A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "President Bush has identified the success of global trade talks launched in Doha, Qatar, in November 2001 as one of the United States' top trade policy priorities. Known as the Doha Development Agenda, the talks are an important means of spurring global growth and development. Completing the talks in 2006 was considered essential for an agreement to qualify for streamlined congressional consideration under the U.S. Trade Promotion Authority. However, the talks collapsed in late July 2006 in the face of wide differences over the extent of agricultural reform and how best to promote economic development in poor countries. Efforts to break the deadlock continue. Given the tenuous state of this central plank of U.S. trade policy, GAO updated its series of prior reports. In this report, we assess (1) the overall status of the Doha Round negotiations now and the progress that had been made prior to and since the breakdown of the talks, (2) the substantive divisions among key World Trade Organization (WTO) members that led to an environment of deadlock and the eventual suspension of the negotiations, and (3) the possible economic and other …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "For decades, the United States has worked toward the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, most recently under the 2003 Roadmap for Peace, which calls for an independent Palestinian state coexisting peacefully with the State of Israel. Since fiscal year 1993, the United States has provided more than $2.2 billion in assistance to the West Bank and Gaza to support the Middle East peace process and encourage progress in reforming the Palestinian Authority. In fiscal years 2005 and 2006 alone, the United States provided over $420 million in Economic Support Funds for the West Bank and Gaza; this funding is primarily administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). In the conference report accompanying the 2005 supplemental appropriation legislation, the Congress directed that the assistance be allocated to two broad development categories--economic revitalization and infrastructure development--each with five subcategories. In January 2006, Hamas--designated a terrorist organization by the United States and others--won a majority of the seats in the Palestinian parliament. On January 30, 2006, the United Nations (UN), the United States, the European Union, and Russia--known as the Quartet on the Middle East--stated that they would provide …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "As of March 1, 2007, over 24,000 servicemembers have been wounded in action since the onset of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), according to the Department of Defense (DOD). GAO work has shown that servicemembers injured in combat face an array of significant medical and financial challenges as they begin their recovery process in the health care systems of DOD and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). GAO was asked to discuss concerns regarding DOD and VA efforts to provide medical care and rehabilitative services for servicemembers who have been injured during OEF and OIF. This testimony addresses (1) the transition of care for seriously injured servicemembers who are transferred between DOD and VA medical facilities, (2) DOD's and VA's efforts to provide early intervention for rehabilitation for seriously injured servicemembers, (3) DOD's efforts to screen servicemembers at risk for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and whether VA can meet the demand for PTSD services, and (4) the impact of problems related to military pay on injured servicemembers and their families. This testimony is based on GAO work issued from 2004 through 2006 on the …

Currently, a combination of technologies is typically required to assess the malignancy of cancer cells. These methods often lack the specificity and sensitivity necessary for early, accurate diagnosis. Here we demonstrate using clinical samples the application of laser trapping Raman spectroscopy as a novel approach that provides intrinsic biochemical markers for the noninvasive detection of individual cancer cells. The Raman spectra of live, hematopoietic cells provide reliable molecular fingerprints that reflect their biochemical composition and biology. Populations of normal T and B lymphocytes from four healthy individuals, and cells from three leukemia patients were analyzed, and multiple intrinsic Raman markers associated with DNA and protein vibrational modes have been identified that exhibit excellent discriminating power for cancer cell identification. A combination of two multivariate statistical methods, principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA), was used to confirm the significance of these markers for identifying cancer cells and classifying the data. The results indicate that, on average, 95% of the normal cells and 90% of the patient cells were accurately classified into their respective cell types. We also provide evidence that these markers are unique to cancer cells and not purely a function of differences in their cellular activation.

Totalview, from the Etnus Corporation, is a sophisticated and feature rich software debugger for parallel applications. As Totalview has gained in popularity and market share its pricing model has increased to the point where it is often prohibitively expensive for massively parallel supercomputers. Additionally, many of Totalview's advanced features are not used by members of the scientific computing community. For these reasons, supercomputing centers have begun to search for a basic parallel debugging tool which can be used as an alternative to Totalview. As the cost and complexity of Totalview has increased over the years, scientific computing centers have started searching for a viable parallel debugging alternative. DDT (Distributed Debugging Tool) from Allinea Software is a relatively new parallel debugging tool which aims to provide much of the same functionality as Totalview. This review outlines the basic features and limitations of DDT to determine if it can be a reasonable substitute for Totalview. DDT was tested on the NERSC platforms Bassi, Seaborg, Jacquard and Davinci with Fortran90, C, and C++ codes using MPI and OpenMP for parallelism.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to honoring the Texas Police Chiefs Association for 50 years of service.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to honoring Chris Kyker of Abilene for her many years of service in behalf of the citizens of Texas.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to recognizing the 100th anniversary of First State Bank of Uvalde.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to recognizing Monsignor Larry J. Droll on his 60th birthday.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to welcoming Leadership Kerr County to the State Capitol.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to recognizing February 13, 2007, as Red and Black Day at the State Capitol.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to recognizing the Commemorative Air Force on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate relating to designating February 13, 2007, as Midland-Odessa Day at the State Capitol.

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; County's payment of legal fees of a criminal district attorney charged with criminal offenses (RQ-0461-GA)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether the State Office of Administrative Hearings is required to furnish a free transcript in an administrative driver's license suspension appeal (RQ-0552-GA)

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Carbon dioxide capture from large stationary sources and storage in geological media is a technologically-feasible mitigation measure for the reduction of anthropogenic emissions of CO2 to the atmosphere in response to climate change. Carbon dioxide (CO2) can be sequestered underground in oil and gas reservoirs, in deep saline aquifers, in uneconomic coal beds and in salt caverns. The Alberta Basin provides a very large capacity for CO2 storage in oil and gas reservoirs, along with significant capacity in deep saline formations and possible unmineable coal beds. Regional assessments of potential geological CO2 storage capacity have largely focused so far on estimating the total capacity that might be available within each type of reservoir. While deep saline formations are effectively able to accept CO2 immediately, the storage potential of other classes of candidate storage reservoirs, primarily oil and gas fields, is not fully available at present time. Capacity estimates to date have largely overlooked rates of depletion in these types of storage reservoirs and typically report the total estimated storage capacity that will be available upon depletion. However, CO2 storage will not (and cannot economically) begin until the recoverable oil and gas have been produced via traditional means. This report describes …

The accelerating expansion of the universe presents an exciting, fundamental challenge to the standard models of particle physics and cosmology. I highlight some of the outstanding challenges in both developing theoretical models and interpreting without bias the observational results from precision cosmology experiments in the next decade that will return data to help reveal the nature of the new physics. Examples given focus on distinguishing a new component of energy from a new law of gravity, and the effect of early dark energy on baryon acoustic oscillations.

Altering flow regimes of rivers has large effects on native floras and faunas because native species are adapted to the natural flow regime, many species require lateral connectivity with floodplain habitat for feeding or spawning, and the change in regime often makes it possible for invasive species to replace natives (Bunn & Arthington 2002). Floodplain backwaters, both permanent and temporary, are nursery areas for age 0+ fish and stable isotope studies indicate that much of the productivity that supports fish larvae is autochthonous to these habitats (Herwig et al. 2004). Limiting access by fish to floodplain habitat for feeding, spawning and nursery habitat is one of the problems noted with dams that regulate flow in rivers and is considered to be important as an argument to remove dams and other flow regulating structures from rivers (Shuman 1995; Bednarek 2001). While there have been a number of studies in the literature about the use of floodplain habitat for fish reproduction (Copp 1989; Killgore & Baker 1996; Humphries, et al. 1999; Humphries and Lake 2000; Crain et al. 2004; King 2004) there have been only a few studies that examined this aspect of stream ecology in more than a cursory way. The …

High voltage insulation is one of the main areas of pulsed power research and development, and dielectric breakdown is usually the limiting factor in attaining the highest possible performance in pulsed power devices. For many applications the delivery of pulsed power into a vacuum region is the most critical aspect of operation. The surface of an insulator exposed to vacuum can fail electrically at an applied field more than an order or magnitude below the bulk dielectric strength of the insulator. This mode of breakdown, called surface flashover, imposes serious limitations on the power flow into a vacuum region. This is especially troublesome for applications where high voltage conditioning of the insulator and electrodes is not practical and for applications where relatively long pulses, on the order of several microseconds, are required. The goal of this project is to establish a sound fundamental understanding of the mechanisms that lead to surface flashover, and then evaluate the most promising techniques to improve vacuum insulators and enable high voltage operation at stress levels near the intrinsic bulk breakdown limits of the material. The approach we proposed and followed was to develop this understanding through a combination of theoretical and computation methods coupled …

We consider flux compactification of type IIB string theory as the orientifold limit of an F-theory on a Calabi-Yau fourfold. We show that when supersymmetry is dominantly broken by the axion-dilaton and the contributions of the F-terms associated with complex structure moduli are small, the Hessian of the flux potential always has tachyonic modes for de Sitter vacua. This implies that there exist no meta-stable de Sitter vacua in this limit. Moreover, we find that the stability requirement imposes a relation between the values of cosmological constant and the scale of supersymmetry breaking for non-supersymmetric anti de Sitter vacua in this limit. The proof is general and does rely on the details of the geometry of the compact Calabi-Yau internal space. We finally analyze the consequences of these constraints on the statistics of meta-stable de Sitter vacua and address some other related issues.

A recent study [1] has indicated substantial potential emittance growth in the ILC bunch compressor due to quad misalignments, BPM misalignments, and pitches in the RF cavities. Table 1 summarizes several results from [1]. In this simulation, quad misalignments and cavity pitches are Gaussian distributed and are considered with respect to the nominal survey line; BPM misalignments are also Gaussian-distributed but are considered with respect to the quadrupole axis. It is assumed that the BPM offsets with respect to the quads are found in a previous quad-shunting BBA step which is not simulated. In this study we seek to repeat the studies documented above, and additionally to perform a study in which additional dispersion bumps are used to further reduce the projected emittance.

This article discusses a proposal for an ultra fast feedback response that will protect the load and solid state switches of the ON/OFF Marx type modulators. The feedback guards main elements of a modulator against possible arcs in the load, particularly arcs inside of the electron guns. The chief concept behind the proposed response system is an employment of a fraction of the output modulator power as a controlling and guarding pulse during the delivery time. The time constant of the proposed feedback loop lies in the nanosecond range. Peculiarities of proposed topology are discussed.