Climate change projections from three General Circulation Models were used to adjust the temperature and precipitation in 2030 and 2080 in each of five ecological provinces in Tennessee to estimate the direct economic effects of the projected changes on recreation using the Tourism Climatic Index. The indirect effects on recreation were evaluated qualitatively, based on current demand for the unique values associated with current conditions. The results of the direct impact evaluation reveal that climate change will have variable effects on recreational activities in Tennessee. The magnitude and direction of the effects vary by the recreational activity involved, patterns of precipitation and temperature regimes, and specific location in Tennessee. Recreational activities such as rock climbing, winter activities independent of snow, and whitewater boating are likely to benefit from projected climate changes due to increased temperatures in the winter months. Summer-based activities such as lake recreation and camping are likely to decline with increasing seasonal temperatures. The indirect effects of climate change on recreation are likely to have a larger effect than the direct impacts of climatic variables.

Laser interactions with materials have unique advantages to explore the rapid synthesis, processing, and in situ characterization of high quality and novel nanoparticles, nanotubes and nanowires. For example, laser vaporization of solids into background gases provides a wide range of processing conditions for the formation of nanomaterials by both catalyst-free and catalyst-assisted growth processes. Laser interactions with the growing nanomaterials provide remote in situ characterization of their size, structure, and composition with unprecedented temporal resolution. In this article, laser interactions involved in the synthesis of primarily carbon nanostructures are reviewed, including the catalyst-free synthesis of single-walled carbon nanohorns and quantum dots, to the catalyst-assisted growth of single and multi-walled carbon nanotubes.

As our dependence on the cyber infrastructure grows more complex and more distributed, the systems that compose it become more prone to failures and exploitation. Intelligence refers to discrete or private information, which possess currency and relevance. The ability to abstract, evaluate, and understand such information underlies its accuracy and true value. The collection, analysis and utilization of information constitutes a business-, sociopolitical-, military-intelligence activity that ultimately poses significant advantages and liabilities to the survivability of "our" society. The aim of this workshop (www.csiir.ornl.gov/csiirw) was to discuss (and publish) novel theoretical and empirical research focused on the many different aspects of cyber security and information intelligence. The scope will vary from methodologies and tools to systems and applications to more precise definition of the various problems and impacts. Topics include: Scalable trustworthy systems Enterprise-level metrics Coping with insider and life-cycle threats Coping with malware and polymorphism Phishing/whaling, spam and cyber crime High assurance system survivability Cyber security for the Smart Grid Digital provenance and data integrity Privacy-aware security and usable security Social networking models for managing trust and security A principle goal of the workshop was to foster discussions and dialog among the 150 registered attendees from North America, Europe, …

Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness in the Western world. The World Health Organisation estimates that 135 million people have diabetes mellitus worldwide and that the number of people with diabetes will increase to 300 million by the year 2025 (Amos et al., 1997). Timely detection and treatment for DR prevents severe visual loss in more than 50% of the patients (ETDRS, 1991). Through computer simulations is possible to demonstrate that prevention and treatment are relatively inexpensive if compared to the health care and rehabilitation costs incurred by visual loss or blindness (Javitt et al., 1994). The shortage of ophthalmologists and the continuous increase of the diabetic population limits the screening capability for effective timing of sight-saving treatment of typical manual methods. Therefore, an automatic or semi-automatic system able to detect various type of retinopathy is a vital necessity to save many sight-years in the population. According to Luzio et al. (2004) the preferred way to detect diseases such as diabetic retinopathy is digital fundus camera imaging. This allows the image to be enhanced, stored and retrieved more easily than film. In addition, images may be transferred electronically to other sites where a retinal specialist or an automated …

Plan outlining how the Texas Parks and Wildlife department plans to "conserve land and water resources and to provide outdoor recreation opportunities for all Texans" (Letter to the People of Texas).

Enzymes catalyze biochemical reactions with remarkable specificity and efficiency, usually under physiological conditions. Computer simulation is a powerful tool for understanding enzyme catalytic mechanisms, particularly in cases where standard experimental techniques may be of limited utility. Here, we present an overview of the application of computer simulation techniques to understanding enzyme catalytic mechanisms. Examples using quantum chemical methods, as well as combined quantum mechanical/classical mechanical approaches, are provided.

The global wind power market has been growing at a phenomenal pace, driven by favorable policies towards renewable energy and the improving economics of wind projects. On a going forward basis, utility-scale wind power offers the potential for significant reductions in the carbon footprint of the electricity sector. Specifically, the global wind resource is vast and, though accessing this potential is not costless or lacking in barriers, wind power can be developed at scale in the near to medium term at what promises to be an acceptable cost.

Developing a predictive understanding of subsurface flow and transport is complicated by the disparity of scales across which controlling hydrological properties and processes span. Conventional techniques for characterizing hydrogeological properties (such as pumping, slug, and flowmeter tests) typically rely on borehole access to the subsurface. Because their spatial extent is commonly limited to the vicinity near the wellbores, these methods often can not provide sufficient information to describe key controls on subsurface flow and transport. The field of hydrogeophysics has evolved in recent years to explore the potential that geophysical methods hold for improving the quantification of subsurface properties and processes relevant for hydrological investigations. This chapter is intended to familiarize hydrogeologists and water resource professionals with the state-of-the-art as well as existing challenges associated with hydrogeophysics. We provide a review of the key components of hydrogeophysical studies, which include: geophysical methods commonly used for shallow subsurface characterization; petrophysical relationships used to link the geophysical properties to hydrological properties and state variables; and estimation or inversion methods used to integrate hydrological and geophysical measurements in a consistent manner. We demonstrate the use of these different geophysical methods, petrophysical relationships, and estimation approaches through several field-scale case studies. Among other applications, …

Microbial communities are each a composite of populations whose presence and relative abundance in water or other environmental samples are a direct manifestation of environmental conditions, including the introduction of microbe-rich fecal material and factors promoting persistence of the microbes therein. As shown by culture-independent methods, different animal-host fecal microbial communities appear distinctive, suggesting that their community profiles can be used to differentiate fecal samples and to potentially reveal the presence of host fecal material in environmental waters. Cross-comparisons of microbial communities from different hosts also reveal relative abundances of genetic groups that can be used to distinguish sources. In increasing order of their information richness, several community analysis methods hold promise for MST applications: phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA) analysis, denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE), terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (TRFLP), cloning/sequencing, and PhyloChip. Specific case studies involving TRFLP and PhyloChip approaches demonstrate the ability of community-based analyses of contaminated waters to confirm a diagnosis of water quality based on host-specific marker(s). The success of community-based MST for comprehensively confirming fecal sources relies extensively upon using appropriate multivariate statistical approaches. While community-based MST is still under evaluation and development as a primary diagnostic tool, results presented herein demonstrate its promise. …

Comprehensive Federal fleet management guide offered as a companion to Executive Order 13514 Section 12 guidance.

The gastrointestinal (GI) tract is teeming with an extremely abundant and diverse microbial community. The members of this community have coevolved along with their hosts over millennia. Until recently, the gut ecosystem was viewed as black box with little knowledge of who or what was there or their specific functions. Over the past decade, however, this ecosystem has become one of fastest growing research areas of focus in microbial ecology and human and animal physiology. This increased interest is largely in response to studies tying microbes in the gut to important diseases afflicting modern society, including obesity, allergies, inflammatory bowel diseases, and diabetes. Although the importance of a resident community of microorganisms in health was first hypothesized by Pasteur over a century ago (Sears, 2005), the multiplicity of physiological changes induced by commensal bacteria has only recently been recognized (Hooper et al., 2001). The term 'ecological development' was recently coined to support the idea that development of the GI tract is a product of the genetics of the host and the host's interactions with resident microbes (Hooper, 2004). The search for new therapeutic targets and disease biomarkers has escalated the need to understand the identities and functions of the microorganisms …

Agency strategic plan for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice describing the organization's planned services, activities, and other goals during fiscal years 2011 through 2015.

Proceedings of the Environmental Health Information Partnership (EnHIP) Meeting March 25-26, 2010

This chapter describes the current status of evaluated nuclear data for nuclear technology applications. We start with evaluation procedures for neutron-induced reactions focusing on incident energies from the thermal energy up to 20 MeV, though higher energies are also mentioned. This is followed by examining the status of evaluated neutron data for actinides that play dominant role in most of the applications, followed by coolants/moderators, structural materials and fission products. We then discuss neutron covariance data that characterize uncertainties and correlations. We explain how modern nuclear evaluated data libraries are validated against an extensive set of integral benchmark experiments. Afterwards, we briefly examine other data of importance for nuclear technology, including fission yields, thermal neutron scattering and decay data. A description of three major evaluated nuclear data libraries is provided, including the latest version of the US library ENDF/B-VII.0, European JEFF-3.1 and Japanese JENDL-3.3. A brief introduction is made to current web retrieval systems that allow easy access to a vast amount of up-to-date evaluated nuclear data for nuclear technology applications.

As the treatment and management of HIV/AIDS continues to evolve with new scientific breakthroughs, treatment discoveries, and management challenges, it is difficult for people living with HIV/AIDS and those who care for them to keep up with the latest information on HIV/AIDS screening and testing, prevention, treatment, and research. The National Library of Medicine (NLM), of the National Institutes of Health, has a wealth of health information resources freely available on the Internet to address these needs.

Report submitted by the Texas Department of Transportation containing background information on the department, and summaries of requests for appropriations and expenditures for the fiscal years 2012 and 2013 with supporting documentation.

Currently, no automated means of detecting abnormal mammograms exist. While knowledge discovery capabilities through data mining and data analytics tools are widespread in many industries, the healthcare industry as a whole lags far behind. Providers are only just beginning to recognize the value of data mining as a tool to analyze patient care and clinical outcomes. The research conducted by the authors investigates the use of genetic algorithms for classification of unstructured mammography reports, which can be later correlated to the images for extraction and testing. In mammography, much effort has been expended to characterize findings in the radiology reports. Various computer-assisted technologies have been developed to assist radiologists in detecting cancer; however, the algorithms still lack high degrees of sensitivity and specificity, and must undergo machine learning against a training set with known pathologies in order to further refine the algorithms with higher validity of truth. In a large database of reports and corresponding images, automated tools are needed just to determine which data to include in the training set. Validation of these data is another issue. Radiologists disagree with each other over the characteristics and features of what constitutes a normal mammogram and the terminology to use in …

Aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopes (STEMs) can now produce electron probes as small as 1 {angstrom} at 60 keV. This level of performance allows individual light atoms to be imaged in various novel materials including graphene, monolayer boron nitride, and carbon nanotubes. Operation at 60 keV avoids direct knock-on damage in such materials, but some radiation damage often remains, and limits the maximum usable electron dose. Elemental identification by electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) is then usefully supplemented by annular dark-field (ADF) imaging, for which the signal is much larger and the spatial resolution significantly better. Because of its strong dependence on the atomic number Z, ADF can be used to identify the chemical type of individual atoms, both heavy and light. We review the instrumental requirements for atomic resolution imaging at 60 keV and lower energies, and we illustrate the kinds of studies that have now become possible by ADF images of graphene, monolayer BN, and single-wall carbon nanotubes, and by ADF images and EEL spectra of carbon nanotubes containing nanopods filled with single atoms of Er. We then discuss likely future developments.

This report is a descriptive journey of the Cathode Processing for Lithium-ion Batteries

Today's scientific challenges such as routes to a sustainable energy future, materials by design or biological and chemical environmental remediation methods, are complex problems that require the integration of a wide range of complementary expertise to be addressed successfully. Experimental and computational science research methods can hereby offer fundamental insights for their solution. Experimental facilities in particular can contribute through a large variety of investigative methods, which can span length scales from millions of kilometers (radar) to the sub-nucleus (LHC). These methods are used to probe structure, properties, and function of objects from single elements to whole communities. Hereby direct imaging techniques are a powerful means to develop an atomistic understanding of scientific issues. For example, the identification ofmechanisms associated with chemical, material, and biological transformations requires the direct observation of the reactions to build up an understanding of the atom-by-atom structural and chemical changes. Computational science can aid the planning of such experiments, correlate results, explain or predict the phenomena as they would be observed and thus aid their interpretation. Furthermore computational science can be essential for the investigation of phenomena that are difficult to observe due to their scale, reaction time or extreme conditions. Combining experimental and computational …

The energy industry is embarking upon an infrastructure transformation that will result in a national power grid that is more intelligent, robust, resilient, and secure. While the final form will not be known for quite some time, clearly a smarter grid will make better use of information. Whether an electric utility is making real-time adjustments in response to changing load conditions, or commercial and private consumers are making better choices, the timely availability of this information will become increasingly critical. Ultimately, the overall efficiency, reliability, and resilience of the grid is inextricably linked to information. Unfortunately, "the electric power sector is second from the bottom of all major U.S. industries in terms of R&D spending as a percentage of revenue, exceeding only pulp and paper [Amin2011]." Moreover, U.S. officials worry that cyber-spies could use their [demonstrated] access to shut down the grid or take control of power plants during a time of crisis or war [CIO09, WSJ09]. Moreover, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) released the results of a two-year study, The Future of the Electric Grid.

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