Terrorist Attack in Tunis: Implications (open access)

Terrorist Attack in Tunis: Implications

This report briefly discusses the implications of the March 18 terrorist attack in Tunis which killed at least 20 foreign tourists visiting the national Bardo Museum, along with a Tunisian police officer.
Date: March 23, 2015
Creator: Arieff, Alexis & Humud, Carla E.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Mandatory Spending Since 1962 (open access)

Mandatory Spending Since 1962

Federal spending is divided into three broad categories: discretionary spending, mandatory spending, and net interest. Federal spending has outrun federal revenues for the last 10 fiscal years. In the long term, projections suggest that if current policies remain unchanged, the United States faces a major fiscal imbalance, largely due to rising health care costs and impending Baby Boomer retirements. Because discretionary spending is a smaller proportion of total federal outlays compared to mandatory spending, some budget experts contend that any significant reductions in federal spending must include cuts in entitlement spending. Other budget and social policy experts contend that cuts in entitlement spending could compromise their goals: the economic security of the elderly and the poor.
Date: March 23, 2012
Creator: Austin, D. Andrew & Levit, Mindy R.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Integrated Multiscale Modeling of Molecular Computing Devices (open access)

Integrated Multiscale Modeling of Molecular Computing Devices

Significant advances were made on all objectives of the research program. We have developed fast multiresolution methods for performing electronic structure calculations with emphasis on constructing efficient representations of functions and operators. We extended our approach to problems of scattering in solids, i.e. constructing fast algorithms for computing above the Fermi energy level. Part of the work was done in collaboration with Robert Harrison and George Fann at ORNL. Specific results (in part supported by this grant) are listed here and are described in greater detail. (1) We have implemented a fast algorithm to apply the Green's function for the free space (oscillatory) Helmholtz kernel. The algorithm maintains its speed and accuracy when the kernel is applied to functions with singularities. (2) We have developed a fast algorithm for applying periodic and quasi-periodic, oscillatory Green's functions and those with boundary conditions on simple domains. Importantly, the algorithm maintains its speed and accuracy when applied to functions with singularities. (3) We have developed a fast algorithm for obtaining and applying multiresolution representations of periodic and quasi-periodic Green's functions and Green's functions with boundary conditions on simple domains. (4) We have implemented modifications to improve the speed of adaptive multiresolution algorithms for …
Date: March 23, 2012
Creator: Beylkin, Gregory
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Sudan (open access)

Sudan

This report provides a brief overview of political, economic, and humanitarian conditions in Sudan and examines the conflict dynamics that persist in the country. It also outlines U.S. policy and congressional engagement.
Date: March 23, 2015
Creator: Blanchard, Lauren P.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
LLNL Contribution to Sandia Used Fuel Disposition - Security March 2011 Deliverable (open access)

LLNL Contribution to Sandia Used Fuel Disposition - Security March 2011 Deliverable

Cleary [2007] divides the proliferation pathway into stages: diversion, facility misuse, transportation, transformation, and weapons fabrication. King [2010], using Cleary's methodology, compares a deepburn fusion-driven blanket containing weapons-grade plutonium with a PWR burning MOX fuel enrichments of 5-9%. King considers the stages of theft, transportation, transformation, and nuclear explosive fabrication. In the current study of used fuel storage security, a similar approach is appropriate. First, one must consider the adversary's objective, which can be categorized as on-site radionuclide dispersion, theft of material for later radionuclide dispersion, and theft of material for later processing and fabrication into a nuclear explosive. For on-site radionuclide dispersion, only a single proliferation pathway stage is appropriate: dispersion. That situation will be addressed in future reports. For later radionuclide dispersion, the stages are theft, transportation, and transformation (from oxide spent fuel containing both fission products and actinides to a material size and shape suitable for dispersion). For later processing and fabrication into a nuclear explosive, the stages are theft (by an outsider or by facility misuse by an insider), transportation, transformation (from oxide spent fuel containing both fission products and actinides to a metal alloy), and fabrication (of the alloy into a weapon). It should be …
Date: March 23, 2011
Creator: Blink, J. A.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Community Development Block Grants: Funding Issues in the 112th Congress and Recent Funding History (open access)

Community Development Block Grants: Funding Issues in the 112th Congress and Recent Funding History

The FY 2013 budget debate will take place within the context of growing concerns about the need to address federal budget deficits, the national debt, and a sluggish economic recovery following the longest and deepest recession since the Great Depression. This report contains information on FY 2013 appropriations, FY 2012 appropriations, FY 2011 appropriations, Congressional action, and related topics.
Date: March 23, 2012
Creator: Boyd, Eugene
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
AutomaDeD: Automata-Based Debugging for Dissimilar Parallel Tasks (open access)

AutomaDeD: Automata-Based Debugging for Dissimilar Parallel Tasks

Today's largest systems have over 100,000 cores, with million-core systems expected over the next few years. This growing scale makes debugging the applications that run on them a daunting challenge. Few debugging tools perform well at this scale and most provide an overload of information about the entire job. Developers need tools that quickly direct them to the root cause of the problem. This paper presents AutomaDeD, a tool that identifies which tasks of a large-scale application first manifest a bug at a specific code region at a specific point during program execution. AutomaDeD creates a statistical model of the application's control-flow and timing behavior that organizes tasks into groups and identifies deviations from normal execution, thus significantly reducing debugging effort. In addition to a case study in which AutomaDeD locates a bug that occurred during development of MVAPICH, we evaluate AutomaDeD on a range of bugs injected into the NAS parallel benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that detects the time period when a bug first manifested itself with 90% accuracy for stalls and hangs and 70% accuracy for interference faults. It identifies the subset of processes first affected by the fault with 80% accuracy and 70% accuracy, respectively and the …
Date: March 23, 2010
Creator: Bronevetsky, G; Laguna, I; Bagchi, S; de Supinski, B R; Ahn, D & Schulz, M
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library
Statistical Fault Detection for Parallel Applications with AutomaDeD (open access)

Statistical Fault Detection for Parallel Applications with AutomaDeD

Today's largest systems have over 100,000 cores, with million-core systems expected over the next few years. The large component count means that these systems fail frequently and often in very complex ways, making them difficult to use and maintain. While prior work on fault detection and diagnosis has focused on faults that significantly reduce system functionality, the wide variety of failure modes in modern systems makes them likely to fail in complex ways that impair system performance but are difficult to detect and diagnose. This paper presents AutomaDeD, a statistical tool that models the timing behavior of each application task and tracks its behavior to identify any abnormalities. If any are observed, AutomaDeD can immediately detect them and report to the system administrator the task where the problem began. This identification of the fault's initial manifestation can provide administrators with valuable insight into the fault's root causes, making it significantly easier and cheaper for them to understand and repair it. Our experimental evaluation shows that AutomaDeD detects a wide range of faults immediately after they occur 80% of the time, with a low false-positive rate. Further, it identifies weaknesses of the current approach that motivate future research.
Date: March 23, 2010
Creator: Bronevetsky, G; Laguna, I; Bagchi, S; de Supinski, B R; Ahn, D & Schulz, M
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library
Legislative Branch: FY2011 Appropriations (open access)

Legislative Branch: FY2011 Appropriations

This report gives an overview of the status of FY2011 appropriations and funding issues for the Senate, House of Representatives, and support agencies.
Date: March 23, 2011
Creator: Brudnick, Ida A.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Assembly of 500,000 inter-specific catfish expressed sequence tags and large scale gene-associated marker development for whole genome association studies (open access)

Assembly of 500,000 inter-specific catfish expressed sequence tags and large scale gene-associated marker development for whole genome association studies

Background-Through the Community Sequencing Program, a catfish EST sequencing project was carried out through a collaboration between the catfish research community and the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute. Prior to this project, only a limited EST resource from catfish was available for the purpose of SNP identification. Results-A total of 438,321 quality ESTs were generated from 8 channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus) and 4 blue catfish (Ictalurus furcatus) libraries, bringing the number of catfish ESTs to nearly 500,000. Assembly of all catfish ESTs resulted in 45,306 contigs and 66,272 singletons. Over 35percent of the unique sequences had significant similarities to known genes, allowing the identification of 14,776 unique genes in catfish. Over 300,000 putative SNPs have been identified, of which approximately 48,000 are high-quality SNPs identified from contigs with at least four sequences and the minor allele presence of at least two sequences in the contig. The EST resource should be valuable for identification of microsatellites, genome annotation, large-scale expression analysis, and comparative genome analysis. Conclusions-This project generated a large EST resource for catfish that captured the majority of the catfish transcriptome. The parallel analysis of ESTs from two closely related Ictalurid catfishes should also provide powerful means for the …
Date: March 23, 2010
Creator: Catfish Genome Consortium
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library
An estimate of collisional beam scattering during final focus in NDCX-II (open access)

An estimate of collisional beam scattering during final focus in NDCX-II

The final focus of NDCX-II contains a region with quite high plasma density. We estimate here how much collisional scatter we expect from transit through this plasma. A separate question, not explored here, is how much scatter there might be off of collective fluctuations in the neutralizing plasma, including those driven by the passage of the beam.
Date: March 23, 2010
Creator: Cohen, R.H.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
A Next Generation Light Source Facility at LBNL (open access)

A Next Generation Light Source Facility at LBNL

The Next Generation Light Source (NGLS) is a design concept, under development at LBNL, for a multibeamline soft x-ray FEL array powered by a ~;;2 GeV superconducting linear accelerator, operating with a 1 MHz bunch repetition rate. The CW superconducting linear accelerator is supplied by a high-brightness, highrepetition- rate photocathode electron gun. Electron bunches are distributed from the linac to the array of independently configurable FEL beamlines with nominal bunch rates up to 100 kHz in each FEL, and with even pulse spacing. Individual FELs may be configured for EEHG, HGHG, SASE, or oscillator mode of operation, and will produce high peak and average brightness x-rays with a flexible pulse format, with pulse durations ranging from sub-femtoseconds to hundreds of femtoseconds.
Date: March 23, 2011
Creator: Corlett, J. N.; Austin, B.; Baptiste, K. M.; Byrd, J. M.; Denes, P.; Donahue, R. et al.
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library
Two-dimensional Imaging Velocity Interferometry: Technique and Data Analysis (open access)

Two-dimensional Imaging Velocity Interferometry: Technique and Data Analysis

We describe the data analysis procedures for an emerging interferometric technique for measuring motion across a two-dimensional image at a moment in time, i.e. a snapshot 2d-VISAR. Velocity interferometers (VISAR) measuring target motion to high precision have been an important diagnostic in shockwave physics for many years Until recently, this diagnostic has been limited to measuring motion at points or lines across a target. We introduce an emerging interferometric technique for measuring motion across a two-dimensional image, which could be called a snapshot 2d-VISAR. If a sufficiently fast movie camera technology existed, it could be placed behind a traditional VISAR optical system and record a 2d image vs time. But since that technology is not yet available, we use a CCD detector to record a single 2d image, with the pulsed nature of the illumination providing the time resolution. Consequently, since we are using pulsed illumination having a coherence length shorter than the VISAR interferometer delay ({approx}0.1 ns), we must use the white light velocimetry configuration to produce fringes with significant visibility. In this scheme, two interferometers (illuminating, detecting) having nearly identical delays are used in series, with one before the target and one after. This produces fringes with at …
Date: March 23, 2011
Creator: Erskine, D. J.; Smith, R. F.; Bolme, C.; Celliers, P. & Collins, G.
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library
U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF): Background and Issues for Congress (open access)

U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF): Background and Issues for Congress

Special Operations Forces (SOF) play a significant role in U.S. military operations, and the Administration has given U.S. SOF greater responsibility for planning and conducting worldwide counterterrorism operations. This report covers SOF budgets for FY2013 and what the budgeted money could be used for.
Date: March 23, 2012
Creator: Feickert, Andrew
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Eligibility and Determination of Health Insurance Premium Tax Credits and Cost-Sharing Subsidies: In Brief (open access)

Eligibility and Determination of Health Insurance Premium Tax Credits and Cost-Sharing Subsidies: In Brief

Certain individuals without access to subsidized health insurance coverage may be eligible for premium tax credits, as established under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA; P.L. 111-148, as amended). This report examines these tax credits and their eligibility requirements, as well as cost-sharing subsidies.
Date: March 23, 2016
Creator: Fernandez, Bernadette
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Cybersecurity (open access)

Cybersecurity

This report details the information related to cybersecurity, its factors, legislative issues, and long-term challenges.
Date: March 23, 2015
Creator: Fischer, Eric A. & Theohary, Catherine A.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Design and Construction of Prototype Dark Matter Detectors (open access)

Design and Construction of Prototype Dark Matter Detectors

The Lepton Quark Studies (LQS) group is engaged in searching for dark matter using the Dark Matter Time Projection Chamber (DMTPC) at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) (Carlsbad, NM). DMTPC is a direction-sensitive dark matter detector designed to measure the recoil direction and energy deposited by fluorine nuclei recoiling from the interaction with incident WIMPs. In the past year, the major areas of progress have been: #15; to publish the #12;first dark matter search results from a surface run of the DMTPC prototype detector, #15; to build and install the 10L prototype in the underground laboratory at WIPP which will house the 1 m{sup 3} detector, and #15; to demonstrate charge and PMT readout of the TPC using prototype detectors, which allow triggering and #1;{Delta}z measurement to be used in the 1 m{sup 3} detector under development.
Date: March 23, 2012
Creator: Fisher, Peter
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Federal Deposit Insurance for Banks and Credit Unions (open access)

Federal Deposit Insurance for Banks and Credit Unions

This report begins with an overview of the FDIC, recent status of the DIF, and efforts to reduce the loss exposure and total risk to the fund. Next, an overview of the NCUA, recent status of the NCUSIF, and efforts to reduce the loss exposure and total risk to the fund are presented.
Date: March 23, 2011
Creator: Getter, Darryl E.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Accurate Alignment of Plasma Channels Based on Laser Centroid Oscillations (open access)

Accurate Alignment of Plasma Channels Based on Laser Centroid Oscillations

A technique has been developed to accurately align a laser beam through a plasma channel by minimizing the shift in laser centroid and angle at the channel outptut. If only the shift in centroid or angle is measured, then accurate alignment is provided by minimizing laser centroid motion at the channel exit as the channel properties are scanned. The improvement in alignment accuracy provided by this technique is important for minimizing electron beam pointing errors in laser plasma accelerators.
Date: March 23, 2011
Creator: Gonsalves, Anthony; Nakamura, Kei; Lin, Chen; Osterhoff, Jens; Shiraishi, Satomi; Schroeder, Carl et al.
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library
Electromagnetic Transport From Microtearing Mode Turbulence (open access)

Electromagnetic Transport From Microtearing Mode Turbulence

This Letter presents non-linear gyrokinetic simulations of microtearing mode turbulence. The simulations include collisional and electromagnetic effects and use experimental parameters from a high beta discharge in the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX). The predicted electron thermal transport is comparable to that given by experimental analysis, and it is dominated by the electromagnetic contribution of electrons free streaming along the resulting stochastic magnetic field line trajectories. Experimental values of flow shear can significantly reduce the predicted transport.
Date: March 23, 2011
Creator: Guttenfelder, W.; Candy, J.; Kaye, S. M.; Nevins, W. M.; Wang, E.; Bell, R. E. et al.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Outer Continental Shelf Moratoria on Oil and Gas Development (open access)

Outer Continental Shelf Moratoria on Oil and Gas Development

This report discusses moratoria measures for the outer continental shelf (OCS) which establish bans or restrictions on oil and gas exploration and development in federal ocean areas. It includes a background of offshore oil and gas development, the sources of U.S. moratorium policy, the background of ocean governance, U.S. moratoria in international areas, and related issues for congress.
Date: March 23, 2011
Creator: Hagerty, Curry L.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Outer Continental Shelf Moratoria on Oil and Gas Development (open access)

Outer Continental Shelf Moratoria on Oil and Gas Development

This report discusses moratoria measures for the outer continental shelf (OCS) which establish bans or restrictions on oil and gas exploration and development in federal ocean areas. It includes a background of offshore oil and gas development, the sources of U.S. moratorium policy, the background of ocean governance, U.S. moratoria in international areas, and related issues for congress.
Date: March 23, 2010
Creator: Hagerty, Curry L.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program FY 2009 for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (open access)

Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program FY 2009 for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Berkeley Lab LDRD FY2009 Annual Report
Date: March 23, 2010
Creator: Hansen, Todd C.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Iran Sanctions (open access)

Iran Sanctions

This report analyzes U.S. and international sanctions against Iran and provides some examples, based on open sources, of companies and countries that conduct business with Iran.
Date: March 23, 2016
Creator: Katzman, Kenneth
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library