We present a measurement of the top pair production cross section in p{bar p} collisions at {radical}s = 1.96 TeV. We collect a data sample with an integrated luminosity of 194 {+-} 11 pb{sup -1} with the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron. We use an artificial neural network technique to discriminate between top pair production and background processes in a sample of 519 lepton+jets events, which have one isolated energetic charged lepton, large missing transverse energy and at least three energetic jets. We measure the top pair production cross section to be {sigma}{sub t{bar t}} = 6.6 {+-} 1.1 {+-} 1.5 pb, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second is systematic.

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

In this second year of the grant, we have made good progress toward our goals of elucidating the basic materials response to repeated laser pulsing. This work includes both computer simulation and experimentation, as we now describe.

On August 19, 2004, three operators [employees of Washington TRU Solutions Central Characterization Project (CCP)] and one Health and Safety Technician [(H&ST), an employee of the University of California (UC)] were working in the mobile characterization unit, known as the Mobile Visual Examination and Repackaging Unit (MOVER). The unit, which was located in the Decontamination and Waste Treatment Facility (DWTF) Yard, uses a glovebox to repackage Transuranic (TRU) drums. Work was in progress on the last set of drums to be repackaged. Work had been completed on a TRU drum that was on its way out of the unit. Work had begun on a 0.6-plutonium-equivalent curie (PE Ci) TRU container. During the bag-in process for the 0.6-PE Ci container, operators encountered contamination measuring 6,000 counts per minute (cpm), or approximately 12,000 disintegrations per minute (dpm) on the exposed area of the drum port. The operators decontaminated the exposed, contaminated area of the drum port, and this exposed area was swiped again. The area was declared clean. During bag-out of the previous drum, operators noticed that the retaining band was not tightened optimally; therefore, the retaining band was replaced with a new one on this drum. The three operators and LLNL …

This report gives information related to Gasoline prices and also discusses Policies and Proposals.

Daily newspaper from Sapulpa, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Daily newspaper from Perry, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Daily newspaper from Chickasha, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

None

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

The objective of this program is to develop a system to both monitor the vibration of a bottomhole assembly, and to adjust the properties of an active damper in response to these measured vibrations. Phase I of this program, which entailed modeling and design of the necessary subsystems and design, manufacture and test of a full laboratory prototype, was completed on May 31, 2004. The principal objectives of Phase II are: more extensive laboratory testing, including the evaluation of different feedback algorithms for control of the damper; design and manufacture of a field prototype system; and, testing of the field prototype in drilling laboratories and test wells. As a result of the lower than expected performance of the MR damper noted last quarter, several additional tests were conducted. These dealt with possible causes of the lack of dynamic range observed in the testing: additional damping from the oil in the Belleville springs; changes in properties of the MR fluid; and, residual magnetization of the valve components. Of these, only the last was found to be significant. By using a laboratory demagnetization apparatus between runs, a dynamic range of 10:1 was achieved for the damper, more than adequate to produce the …

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

Solidification of dendritic alloys is modeled using stabilized finite element techniques to study convection and macrosegregation driven by buoyancy and shrinkage. The adopted governing macroscopic conservation equations of momentum, energy and species transport are derived from their microscopic counterparts using the volume-averaging method. A single domain model is considered with a fixed numerical grid and without boundary conditions applied explicitly on the freezing front. The mushy zone is modeled here as a porous medium with either an isotropic or an anisotropic permeability. The stabilized finite-element scheme, previously developed by authors for modeling flows with phase change, is extended here to include effects of shrinkage, density changes and anisotropic permeability during solidification. The fluid flow scheme developed includes streamline-upwind/Petrov-Galerkin (SUPG), pressure stabilizing/Petrov-Galerkin, Darcy stabilizing/Petrov-Galerkin and other stabilizing terms arising from changes in density in the mushy zone. For the energy and species equations a classical SUPG-based finite element method is employed with minor modifications. The developed algorithms are first tested for a reference problem involving solidification of lead-tin alloy where the mushy zone is characterized by an isotropic permeability. Convergence studies are performed to validate the simulation results. Solidification of the same alloy in the absence of shrinkage is studied to …

Environmental protection concerns span a wide variety of issues, including clean air, water quality, chemical security, and environmental aspects of other major issue areas such as transportation and defense. This issue brief provides an overview of key environmental issues that are receiving or may receive attention in the 109th Congress. The sections on specific issues contain references to more detailed and extensive CRS reports on the subjects covered.

Weekly student newspaper from Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, Texas that includes campus and local news along with advertising.

Energy supplies and prices are a major economic factor in the United States, and energy markets are volatile and unpredictable. For both these reasons, energy policy is of frequent interest to the Congress. This report presents a statistical view of the supply and consumption of various forms of energy. After an introductory overview of aggregate energy consumption, the report presents detailed analysis of trends and statistics regarding specific energy sources: oil, electricity, natural gas, and coal. A section on trends in energy efficiency is also presented.

None

None

The proliferation of corporate affiliates in banking, finance, and commerce has figured in discussion of several policy issues, including how to protect against (1) losses incurred by affiliated companies; (2) anticompetitive “tying” of bank and nonbank financial services; and (3) misuse of financial data of consumers. This report outlines the nature and evolution of affiliates, primarily from a regulatory perspective. It provides background for discussing financial issues involving corporate affiliates.

Omnibus appropriations acts have become a significant feature of the legislative process in recent years as Congress and the President have used them more frequently to bring action on the regular appropriations cycle to a close. Following a discussion of pertinent background information, this report reviews the recent enactment of such measures and briefly addresses several issues raised by their use.

The evolution of hunter-gatherer maritime adaptations in western North America has been a prominent topic of discussion among archaeologists in recent years (e.g. Arnold 1992; Erlandson and Colten 1991; Erlandson and Glassow 1997; Lightfoot 1993). Although vast coastal regions of the northeastern Pacific (for example, southern California) have been investigated in detail, our understanding of hunter-gatherer developments along the coast of northern California is limited. Previous research indicates that humans have exploited marine mammals, fish and shellfish along the northern California shoreline since the early Holocene (Schwaderer 1992). By the end of the late Holocene, some groups remained year-round on the coast subsisting primarily on marine resources (e.g. Gould 1975; Hildebrandt and Levulett 2002). However, a paucity of well-dated cultural deposits has hindered our understanding of these developments, particularly during the early and middle Holocene. The lack of a long and reliable chronological sequence has restricted our interpretations of behavioral change, including the adaptive strategies (such as foraging, mobility and settlement) used by human foragers to colonize and inhabit the coastal areas of this region. These shortcomings have also hindered comparative interpretations with other coastal and inland regions in western North America. Here we present a Holocene radiocarbon chronology of …

None

The Richtmyer-Meshkov instability is a fundamental fluid instability that occurs when perturbations on an interface separating gases with different properties grow following the passage of a shock. This instability is typically studied in shock tube experiments, and constitutes a fundamental example of a complex hydrodynamic flow. Numerical simulations and models for the instability growth and evolution have also been used to further elucidate the physics of the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability. In the present work, the formally high-order accurate weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) shock-capturing method using a third-order total-variation diminishing (TVD) Runge-Kutta time-evolution scheme (as implemented in the HOPE code [68]) is applied to simulate the single-mode Richtmyer-Meshkov instability with reshock in two spatial dimensions. The initial conditions and computational domain for the simulations are modeled after the Collins and Jacobs [29] single-mode, Mach 1.21 air(acetone)/SF{sub 6} shock tube experiment. The following boundary conditions are used: (1) periodic in the spanwise direction corresponding to the cross section of the test section; (2) outflow at the entrance of the test section in the streamwise direction, and; (3) reflecting at the end wall of the test section in the streamwise direction. The present investigation has three principal motivations: (1) to provide additional validation of …

A series of experiments was conducted to investigate the combined utilization of high-harmonics fast-wave (HHFW) and neutral-beam injection (NBI) auxiliary heating in National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) plasmas. A modest increase of the total stored energy coincident with a near doubling of the neutron production rate is observed when NBI heating is added to HHFW in L-mode plasmas. An increase in the core electron temperature is also observed. On the other hand, essentially no stored energy augmentation nor neutron production rate enhancement is observed when applying HHFW during the ''H'' phase of NBI-driven H-mode plasmas. Spectroscopic measurements of the edge carbon line radiation indicate an unpredicted ion temperature increase, suggesting that edge effects are reducing the amount of HHFW power reaching the plasma core.