A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Thirty years ago Congress enacted protections to ensure that participants in multiemployer pension plans received their promised benefits. These defined benefit plans are created by collective bargaining agreements covering more than one employer. Today, these plans provide pension coverage to over 10.4 million participants in approximately 1,500 multiemployer plans insured by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). In this report, GAO examines (1) the current status of nation's multiemployer plans; (2) steps PBGC takes to monitor the health of these plans; (3) the structure of multiemployer plans in other countries; and (4) statutory and regulatory changes that could help plans provide participants with the benefits they are due. To address these questions, GAO analyzed government and industry data and interviewed government officials, pension experts and plan practitioners in the United States, the Netherlands, Denmark, United Kingdom, and Canada."

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) administers several pension benefit programs for veterans as well as their surviving spouses and dependent children. The most current pension programs available (for those meeting the eligibility criteria on or after January 1, 1979) are the Improved Disability Pension for certain low-income veterans and the Improved Death Pension for certain low-income surviving spouses or children of veterans. There is also a special pension for Medal of Honor recipients. This report describes these programs, including the eligibility criteria and current benefit levels. This report will be updated as needed to reflect legislative activity and changes to benefits or eligibility requirements.

This report provides background and current status information on multilateral regimes established to restrict trade in nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and missile technologies, and to monitor their civil applications. Congress may consider the efficacy of these regimes in considering the potential renewal of the Export Administration Act, as well as other proliferation-specific legislation in the 111th Congress.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) offers directly, or in conjunction with other federal agencies, several benefits for surviving spouses, children, and dependent parents of deceased veterans to provide them with financial, educational, and emotional support. Among these various programs, Dependency and Indemnity Compensation (DIC) is a monthly tax-free cash payment for eligible surviving spouses, children, and dependent parents. This report outlines the eligibility requirements and benefit levels for DIC, the policy issues associated with DIC, and legislation in the 111th Congress related to DIC.

The recent online publication of classified defense documents by the organization WikiLeaks and subsequent reporting by the New York Times and other news media have focused attention on whether such publication violates U.S. criminal law. The Justice Department and Department of Defense are investigating the circumstances to determine whether any prosecutions will be undertaken in connection with the disclosure. This report identifies some criminal statutes that may apply and also discusses the statutory prohibitions that may be implicated, such as the Espionage Act.

This report discusses the growing interest in the potential for ethanol to displace petroleum as a transportation fuel, as well as related issues, including current Clean Air Act (CAA) limitation on ethanol content in gasoline; the requests of ethanol producers for an increase of this limitation; and the effects the limitation has upon vehicle and engine warranties and the infrastructures of the automobile and fuel industries.

This report provides a descriptive analysis of both nonmonetary and monetary burial veterans' benefits and national cemeteries. It addresses congressional and constituent issues, such as who is eligible to receive burial benefits; who can be buried in a national cemetery; what plans does the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) have to build new or expand existing national cemeteries; and what benefits does the VA provide, among others.

This report focuses on several statutory presumptions that relate to the second element of a service-connected claim for disability compensation, and synthesizes the legal principles that guide the Department of Veterans Affairs' application of the statutory presumptions during the claims adjudication process. Specifically, this report will discuss the "presumption of soundness," the presumption of aggravation of a pre-existing injury or disease, the "line of duty" presumption, and finally, the "combat veteran" presumption, all of which are codified at Title 38 of the United States Code.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Secure Border Initiative Network (SBInet) is to place surveillance systems along our nation's borders and provide Border Patrol command centers with the imagery and related tools and information needed to detect breaches and make agent deployment decisions. To deliver SBInet, DHS has relied heavily on its prime contractor. Because of the importance of effective contractor management and oversight to SBInet, GAO was asked to determine the extent to which DHS (1) defined and implemented effective controls for managing and overseeing the prime contractor and (2) effectively monitored the contractor's progress in meeting cost and schedule expectations. To do this, GAO analyzed key program documentation against relevant guidance and best practices, and interviewed program officials."

This report provides information on the current Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) life insurance programs available for servicemembers and veterans, management and administration issues, and associated policy issues and legislation.

This report provides an overview of the President's veto power, including regular vetoes and pocket vetoes.

We evaluate photodetectors for use in a Compton Coincidence apparatus designed for measuring scintillator proportionality. There are many requirements placed on the photodetector in these systems, including active area, linearity, and the ability to accurately measure low light levels (which implies high quantum efficiency and high signal-to-noise ratio). Through a combination of measurement and Monte Carlo simulation, we evaluate a number of potential photodetectors, especially photomultiplier tubes and hybrid photodetectors. Of these, we find that the most promising devices available are photomultiplier tubes with high ({approx}50%) quantum efficiency, although hybrid photodetectors with high quantum efficiency would be preferable.

Small signal stability problems are one of the major threats to grid stability and reliability in the U.S. power grid. An undamped mode can cause large-amplitude oscillations and may result in system breakups and large-scale blackouts. There have been several incidents of system-wide oscillations. Of those incidents, the most notable is the August 10, 1996 western system breakup, a result of undamped system-wide oscillations. Significant efforts have been devoted to monitoring system oscillatory behaviors from measurements in the past 20 years. The deployment of phasor measurement units (PMU) provides high-precision, time-synchronized data needed for detecting oscillation modes. Measurement-based modal analysis, also known as ModeMeter, uses real-time phasor measurements to identify system oscillation modes and their damping. Low damping indicates potential system stability issues. Modal analysis has been demonstrated with phasor measurements to have the capability of estimating system modes from both oscillation signals and ambient data. With more and more phasor measurements available and ModeMeter techniques maturing, there is yet a need for methods to bring modal analysis from monitoring to actions. The methods should be able to associate low damping with grid operating conditions, so operators or automated operation schemes can respond when low damping is observed. The work …

This presentation summarizes "A Technoeconomic Analysis of Biomethane Production from Biogas and Pipeline Delivery".

The ALTOS campaign focuses on operating a tethered observing system for routine in situ sampling of low-level (< 2 km) Arctic clouds. It has been a long-term hope to fly tethered systems at Barrow, Alaska, but it is clear that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will not permit in-cloud tether systems at Barrow, even if unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operations are allowed in the future. We have provided the scientific rationale for long-term, routine in situ measurements of cloud and aerosol properties in the Arctic. The existing restricted air space at Oliktok offers an opportunity to do so.

The purpose of this report is to provide a concise but comprehensive overview of Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Climate Research Facility instrumentation status. The report is divided into the following five sections: (1) new instrumentation in the process of being acquired and deployed, (2) field campaigns, (3) existing instrumentation and progress on improvements or upgrades, (4) proposed future instrumentation, and (5) Small Business Innovation Research instrument development.

The use of permanent magnets instead of electromagnet coils for low power Hall thrusters can offer a significant reduction of both the total electric power consumption and the thruster mass. Two permanent magnet versions of the miniaturized cylindrical Hall thruster (CHT) of different overall dimensions were operated in the power range of 50W-300 W. The discharge and plasma plume measurements revealed that the CHT thrusters with permanent magnets and electromagnet coils operate rather differently. In particular, the angular ion current density distribution from the permanent magnet thrusters has an unusual halo shape, with a majority of high energy ions flowing at large angles with respect to the thruster centerline. Differences in the magnetic field topology outside the thruster channel and in the vicinity of the channel exit are likely responsible for the differences in the plume characteristics measured for the CHTs with electromagnets and permanent magnets. It is shown that the presence of the reversing-direction or cusp-type magnetic field configuration inside the thruster channel without a strong axial magnetic field outside the thruster channel does not lead to the halo plasma plume from the CHT. __________________________________________________

This project conducted fundamental studies of PEM MEA degradation. Insights gained from these studies were disseminated to assist MEA manufacturers in understanding degradation mechanisms and work towards DOE 2010 fuel cell durability targets.

Report submitted by the University of North Texas to the Texas 81st regular legislature requesting appropriations to fund university programming and activities. It includes an overview of the university's goals, summaries of appropriations requests for fiscal years 2012 and 2013, and supporting documentation.

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

After 10 years of running, the PHENIX experiment has by now accumulated more than 700 TB of reconstructed data which are directly used for analysis. Analyzing these amounts of data efficiently requires a coordinated approach. Beginning in 2005 we started to develop a system for the RHIC Atlas Computing Facility (RACF) which allows the efficient analysis of these large data sets. The Analysis Taxi is now the tool which allows any collaborator to process any data set taken since 2003 in weekly passes with turnaround times of typically three to four days.

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This article discusses hydrogen bonding between solutes in solvents octan-1-ol and water.

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an oral interview with Bill Filter. Filter joined the Army in early 1943 and received basic training at Camp Hood. He received specialized training in engineering at DePaul University. Upon completion, he was assigned to San Diego to educate mechanical engineers in the 96th Infantry Division. The unit was then sent to Hawaii for amphibious training. He participated in the liberation of Leyte as a member of G Company, 381st Infantry Regiment. He trudged through swamps as part of the first wave on Leyte Island. On Christmas his unit had a small celebration with makeshift decorations. On 1 April 1945 he landed on Okinawa and met resistance on the third day. He recounts close encounters with Japanese knee mortars while scaling an escarpment later that month. On 16 June 1945 he was wounded by a piece of shrapnel and evacuated to Guam after spending a month in a field hospital. Filter returned home and received medical care at Letterman General Hospital, Schick General Hospital, and Walter Reed Hospital. He was discharged in December 1945.