A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO's third report on the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) follows up on recommendations from the January 28, 2009, report (GAO-09-296). It also reviews (1) the nature and purpose of activities that had been initiated under TARP as of March 27, 2009; (2) the Department of Treasury's Office of Financial Stability's (OFS) hiring efforts, use of contractors, and progress in developing an internal control system; and (3) TARP performance indicators. For this work, GAO reviewed signed agreements and other relevant documentation and met with officials from OFS, contractors, and federal agencies. As of March 27, 2009, Treasury had disbursed $303.4 billion of the $700 billion in TARP funds. Most of the funds (almost $199 billion) went to purchase preferred shares of 532 financial institutions under the Capital Purchase Program (CPP), Treasury's primary vehicle under TARP for stabilizing financial markets."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) Division of Enforcement (Enforcement) plays a key role in meeting the agency's mission to protect investors and maintain fair and orderly markets. In recent years, Enforcement has brought cases yielding record civil penalties, but questions have been raised about its capacity to manage its resources and fulfill its law enforcement and investor protection responsibilities. GAO was asked to evaluate, among other issues, (1) SEC's progress toward implementing GAO's 2007 recommendations; (2) the extent to which Enforcement has an appropriate mix of resources dedicated to achieving its objectives; and (3) the adoption, implementation, and effects of recent penalty policies. GAO analyzed information on resources, enforcement actions, and penalties; and interviewed current and former SEC officials and staff, and others."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses our work on the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), under which the Department of the Treasury (Treasury) has the authority to purchase and insure up to $700 billion in troubled assets held by financial institutions through its Office of Financial Stability (OFS). As Congress may know, Treasury was granted this authority in response to the financial crisis that has threatened the stability of the U.S. banking system and the solvency of numerous financial institutions. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (the act) that authorized TARP on October 3, 2008, requires GAO to report at least every 60 days on the findings resulting from our oversight of the actions taken under the program. We are also responsible for auditing TARP's annual financial statements and for producing special reports on any issues that emerge from our oversight. To carry out these oversight responsibilities, we have assembled interdisciplinary teams with a wide range of technical skills, including financial market and public policy analysts, accountants, lawyers, and economists who represent combined resources from across GAO. This testimon is based primarily on our March 31, 2009 report that we are issuing …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This report presents the results of GAO's review of the expenses of the Office of Special Counsel-Patrick J. Fitzgerald (OSC-Fitzgerald) for the 6 months ended September 30, 2008. The expenses we reviewed were those made by the Department of Justice (DOJ) between April 1, 2008, and September 30, 2008, from the permanent, indefinite appropriation (fund) for OSC-Fitzgerald. To determine if there were additional payments made subsequent to the 6-month period covered by our review, we also reviewed expenses paid out of the fund between October 1, 2008, and February 28, 2009. DOJ determined that the appropriation established by Public Law 100-2021 to fund expenses by independent counsels pursuant to the independent counsel law or other law is available to fund the expenses of U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who was appointed as a special counsel within the Department of Justice by the then-Acting Attorney General. Under this law, we are required to perform semiannual financial reviews of expenses from the fund, and, we report our findings to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. To satisfy this requirement, we review each expense processed by DOJ to determine whether it …

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Bi-weekly student newspaper from Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas that includes campus news and local news of interest to students along with advertising.

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

The objective of this project was to assess the feasibility of using a membrane process to capture CO2 from coal-fired power plant flue gas. During this program, MTR developed a novel membrane (Polaris™) with a CO2 permeance tenfold higher than commercial CO2-selective membranes used in natural gas treatment. The Polaris™ membrane, combined with a process design that uses a portion of combustion air as a sweep stream to generate driving force for CO2 permeation, meets DOE post-combustion CO2 capture targets. Initial studies indicate a CO2 separation and liquefaction cost of $20 - $30/ton CO2 using about 15% of the plant energy at 90% CO2 capture from a coal-fired power plant. Production of the Polaris™ CO2 capture membrane was scaled up with MTR’s commercial casting and coating equipment. Parametric tests of cross-flow and countercurrent/sweep modules prepared from this membrane confirm their near-ideal performance under expected flue gas operating conditions. Commercial-scale, 8-inch diameter modules also show stable performance in field tests treating raw natural gas. These findings suggest that membranes are a viable option for flue gas CO2 capture. The next step will be to conduct a field demonstration treating a realworld power plant flue gas stream. The first such MTR field …

This report documents the requirements for transferring physical and hydraulic property data compiled by PNNL into the Hanford Environmental Information System (HEIS). The Remediation Decision Support (RDS) Project is managed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to support Hanford Site waste management and remedial action decisions by the U.S. Department of Energy and one of their current site contractors - CH2M-Hill Plateau Remediation Company (CHPRC). The objective of Task 1, Activity 6 of the RDS project is to compile all available physical and hydraulic property data for sediments from the Hanford Site, to port these data into the Hanford Environmental Information System (HEIS), and to make the data web-accessible to anyone on the Hanford Local Area Network via the so-called Virtual Library.1 These physical and hydraulic property data are used to estimate parameters for analytical and numerical flow and transport models that are used for site risk assessments and evaluation of remedial action alternatives. In past years efforts were made by RDS project staff to compile all available physical and hydraulic property data for Hanford sediments and to transfer these data into SoilVision{reg_sign}, a commercial geotechnical software package designed for storing, analyzing, and manipulating soils data. Although SoilVision{reg_sign} has proven …

Reconciliation detail and summary with an ending balance of $4,622.67 for the period ending on March 31, 2009.

A strong systems approach to designing and building practical LED-based replacement lamps is lacking. The general method of taking high-performance LEDs and marrying them to standard printed circuit boards, drivers and a heat sink has fallen short of the promise of LED lighting. In this program, a top-down assessment of requirements and a bottom-up reinvention of LED sources, electronics, optics and mechanics have resulted in the highest performance lamp possible. The team, comprised of Color Kinetics, the leaders in LED lighting and Cree, the leaders in LED devices took an approach to reinvent the package, the driver and the overall form and aesthetic of a replacement source. The challenge was to create a new benchmark in LED lighting - the resultant lamp, a PAR38 equivalent, met the light output, color, color quality and efficacy marks set out in the program as well as being dimmable, which is important for market acceptance. The approach combined the use of multiple source die, a chip-on-board approach, a very efficient driver topology, the use of both direct emission and phosphor conversion, and a unique faceted optic to avoid the losses, artifacts and hotspots of lensed approaches. The integral heat sink provided a mechanical base …

Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory expanded the Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Transportation (GREET) model and incorporated the fuel economy and electricity use of alternative fuel/vehicle systems simulated by the Powertrain System Analysis Toolkit (PSAT) to conduct a well-to-wheels (WTW) analysis of energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). The WTW results were separately calculated for the blended charge-depleting (CD) and charge-sustaining (CS) modes of PHEV operation and then combined by using a weighting factor that represented the CD vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) share. As indicated by PSAT simulations of the CD operation, grid electricity accounted for a share of the vehicle's total energy use, ranging from 6% for a PHEV 10 to 24% for a PHEV 40, based on CD VMT shares of 23% and 63%, respectively. In addition to the PHEV's fuel economy and type of on-board fuel, the marginal electricity generation mix used to charge the vehicle impacted the WTW results, especially GHG emissions. Three North American Electric Reliability Corporation regions (4, 6, and 13) were selected for this analysis, because they encompassed large metropolitan areas (Illinois, New York, and California, respectively) and provided a significant variation of marginal generation …

One of the most promising methods of capturing CO{sub 2} emitted by coal-fired power plants for subsequent sequestration is chemical looping combustion (CLC). A powdered metal oxide such as NiO transfers oxygen directly to a fuel in a fuel reactor at high temperatures with no air present. Heat, water, and CO{sub 2} are released, and after H{sub 2}O condensation the CO{sub 2} (undiluted by N{sub 2}) is ready for sequestration, whereas the nickel metal is ready for reoxidation in the air reactor. In principle, these processes can be repeated endlessly with the original nickel metal/nickel oxide participating in a loop that admits fuel and rejects ash, heat, and water. Our project accumulated kinetic rate data at high temperatures and elevated pressures for the metal oxide reduction step and for the metal reoxidation step. These data will be used in computational modeling of CLC on the laboratory scale and presumably later on the plant scale. The oxygen carrier on which the research at Utah is focused is CuO/Cu{sub 2}O rather than nickel oxide because the copper system lends itself to use with solid fuels in an alternative to CLC called 'chemical looping with oxygen uncoupling' (CLOU).

This conference brings together scientists interested in a range of basic phenomena linked to the ejection and scattering of electrons from atoms, molecules, clusters, liquids and solids by absorption of light. Photoionization, a highly sensitive probe of both structure and dynamics, can range from perturbative single-photon processes to strong-field highly non-perturbative interactions. It is responsible for the formation and destruction of molecules in astrophysical and plasma environments and successfully used in advanced analytical techniques. Positive ions, which can be produced and studied most effectively using photoionization, are the major components of all plasmas, vital constituents of flames and important intermediates in many chemical reactions. Negative ions are significant as transient species and, when photodetached, the corresponding neutral species often undergoes remarkable, otherwise non-observable, dynamics. The scope of the meeting spans from novel observations in atomic and molecular physics, such as Coulomb Crystals, highly excited states and cold Rydberg plasmas, to novel energy resolved or ultrafast time-resolved experiments, photoionization in strong laser fields, theoretical method development for electron scattering, photoionization and photodetachment and more complex phenomena such as charge transfer and DNA and protein conductivity, important for biological and analytical applications.

Recent studies of heterogeneous reburning, i.e., reburning involving a coal-derived char, have elucidated its variables, kinetics and mechanisms that are valuable to the development of a highly efficient reburning process. Young lignite chars contain catalysts that not only reduce NO, but they also reduce HCN that is an important intermediate that recycles to NO in the burnout zone. Gaseous CO scavenges the surface oxides that are formed during NO reduction, regenerating the active sites on the char surface. Based on this mechanistic information, cost-effective mixed fuels containing these multiple features has been designed and tested in a simulated reburning apparatus. Remarkably high reduction of NO and HCN has been observed and it is anticipated that mixed fuel will remove 85% of NO in a three-stage reburning process.

We provide an introduction to recent lattice formulations of supersymmetric theories which are invariant under one or more real supersymmetries at nonzero lattice spacing. These include the especially interesting case of N = 4 SYM in four dimensions. We discuss approaches based both on twisted supersymmetry and orbifold-deconstruction techniques and show their equivalence in the case of gauge theories. The presence of an exact supersymmetry reduces and in some cases eliminates the need for fine tuning to achieve a continuum limit invariant under the full supersymmetry of the target theory. We discuss open problems.

This report presents the results of a 5-day test of an electrochemical bench-scale apparatus using a proprietary (NAS-GY) material formulation of a (Na) Super Ion Conductor (NaSICON) membrane in a Large Area NaSICON Structures (LANS) configuration. The primary objectives of this work were to assess system performance, membrane seal integrity, and material degradation while removing Na from Group 5 and 6 tank waste from the Hanford Site.

We point out how, in certain models of New Physics, the same combination of couplings occurs in the amplitudes for both D{sup 0}-{bar D}{sup 0} mixing and the rare decays D{sup 0} {yields} {ell}{sup +}{ell}{sup -}. If the New Physics dominates and is responsible for the observed mixing, then a very simple correlation exists between the magnitudes of each; in fact the rates for the decay D{sup 0} {yields} {ell}{sup +}{ell}{sup -} are completely fixed by the mixing. Observation of D{sup 0} {yields} {ell}{sup +}{ell}{sup -} in excess of the Standard Model prediction could identify New Physics contributions to D{sup 0}-{bar D}{sup 0} mixing.

Our project goal was to develop innovative seismic-based workflows for the incremental recovery of oil from karst-modified reservoirs within the onshore continental United States. Specific project objectives were: (1) to calibrate new multi-trace seismic attributes (volumetric curvature, in particular) for improved imaging of karst-modified reservoirs, (2) to develop attribute-based, cost-effective workflows to better characterize karst-modified carbonate reservoirs and fracture systems, and (3) to improve accuracy and predictiveness of resulting geomodels and reservoir simulations. In order to develop our workflows and validate our techniques, we conducted integrated studies of five karst-modified reservoirs in west Texas, Colorado, and Kansas. Our studies show that 3-D seismic volumetric curvature attributes have the ability to re-veal previously unknown features or provide enhanced visibility of karst and fracture features compared with other seismic analysis methods. Using these attributes, we recognize collapse features, solution-enlarged fractures, and geomorphologies that appear to be related to mature, cockpit landscapes. In four of our reservoir studies, volumetric curvature attributes appear to delineate reservoir compartment boundaries that impact production. The presence of these compartment boundaries was corroborated by reservoir simulations in two of the study areas. Based on our study results, we conclude that volumetric curvature attributes are valuable tools for mapping …

The objective of this project is to determine whether deformation mode is a primary factor in the mechanism of irradiation assisted intergranular stress corrosion cracking of austenitic alloys in light watert reactor core components. Deformation mode will be controlled by both the stacking fault energy of the alloy and the degree of irradiation. In order to establish that localized deformation is a major factor in IASCC, the stacking fault energies of the alloys selected for study must be measured. Second, it is completely unknown how dose and SFE trade-off in terms of promoting localized deformation. Finally, it must be established that it is the localized deformation, and not some other factor that drives IASCC.

The Nez Perce Tribe (NPT), through funding provided by the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), has implemented a Chinook salmon supplementation program (250,000 smolts) on the Lostine River, a tributary to the Grande Ronde River of Oregon. The Grande Ronde Endemic Spring Chinook Salmon Supplementation project, which involves supplementation of the Upper Grande Ronde River and Catherine Creek in addition to the Lostine River, was established to prevent extirpation and increase the number of threatened Snake River spring/summer Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) returning to the Grande Ronde River. This report covers the tenth season (1997-2006) of adult Chinook salmon broodstock collection in the Lostine River and the eighth season (1999-2006) of acclimation of resulting Lostine River progeny. Production of Lostine River spring Chinook salmon smolts currently occurs at Lookingglass Fish Hatchery (LGH). The Lostine River supplementation program utilizes two strategies to obtain egg source for production of smolts for supplementation: captive broodstock and conventional broodstock. The captive broodstock strategy involves (1) capture of natural juvenile spring Chinook salmon smolts from the Lostine River, (2) rearing those to adult and spawning them, and (3) rearing the resultant progeny for eventual acclimation and release back into the Lostine River. The conventional broodstock strategy …

This effort contains two main components: The new induction-bunching module is expected to deliver higher fluence in the bunched beam, and the new target positioner will enable a significantly enhanced target physics repetition rate. The velocity ramp that bunches the K{sup +} beam in the neutralized drift compression section is established with a bipolar voltage ramp applied to an acceleration gap. An induction acceleration module creates this voltage waveform. The new bunching module (IBM) specially built for NDCX has approximately twice the capability (volt-seconds) as our original IBM. We reported on the beam line design for the best use of the bunching module in our FY08 Q2 report. Based on simulations and theoretical work, we chose to extend the drift compression section and use the additional volt-seconds to extend the pulse duration and keep the peak voltage swing (and velocity excursions) similar to the present module. Simulations showed that this approach, which extends the drift section, to be advantageous because it limits the chromatic aberrations in the beam spot on target. To this end, colleagues at PPPL have fabricated the meter-long extension to the ferroelectric plasma source and it was installed on the beam line with the new IBM in …

A summary of progress at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is given on: (1) experiments on down-ramp injection; (2) experiments on acceleration in capillary discharge plasma channels; and (3) simulations of a staged laser wakefield accelerator (LWFA). Control of trapping in a LWFA using plasma density down-ramps produced electron bunches with absolute longitudinal and transverse momentum spreads more than ten times lower than in previous experiments (0.17 and 0.02 MeV Ic FWHM, respectively) and with central momenta of 0.76 +- 0.02 MeV Ic, stable over a week of operation. Experiments were also carried out using a 40 TW laser interacting with a hydrogen-filled capillary discharge waveguide. For a 15 mm long, 200 mu m diameter capillary, quasi-monoenergetic bunches up to 300 MeV were observed. By detuning discharge delay from optimum guiding performance, self-trapping was found to be stabilized. For a 33 mm long, 300 mu m capillary, a parameter regime with high energy bunches, up to 1 Ge V, was found. In this regime, peak electron energy was correlated with the amount of trapped charge. Simulations show that bunches produced on a down-ramn and iniected into a channel-guided LWFA can produce stable beams with 0.2 MeV Ic-class momentum spread at high …