A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "About 7,000 Medicaid providers in three selected states (Florida, New York, and Texas) had approximately $791 million in unpaid federal taxes from calendar year 2009 or earlier. This represents about 5.6 percent of the Medicaid providers reimbursed by the selected states during 2009. These 7,000 Medicaid providers with unpaid federal taxes received a total of about $6.6 billion in Medicaid reimbursements during 2009 (including American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 [Recovery Act] funds). The amount of unpaid federal taxes GAO identified is likely understated because Internal Revenue Service (IRS) taxpayer data reflect only the amount of unpaid taxes either reported on a tax return or assessed by IRS through enforcement; it does not include entities that did not file tax returns or underreported their income."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In summary, BOP uses different factors in estimating the daily costs of its facilities and community corrections and incorporating certain additional factors would increase the daily cost per inmate for its facilities. Specifically, BOP estimates daily costs per inmate for its prison facilities using operational costs such as staff salaries and training, inmate food, and medical supplies, among other things, but does not include factors such as construction of new prisons, certain modernization and repair (M&R) projects, or depreciation of its existing facilities. According to BOP, these M&R projects and depreciation are incorporated into budget requests, financial statements, and a user fee BOP computes to bill states for the full costs of housing state prisoners. Adding these costs into BOP’s estimates would raise the costs from between $4.39 and $4.82 per day per inmate for the last 3 fiscal years. For community corrections, BOP estimates daily costs using the contract per diem rates paid to the private companies that operate RRCs and monitor inmates on home detention and the costs of management and oversight by BOP Community Corrections officials and subtracts out subsistence fees paid by inmates in …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO identified 32 practices and approaches as effective for applying Agile software development methods to IT projects. The practices generally align with five key software development project management activities: strategic planning, organizational commitment and collaboration, preparation, execution, and evaluation. Officials who have used Agile methods on federal projects generally agreed that these practices are effective. Specifically, each practice was used and found effective by officials from at least one agency, and ten practices were used and found effective by officials from all five agencies. The ten practices are:"

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Application materials submitted to the Texas Historical Commission requesting a historic marker for the Underwood & Clara Nazro House, in Houston, Texas. The materials include the inscription text of the marker, original application, narrative, floor plans, and photographs.

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This report outlines many of the budgetary procedures that are performed by the President, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and agencies. This report provides an overview of the development, submission, and justification of the President’s budget proposal. This report also describes how the President, OMB, and agencies execute the federal budget following the enactment of appropriations and other budgetary legislation by Congress.

This report provides a background of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) financial crisis and the issues for Congress.

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; Application of the Open Meetings Act, chapter 551 of the Government Code, to a coordinated county transportation authority created under chapter 460 of the Transportation Code, and to its committees (RQ-1042-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 a commissioners court may execute a surface lease of county school land that contains a term obligating the lessee to make expenditures for land management and maintenance.

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A synthetic magnetic diagnostics code for fusion equilibria is presented. This code calculates the response of various magnetic diagnostics to the equilibria produced by the VMEC and PIES codes. This allows for treatment of equilibria with both good nested flux surfaces and those with stochastic regions. DIAGNO v2.0 builds upon previous codes through the implementation of a virtual casing principle. The codes is validated against a vacuum shot on the Large Helical Device where the vertical field was ramped. As an exercise of the code, the diagnostic response for various equilibria are calculated on the Large Helical Device (LHD).

The 2012 Gordon Research Conference on Plasma Processing Science will feature a comprehensive program that will highlight the most cutting edge scientific advances in plasma science and technology as well as explore the applications of this nonequilibrium medium in possible approaches relative to many grand societal challenges. Fundamental science sessions will focus on plasma kinetics and chemistry, plasma surface interactions, and recent trends in plasma generation and multi-phase plasmas. Application sessions will explore the impact of plasma technology in renewable energy, the production of fuels from renewable feedstocks and carbon dioxide neutral solar fuels (from carbon dioxide and water), and plasma-enabled medicine and sterilization.

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This presentation describes the history of the Nevada National Security Site (Nevada Test Site) Contract as well as current capabilities.

Equilibrium reconstruction is commonly applied to axisymmetric toroidal devices. Recent advances in computational power and equilibrium codes have allowed for reconstructions of three-dimensional fields in stellarators and heliotrons. We present the first reconstructions of finite beta discharges in the Large Helical Device (LHD). The plasma boundary and magnetic axis are constrained by the pressure profile from Thomson scattering. This results in a calculation of plasma beta without a-priori assumptions of the equipartition of energy between species. Saddle loop arrays place additional constraints on the equilibrium. These reconstruction utilize STELLOPT, which calls VMEC. The VMEC equilibrium code assumes good nested flux surfaces. Reconstructed magnetic fields are fed into the PIES code which relaxes this constraint allowing for the examination of the effect of islands and stochastic regions on the magnetic measurements.

The mechanical behavior of materials with small dimension(s) is of both fundamental scientific interest and technological relevance. The size effects and novel properties that arise from changes in deformation mechanism have important implications for modern technologies such as thin films for microelectronics and MEMS devices, thermal and tribological coatings, materials for energy production and advanced batteries, etc. The overarching goal of the 2012 Gordon Research Conference on "Thin Film and Small Scale Mechanical Behavior" is to discuss recent studies and future opportunities regarding elastic, plastic and time-dependent deformation, as well as degradation and failure mechanisms such as fatigue, fracture and wear. Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to: fundamental studies of physical mechanisms governing small-scale mechanical behavior; advances in test techniques for materials at small length scales, such as nanotribology and high-temperature nanoindentation; in-situ mechanical testing and characterization; nanomechanics of battery materials, such as swelling-induced phenomena and chemomechanical behavior; flexible electronics; mechanical properties of graphene and carbon-based materials; mechanical behavior of small-scale biological structures and biomimetic materials. Both experimental and computational work will be included in the oral and poster presentations at this Conference.

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The numerical methods used in the full particle-orbit following SPIRAL code are described and a number of physics studies performed with the code are presented to illustrate its capabilities. The SPIRAL code is a test-particle code and is a powerful numerical tool to interpret and plan fast-ion experiments in Tokamaks. Gyro-orbit effects are important for fast ions in low-field machines such as NSTX and to a lesser extent in DIII-D. A number of physics studies are interlaced between the description of the code to illustrate its capabilities. Results on heat loads generated by a localized error-field on the DIII-D wall are compared to measurements. The enhanced Triton losses caused by the same localized error-field are calculated and compared to measured neutron signals. MHD activity such as tearing modes and Toroidicity-induced Alfven Eigenmodes (TAEs) have a profound effect on the fast-ion content of Tokamak plasmas and SPIRAL can calculate the effects of MHD activity on the confined and lost fast-ion population as illustrated for a burst of TAE activity in NSTX. The interaction between Ion Cyclotron Range of Frequency (ICRF) heating and fast ions depends solely on the gyro-motion of the fast ions and is captured exactly in the SPIRAL code. …

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This dissertation describes a variety of studies meant to improve the analytical performance of inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and laser ablation (LA) ICP-MS. The emission behavior of individual droplets and LA generated particles in an ICP is studied using a high-speed, high frame rate digital camera. Phenomena are observed during the ablation of silicate glass that would cause elemental fractionation during analysis by ICP-MS. Preliminary work for ICP torch developments specifically tailored for the improvement of LA sample introduction are presented. An abnormal scarcity of metal-argon polyatomic ions (MAr{sup +}) is observed during ICP-MS analysis. Evidence shows that MAr{sup +} ions are dissociated by collisions with background gas in a shockwave near the tip of the skimmer cone. Method development towards the improvement of LA-ICP-MS for environmental monitoring is described. A method is developed to trap small particles in a collodion matrix and analyze each particle individually by LA-ICP-MS.

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