A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Senate report accompanying the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) fiscal year 2008 appropriations expressed concern that USDA's Greenbook charges--the transfer of funds authority USDA used to charge the appropriations accounts of its agencies and staff offices for programs to centrally provide certain services--had grown excessively. USDA's Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) oversees Greenbook charges. The report directed GAO to review these charges and USDA to report on them. This report identifies the agencies and offices assessed Greenbook charges, the amounts of the charges, and the programs supported by Greenbook charges for fiscal years 1999 through 2009. It also (1) assesses how USDA selected programs and monitored Greenbook charges and (2) describes the benefits of the programs, as reported by USDA. GAO reviewed and assessed USDA budget and program documents and discussed processes with officials."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses issues related to girls' delinquency--a topic that has attracted the attention of federal, state, and local policymakers for more than a decade as girls have increasingly become involved in the juvenile justice system. For example, from 1995 through 2005, delinquency caseloads for girls in juvenile justice courts nationwide increased 15 percent while boys' caseloads decreased by 12 percent. More recently, in 2007, 29 percent of juvenile arrests--about 641,000 arrests--involved girls, who accounted for 17 percent of juvenile violent crime arrests and 35 percent of juvenile property crime arrests. Further, research on girls has highlighted that delinquent girls have higher rates of mental health problems than delinquent boys, receive fewer special services, and are more likely to abandon treatment programs. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) is the Department of Justice (DOJ) office charged with providing national leadership, coordination, and resources to prevent and respond to juvenile delinquency and victimization. OJJDP supports states and communities in their efforts to develop and implement effective programs to, among other things, prevent delinquency and intervene after a juvenile has offended. For example, from fiscal years 2007 …

Other written product issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This is a supplement to GAO-10-82. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) comprises 15 agencies in several broad mission areas responsible for, among other things, assisting farmers and rural communities, overseeing the safety of meat and poultry, giving low-income families access to nutritious food, and protecting the nation's forests. USDA's 12 staff offices support these mission activities. In 1965 Congress gave USDA transfer of funds authority that allows it to charge the appropriations accounts of its agencies and staff offices in order to provide certain programs centrally that benefit those agencies and offices. USDA has used this authority to support several e-government, educational, and presidential initiatives, and the USDA visitors' information center; and to fund programs that provide activities and services that USDA's agencies and staff offices would otherwise have to obtain individually, such as sign language interpreter services and a drug testing program. The Senate report accompanying USDA's fiscal year 2008 appropriations, as reported out by the Senate Appropriations Committee, expressed concern that these charges--referred to as "Greenbook" charges--have grown excessively over the last few years. Noting that the disclosure of these charges to Congress …

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Daily student newspaper from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

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 Texas Department of Aging and Disability Services may authorize assissted living facilities to provide nursing services to the termiallly ill and other residents (RQ-0794-GA)

Recording of the Lamkang Traditional jhum agricultural practices in Lamkang and the varieties of crops and grains that are grown in the Lamkang land.

This report, the deliverable for Task 4 of the NA-243 Safeguards by Design Work Plan for Fiscal Year 2009, develops the lessons to be learned for the institutionalization of Safeguards By Design (SBD) from the Department of Energy (DOE) experience developing and implementing DOE-STD-1189, Integration of Safety into the Design Process. This experience was selected for study because of the similarity of the challenges of integrating safety and safeguards into the design process. Development of DOE-STD-1189 began in January 2006 and the standard was issued for implementation in March 2008. The process was much more time consuming than originally anticipated and might not have come to fruition had senior DOE management been less committed to its success. Potentially valuable lessons can be learned from both the content and presentation of the integration approach in DOE-STD-1189 and from the DOE experience in developing and implementing DOE-STD-1189. These lessons are important because the instutionalization of SBD does not yet appear to have the level of senior management commitment afforded development and implementation of DOE-STD-1189.

This project involved the experimental probing of the electronic excited states generated by photoinduced (center-to-center) electron and energy transfer processes in several classes of transition metal donor/acceptor (D/A) complexes. Some of the general properties inferred from these studies should be useful in the design of new systems for energy conversion applications. Pursuit of the project goals has involved the determination of electron transfer efficiencies and the detailed study of variations in the electronic spectra of D/A complexes. This has resulted in the study of some very fundamental issues of photoinduced charge transfer and the identification of some of the constraints on its efficiency. The experimental studies of the competition between the degradative non-radiative unimolecular relaxation of transition metal excited states and their transfer of charge from these excited states to external acceptors have involved a range of techniques such as transient decay kinetics, photoacoustic calorimetry and transient or stationary state spectroscopy. The substrates synthesized for these studies were selected to provide model systems, or series of model systems to probe the validity of models of electronic excited states and their reactivity. The work during the last few years has focused largely, but not exclusively, on the use of emission spectral …

The Utah Heavy Oil Program (UHOP) was established in June 2006 to provide multidisciplinary research support to federal and state constituents for addressing the wide-ranging issues surrounding the creation of an industry for unconventional oil production in the United States. Additionally, UHOP was to serve as an on-going source of unbiased information to the nation surrounding technical, economic, legal and environmental aspects of developing heavy oil, oil sands, and oil shale resources. UHOP fulGilled its role by completing three tasks. First, in response to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 Section 369(p), UHOP published an update report to the 1987 technical and economic assessment of domestic heavy oil resources that was prepared by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission. The UHOP report, entitled 'A Technical, Economic, and Legal Assessment of North American Heavy Oil, Oil Sands, and Oil Shale Resources' was published in electronic and hard copy form in October 2007. Second, UHOP developed of a comprehensive, publicly accessible online repository of unconventional oil resources in North America based on the DSpace software platform. An interactive map was also developed as a source of geospatial information and as a means to interact with the repository from a geospatial setting. …

The turbulent angular momentum flux carried by ions resonant with toroidal ion temperature gradient(ITG) instability is calculated via quasilinear calculation using the phase-space conserving gyrokinetic equation in the laboratory frame. The results near ITG marginality indicate that the inward turbulent equipartition (TEP) momentum pinch [Hahm T.S. et al 2007 Phys. Plasmas 14 072302] remains as the most robust part of pinch. In addition, ion temperature gradient driven momentum flux is inward for typical parameters, while density gradient driven momentum flux is outward as in the previous kinetic result in slab geometry [Diamond P.H. et al 2008 Phys. Plasmas 15 012303].

Quantum dots, which have found widespread use in fields such as biomedicine, photovoltaics, and electronics, are often called artificial atoms due to their size-dependent physical properties. Here this analogy is extended to consider artificial nanocrystal molecules, formed from well-defined groupings of plasmonically or electronically coupled single nanocrystals. Just as a hydrogen molecule has properties distinct from two uncoupled hydrogen atoms, a key feature of nanocrystal molecules is that they exhibit properties altered from those of the component nanoparticles due to coupling. The nature of the coupling between nanocrystal atoms and its response to vibrations and deformations of the nanocrystal molecule bonds are of particular interest. We discuss synthetic approaches, predicted and observed physical properties, and prospects and challenges toward this new class of materials.

Legionnaires disease is a pneumonia caused by the inhalation of the bacterium Legionella pneumophila. The majority of illnesses have been associated with cooling towers since these devices can harbor and disseminate the bacterium in the aerosolized mist generated by these systems. Historically, Savannah River Site (SRS) cooling towers have had occurrences of elevated levels of Legionella in all seasons of the year and in patterns that are difficult to predict. Since elevated Legionella in cooling tower water are a potential health concern a question has been raised as to the best control methodology. In this work we analyze available chemical, biological, and atmospheric data to determine the best method or key parameter for control. The SRS 4Q Industrial Hygiene Manual, 4Q-1203, 1 - G Cooling Tower Operation and the SRNL Legionella Sampling Program, states that 'Participation in the SRNL Legionella Sampling Program is MANDATORY for all operating cooling towers'. The resulting reports include L. pneumophila concentration information in cells/L. L. pneumophila concentrations >10{sup 7} cells/L are considered elevated and unsafe so action must be taken to reduce these densities. These remedial actions typically include increase biocide addition or 'shocking'. Sometimes additional actions are required if the problem persists including increase …

The objectives of this research are threefold: (1) to develop methods for the study electron transfer processes at the single molecule level, (2) to develop a series of modifiable and structurally well defined molecular and nanoparticle systems suitable for detailed single molecule/particle and bulk spectroscopic investigation, (3) to relate experiment to theory in order to elucidate the dependence of electron transfer processes on molecular and electronic structure, coupling and reorganization energies. We have begun the systematic development of single molecule spectroscopy (SMS) of electron transfer and summaries of recent studies are shown. There is a tremendous need for experiments designed to probe the discrete electronic and molecular dynamic fluctuations of single molecules near electrodes and at nanoparticle surfaces. Single molecule spectroscopy (SMS) has emerged as a powerful method to measure properties of individual molecules which would normally be obscured in ensemble-averaged measurement. Fluctuations in the fluorescence time trajectories contain detailed molecular level statistical and dynamical information of the system. The full distribution of a molecular property is revealed in the stochastic fluctuations, giving information about the range of possible behaviors that lead to the ensemble average. In the case of electron transfer, this level of understanding is particularly important to …

For a given symmetric positive definite matrix A {element_of} R{sup nxn}, we develop a fast and backward stable algorithm to approximate A by a symmetric positive-definite semi-separable matrix, accurate to any prescribed tolerance. In addition, this algorithm preserves the product, AZ, for a given matrix Z {element_of} R{sup nxd}, where d << n. Our algorithm guarantees the positive-definiteness of the semi-separable matrix by embedding an approximation strategy inside a Cholesky factorization procedure to ensure that the Schur complements during the Cholesky factorization all remain positive definite after approximation. It uses a robust direction-preserving approximation scheme to ensure the preservation of AZ. We present numerical experiments and discuss potential implications of our work.

The protonation reactions of two ligands that play important roles in the TALSPEAK process for the separation of trivalent actinides from lanthanides, lactic acid and diethylenetrinitropentaacetic acid (DTPA), have been studied at variable temperatures. The protonation constants at 10-70 C were determined by titration potentiometry and the protonation enthalpies were determined at 25 C by titration microcalorimetry. The protonation constants remain essentially unchanged (25-70 C) within the experimental uncertainties, indicating that the effect of temperature on the protonation of lactate is insignificant. In contrast, the protonation constants of DTPA (log {beta}H's) generally decrease as the temperature is increased. Results from this study indicate that the effect of temperature on the protonation of DTPA could alter the speciation of metal ions (actinides and lanthanides) in the TALSPEAK system, since lower values of log{beta}H at higher temperatures suggest that the hydrogen ions would compete less strongly with the metal ions for the complexation of DTPA at higher temperatures.

A controlled field pilot has been developed in Bozeman, Montana, USA, to study near surface CO2 transport and detection technologies. A slotted horizontal well divided into six zones was installed in the shallow subsurface. The scale and CO2 release rates were chosen to be relevant to developing monitoring strategies for geological carbon storage. The field site was characterized before injection, and CO2 transport and concentrations in saturated soil and the vadose zone were modeled. Controlled releases of CO2 from the horizontal well were performed in the summers of 2007 and 2008, and collaborators from six national labs, three universities, and the U.S. Geological Survey investigated movement of CO2 through the soil, water, plants, and air with a wide range of near surface detection techniques. An overview of these results will be presented.

Metallic nanoscale structures are capable of supporting surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs), propagating collective electron oscillations with tight spatial confinement at the metal surface. SPPs represent one of the most promising structures to beat the diffraction limit imposed by conventional dielectric optics. Ag nano wires have drawn increasing research attention due to 2D sub-100 nm mode confinement and lower losses as compared with fabricated metal structures. However, rational and versatile integration of Ag nanowires with other active and passive optical components, as well as Ag nanowire based optical routing networks, has yet to be achieved. Here, we demonstrate that SPPs can be excited simply by contacting a silver nanowire with a SnO2 nanoribbon that serves both as an unpolarized light source and a dielectric waveguide. The efficient coupling makes it possible to measure the propagation-distance-dependent waveguide spectra and frequency-dependent propagation length on a single Ag nanowire. Furthermore, we have demonstrated prototypical photonic-plasmonic routing devices, which are essential for incorporating low-loss Ag nanowire waveguides as practical components into high-capacity photonic circuits.

This report discusses the process of naming Navy ships, which have traditionally been chosen and announced by the Secretary of the Navy. Congress in recent years has proposed, and sometimes passed, legislation regarding the naming of specific ships.

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

None

None

Blank parole data survey containing a series of questions related to the parole population in a particular location, with instructions for filling out the survey.