Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Recovery from major disasters is a complex undertaking that involves the combined efforts of federal, state, and local government in order to succeed. While the federal government provides a significant amount of financial and technical assistance for recovery, state and local jurisdictions work closely with federal agencies to secure and make use of those resources. This testimony describes lessons and insights that GAO has identified from review of past disasters, which may be useful to inform recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricanes Ike and Gustav, as well as disasters yet to come. These lessons come from two reports GAO recently released last fall on disaster recovery. The first draws on the experiences of communities that have recovered from previous major disasters in order to help inform recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricanes Ike and Gustav as well as the 2008 Midwest floods. The second examines the implementation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Public Assistance grant program and identifies several actions that the Department of Homeland Security can take to improve operations of that program. These include improving information sharing and enhancing continuity and communication. …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses the Department of Defense's (DOD) efforts to reduce fuel demand at its forward-deployed locations, particularly those that are not connected to local power grids. In 2008, more than 68 million gallons of fuel, on average, were supplied by DOD each month to support U.S. military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Transporting large quantities of fuel to forward-deployed locations presents an enormous logistics burden and risk. Long truck convoys moving fuel to forward-deployed locations have encountered enemy attacks, severe weather, traffic accidents, and pilferage. For example, DOD reported that in June 2008 alone, 44 trucks and 220,000 gallons of fuel were lost due to attacks or other events while delivering fuel to Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan. High fuel demand, coupled with the recent volatility of fuel prices, also have significant implications for DOD's operating costs. The fully burdened cost of fuel--that is, the total ownership cost of buying, moving, and protecting fuel in systems during combat--has been reported to be many times higher than the price of a gallon of fuel itself. While DOD's weapon systems require large amounts of fuel, the department reports that …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Since 1990, GAO has consistently designated the Department of Defense's (DOD) management of its major weapon acquisitions as a high-risk area. A broad consensus exists that weapon system problems are serious, but efforts at reform have had limited impact. Last year, GAO reported that DOD's portfolio of weapon programs experienced cost growth of $295 billion from first estimates, were delayed by an average of 21 months, and delivered fewer quantities and capabilities to the warfighter than originally planned. At a time when DOD faces increased fiscal pressures from ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the federal budget is strained by a growing number of priorities, it is critical that the department effectively manage its substantial investment in weapon system programs. Every dollar wasted or used inefficiently on acquiring weapon systems means that less money is available for the government's other important budgetary demands. This testimony describes the systemic problems that contribute to the cost, schedule, and performance problems in weapon system programs, recent actions that DOD has taken to address these problems, proposed reform legislation that the committee recently introduced, and additional steps needed to improve future …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was created in March 2003 as part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). From fiscal year 2003 through fiscal year 2007, the average daily population of detainees in ICE custody increased by about 40 percent, with the most growth occurring since fiscal year 2005. In fiscal year 2007, ICE held over 311,000 detainees at more than 500 detention facilities. Most of these were Intergovernmental Service Agreement (IGSA) facilities--state and local jails under contract with ICE to hold detainees. Some ICE detainees received health care services from IGSA staff, IGSA contractors, or community medical providers, and other ICE detainees received health care provided or arranged by the Division of Immigration Health Services (DIHS). DIHS is mainly composed of contract employees and officers from the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) Commissioned Corps--a uniformed service of public health professionals who are part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and who provide services in different settings, including ICE detention facilities. In light of questions about the health care provided to detainees in ICE custody, Congress requested information about ICE's organizational structure and its …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of the Interior is responsible for managing much of the nation's vast natural resources. Its agencies implement an array of programs intended to protect these precious resources for future generations while also allowing certain uses of them, such as oil and gas development and recreation. In some cases, Interior is authorized to collect royalties and fees for these uses. Over the years, GAO has reported on challenges facing Interior as it implements its programs. In addition to basic program management issues, Interior faces difficult choices in balancing its many responsibilities, and in improving the condition of the nation's natural resources and the department's infrastructure, in light of the federal deficit and long-term fiscal challenges facing the nation. This testimony highlights some of the major management challenges facing Interior today. It is based on prior GAO reports."

The overall goal of the project was to bridge the gap between our knowledge of small-scale geochemical reaction rates and reaction rates meaningful for modeling transport at core scales. The working hypothesis was that reaction rates, determined from laboratory measurements based upon reactions typically conducted in well mixed batch reactors using pulverized reactive media may be significantly changed in in situ porous media flow due to rock microstructure heterogeneity. Specifically we hypothesized that, generally, reactive mineral surfaces are not uniformly accessible to reactive fluids due to the random deposition of mineral grains and to the variation in flow rates within a pore network. Expected bulk reaction rates would therefore have to be correctly up-scaled to reflect such heterogeneity. The specific objective was to develop a computational tool that integrates existing measurement capabilities with pore-scale network models of fluid flow and reactive transport. The existing measurement capabilities to be integrated consisted of (a) pore space morphology, (b) rock mineralogy, and (c) geochemical reaction rates. The objective was accomplished by: (1) characterizing sedimentary sandstone rock morphology using X-ray computed microtomography, (2) mapping rock mineralogy using back-scattered electron microscopy (BSE), X-ray dispersive spectroscopy (EDX) and CMT, (3) characterizing pore-accessible reactive mineral surface area, …

The objective of this project is to develop novel non-precious metal electrocatalysts for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), and demonstrate the potential of the catalysts to perform at least as good as conventional Pt catalysts currently in use in polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) with a cost at least 50 % less than a target of 0.2 g (Pt loading)/peak kW and with durability > 2,000 h operation with less than 10 % power degradation. A novel nitrogen-modified carbon-based catalyst was obtained by modifying carbon black with nitrogen-containing organic precursor in the absence of transition metal precursor. The catalyst shows the onset potential of approximately 0.76 V (NHE) for ORR and the amount of H2O2 of approximately 3% at 0.5 V (NHE). Furthermore, a carbon composite catalyst was achieved through the high-temperature pyrolysis of the precursors of transition metal (Co and Fe) and nitrogen supported on the nitrogen-modified carbon-based catalyst, followed by chemical post-treatment. This catalyst showed an onset potential for ORR as high as 0.87 V (NHE), and generated less than 1 % of H2O2. The PEM fuel cell exhibited a current density of 2.3 A cm-2 at 0.2 V for a catalyst loading of 6.0 mg cm-2. No …

OG Technologies, Inc. (OGT) has led this SQA (Surface Quality Assured Steel Bar) program to solve the major surface quality problems plaguing the US special quality steel bars and rods industry and their customers, based on crosscutting sensors and controls technologies. Surface defects in steel formed in a hot rolling process are one of the most common quality issues faced by the American steel industry, accounting for roughly 50% of the rejects or 2.5% of the total shipment. Unlike other problems such as the mechanical properties of the steel product, most surface defects are sporadic and cannot be addressed based on sampling techniques. This issue hurts the rolling industry and their customers in their process efficiency and operational costs. The goal of this program is to develop and demonstrate an SQA prototype, with synergy of HotEye® and other innovations, that enables effective rolling process control and efficient quality control. HotEye®, OGT’s invention, delivers high definition images of workpieces at or exceeding 1,450C while the workpieces travel at 100 m/s. The elimination of surface defect rejects will be achieved through the integration of imaging-based quality assessment, advanced signal processing, predictive process controls and the integration with other quality control tools. The …

We measure rate asymmetries for the rare decays B {yields} K{sup (*)}{ell}{sup +}{ell}{sup -}, where {ell}{sup +}{ell}{sup -} is either e{sup +}e{sup -} or {mu}{sup +}{mu}{sup -}, using a sample of 384 million B{bar B} events collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II e{sup +}e{sup -} collider. We find no evidence for direct CP or lepton-flavor asymmetries. For dilepton masses below the J/{psi} resonance, we find evidence for unexpectedly large isospin asymmetries in both B {yields} K{ell}{sup +}{ell}{sup -} and B {yields} K*{ell}{sup +}{ell}{sup -} which differ respectively by 3.2{sigma} and 2.7{sigma}, including systematic uncertainties, from the Standard Model expectations.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas Senate and House of Representatives relating to granting the legislature permission to adjourn for more than three days during the period beginning on Wednesday, February 25, 2009, and ending on Monday, March 2, 2009.

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

Weekly student newspaper from the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas that includes campus news and commentaries along with advertising.

This report provides a feasibility study for the heating of Tribal buildings using woody biomass. The study was conducted for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation in western Montana. S&K Holding Company and TP Roche Company completed the study and worked together to provide the final report. This project was funded by the DOE's Tribal Energy Program.

This paper constructs strong-stability-preserving general linear time-stepping methods that are well suited for hyperbolic PDEs discretized by the method of lines. These methods generalize both Runge-Kutta (RK) and linear multistep schemes. They have high stage orders and hence are less susceptible than RK methods to order reduction from source terms or nonhomogeneous boundary conditions. A global optimization strategy is used to find the most efficient schemes that have low storage requirements. Numerical results illustrate the theoretical findings.

The rapidly emerging field of systems biology is helping us to understand the molecular determinants of phenotype on a genomic scale [1]. Cis-regulatory elements are major sequence-based determinants of biological processes in cells and tissues [2]. For instance, during transcriptional regulation, transcription factors (TFs) bind to very specific regions on the promoter DNA [2,3] and recruit the basal transcriptional machinery, which ultimately initiates mRNA transcription (Figure 1A). Learning cis-Regulatory Elements from Omics Data A vast amount of work over the past decade has shown that omics data can be used to learn cis-regulatory logic on a genome-wide scale [4-6]--in particular, by integrating sequence data with mRNA expression profiles. The most popular approach has been to identify over-represented motifs in promoters of genes that are coexpressed [4,7,8]. Though widely used, such an approach can be limiting for a variety of reasons. First, the combinatorial nature of gene regulation is difficult to explicitly model in this framework. Moreover, in many applications of this approach, expression data from multiple conditions are necessary to obtain reliable predictions. This can potentially limit the use of this method to only large data sets [9]. Although these methods can be adapted to analyze mRNA expression data from …

We previously showed that the expression of troponin T1 (Tnnt 1) was induced in the central nervous system (CNS) of adultmice 30 min after treatment with ketamine, a glutamate N-methyl-D-aspartic acid (NMDA) receptor antagonist. We hypothesized that Tnnt 1 expression may be an early molecular biomarker of stress response in the CNS of mice. To further evaluate this hypothesis, we investigated the regional expression of Tnnt 1 in the mouse brain using RNA in situ hybridization 4 h after systemic exposure to interferon-a (IFN-a) and gamma ionizing radiation, both of which have be associated with wide ranges of neuropsychiatric complications. Adult B6C3F1 male mice were treated with either human IFN-a (a single i.p. injection at 1 x 105 IU/kg) or whole body gamma-radiation (10 cGy or 2 Gy). Patterns of Tnnt 1 transcript expression were compared in various CNS regions after IFN-a, radiation and ketamine treatments (previous study). Tnnt 1 expression was consistently induced in pyramidal neurons of cerebral cortex and hippocampus after all treatment regimens including 10 cGy of ionizing radiation. Regional expression of Tnnt 1 was induced in Purkinje cells of cerebellum after ionizing radiation and ketamine treatment; but not after IFN-a treatment. None of the three treatments …

Fits to the precision electroweak data that include the NuTeV measurement are considered in family universal, anomaly free U(1) extensions of the Standard Model. In data sets from which the hadronic asymmetries are excluded, some of the Z{prime} models can double the predicted value of the Higgs boson mass, from {approx} 60 to {approx} 120 GeV, removing the tension with the LEP II lower bound, while also modestly improving the {chi}{sup 2} confidence level. The effect of the Z{prime} models on both m{sub H} and the {chi}{sup 2} confidence level is increased when the NuTeV measurement is included in the fit. Both the original NuTeV data and a revised estimate by the PDG are considered.

As a part of the Waste Acceptance Product Specifications (WAPS) for Vitrified High-Level Waste Forms defined by the Department of Energy - Office of Environmental Management, the phase stability must be determined for each of the projected high-level waste (HLW) types at the Savannah River Site (SRS). Specifically, WAPS 1.4.1 requires the glass transition temperature (Tg) to be defined and time-temperature-transformation (TTT) diagrams to be developed. The Tg of a glass is an indicator of the approximate temperature where the supercooled liquid converts to a solid on cooling or conversely, where the solid begins to behave as a viscoelastic solid on heating. A TTT diagram identifies the crystalline phases that can form as a function of time and temperature for a given waste type or more specifically, the borosilicate glass waste form. In order to assess durability, the Product Consistency Test (PCT) was used and the durability results compared to the Environmental Assessment (EA) glass. The measurement of glass transition temperature and the development of TTT diagrams have already been performed for the seven Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) projected compositions as defined in the Waste Form Compliance Plan (WCP). These measurements were performed before DWPF start-up and the results …

The Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) at the Savannah River Site vitrifies radioactive High Level Waste (HLW) for repository internment. The process consists of three major steps: waste pretreatment, vitrification, and canister decontamination/sealing. HLW consists of insoluble metal hydroxides (primarily iron, aluminum, calcium, magnesium, manganese, and uranium) and soluble sodium salts (carbonate, hydroxide, nitrite, nitrate, and sulfate). The pretreatment process in the Chemical Processing Cell (CPC) consists of two process tanks, the Sludge Receipt and Adjustment Tank (SRAT) and the Slurry Mix Evaporator (SME) as well as a melter feed tank. During SRAT processing, nitric and formic acids are added to the sludge to lower pH, destroy nitrite and carbonate ions, and reduce mercury and manganese. During the SME cycle, glass formers are added, and the batch is concentrated to the final solids target prior to vitrification. During these processes, hydrogen can be produced by catalytic decomposition of excess formic acid. The waste contains silver, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, and mercury, but silver and palladium have been shown to be insignificant factors in catalytic hydrogen generation during the DWPF process. A full factorial experimental design was developed to ensure that the existence of statistically significant two-way interactions could be determined without …

The Savannah River Site's HB-Line Facility completed a campaign in which fifty (50) cans of neptunium oxide were produced and shipped to the Idaho National Laboratory in the 9975 shipping container. This shipping campaign involved the addition of neptunium oxide to the 9975 Safety Analysis Report for Packaging (SARP) as a new content and subsequently a Letter of Amendment to the SARP content table. This paper will address the proper steps which should be taken to add a new content table to a SARP. It will also address the importance of product sampling and understanding the material shipping requirements of a SARP.

A highly efficient DC to DC converter has been developed for low-voltage high-current solid oxide fuel cells. The newly developed 'V6' converter resembles what has been done in internal combustion engine that split into multiple cylinders to increase the output capacity without having to increase individual cell size and to smooth out the torque with interleaving operation. The development was started with topology overview to ensure that all the DC to DC converter circuits were included in the study. Efficiency models for different circuit topologies were established, and computer simulations were performed to determine the best candidate converter circuit. Through design optimization including topology selection, device selection, magnetic component design, thermal design, and digital controller design, a bench prototype rated 5-kW, with 20 to 50V input and 200/400V output was fabricated and tested. Efficiency goal of 97% was proven achievable through hardware experiment. This DC to DC converter was then modified in the later stage to converter 35 to 63 V input and 13.8 V output for automotive charging applications. The complete prototype was tested at Delphi with their solid oxide fuel cell test stand to verify the performance of the modified DC to DC converter. The output was tested …

There are thousands of known contaminated sites in the United Stated, including Superfund sites (1500 to 2100 sites), RCRA corrective action sites (1500 to 3500 sites), underground storage tanks (295,000 sites), U.S. Department of Defense sites (7300 sites), U.S. Department of Energy sites (4,000 sites), mining refuse piles, and numerous other hazardous metals and organic contamination sites. Only a small percentage of these sites has been cleaned up. The development of innovative technologies to handle the various clean-up problems on a national and international scale is commonplace. Many innovative technologies have been developed that can be used to effectively remediate contaminated materials. Unfortunately, many of these technologies are only effective for materials coarser than approximately 200 mesh. In addition, these technologies usually require considerable investment in equipment, and the clean-up costs of soil material are relatively high - in excess of $100 to $500 per yd{sup 3}. These costs result from the elaborate nature of the processes, the costs for power, and the chemical cost. The fine materials are disposed of or treated at considerable costs. As a result, the costs often associated with amelioration of contaminated sites are high. Western Research institute is in the process of developing an …