration pulses with tunable colors at infrared wavelengths to directly observe vibrational states and their different rates …

For electricity and hydrogen production, an advanced reactor technology receiving considerable international interest is a modular, passively-safe version of the high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor, known in the U.S. as the Modular Helium Reactor (MHR), which operates at a power level of 600 MW(t). For electricity production, the MHR operates with an outlet helium temperature of 850 C to drive a direct, Brayton-cycle power-conversion system with a thermal-to-electrical conversion efficiency of 48 percent. This concept is referred to as the Gas Turbine MHR (GT-MHR). For hydrogen production, both electricity and process heat from the MHR are used to produce hydrogen. This concept is referred to as the H2-MHR. This report provides pre-conceptual design descriptions of full-scale, nth-of-a-kind H2 MHR plants based on thermochemical water splitting using the Sulfur-Iodine process and High-Temperature Electrolysis.

This report provides information about the Corporate "Inversions" and "Expatriation" on Firms That Incorporate Abroad for Tax Purposes where increasing number of U.S firms have altered their structure by substituting a foreign parent corporation for a domestic one.

This report will monitor pending and possible proposals for U.S. FTAs, relevant legislation and other congressional interest in U.S. FTAs.