Video footage from The Black Academy of Arts and Letters recorded during the 20th annual Summer Youth Arts Institute performance held on June 12, 2004. The theme of the year's program is remembering the past while celebrating the future with performers from ages ranging from elementary to high school students. Groups include bands, orchestras, dancers, handbell choirs and speakers. Various administrators speak throughout the performance as they reset the stage about the program and notable volunteers.

Document listing the three motions made during the WASP Board of Directors meeting held in Nashville, TN on March 25, 2006.

This report discusses the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act, which makes federal funds available to metropolitan areas and states to assist in health care costs and support services for individuals and families affected by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). This report discusses related legislation and appropriations.

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

Since the fall of 2003, a strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) has spread throughout Asia, infecting mostly poultry but also a limited number of humans. The virus reached Europe in 2005, and the Middle East and Africa in 2006. Avian flu is highly contagious in domestic poultry. Strict biosecurity measures are practiced by commercial poultry farms and encouraged by governments. The economic effects of avian flu outbreaks can be significant, especially given international trade restrictions. Controlling avian flu in poultry is seen as the best way to prevent a human pandemic from developing, by reducing the number of animal hosts in which the virus may evolve. This report mainly covers avian flu in poultry, and will be updated.

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

Seasonally managed wetlands in the Grasslands Basin ofCalifornia's San Joaquin Valley provide food and shelter for migratorywildfowl during winter months and sport for waterfowl hunters during theannual duck season. Surface water supply to these wetland contain saltwhich, when drained to the San Joaquin River during the annual drawdownperiod, negatively impacts downstream agricultural riparian waterdiverters. Recent environmental regulation, limiting discharges salinityto the San Joaquin River and primarily targeting agricultural non-pointsources, now addresses return flows from seasonally managed wetlands.Real-time water quality management has been advocated as a means ofmatching wetland return flows to the assimilative capacity of the SanJoaquin River. Past attempts to build environmental monitoring anddecision support systems to implement this concept have failed forreasons that are discussed in this paper. These reasons are discussed inthe context of more general challenges facing the successfulimplementation of environmental monitoring, modelling and decisionsupport systems. The paper then provides details of a current researchand development project which will ultimately provide wetland managerswith the means of matching salt exports with the available assimilativecapacity of the San Joaquin River, when fully implemented. Manipulationof the traditional wetland drawdown comes at a potential cost to thesustainability of optimal wetland moist soil plant habitat in thesewetlands - hence the project …

This report discusses how gasoline composition is regulated and explains the various federal and state gasoline standards. Next, the report presents some of the key issues with the federal RFG program. Some of the problems associated with boutique fuels are discussed, as well as some of the potential effects of harmonization. Finally, congressional actions in the 109th Congress related to boutique fuels, RFG, and harmonization, including the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, are discussed.

We performed an experimental study of charge identification of heavy ions from helium to carbon having energy of about 290 MeV/u using an emulsion chamber. Emulsion was desensitized by means of forced fading (refreshing) to expand a dynamic range of response to highly charged particles. For the track reconstruction and charge identification, the fully automated high speed emulsion read-out system, which was originally developed for identifying minimum ionizing particles, was used without any modification. Clear track by track charge identification up to Z=6 was demonstrated. The refreshing technique has proved to be a powerful technique to expand response of emulsion film to highly ionizing particles.

Weekly newspaper from Rusk, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with extensive advertising.

The CRD addresses the requirements of Department of Energy (DOE) Order 413.3-Change 1, ''Program and Project Management for the Acquisition of Capital Assets'', by providing the Secretarial Acquisition Executive (Level 0) scope baseline and the Program-level (Level 1) technical baseline. The Secretarial Acquisition Executive approves the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management's (OCRWM) critical decisions and changes against the Level 0 baseline; and in turn, the OCRWM Director approves all changes against the Level 1 baseline. This baseline establishes the top-level technical scope of the CRMWS and its three system elements, as described in section 1.3.2. The organizations responsible for design, development, and operation of system elements described in this document must therefore prepare subordinate project-level documents that are consistent with the CRD. Changes to requirements will be managed in accordance with established change and configuration control procedures. The CRD establishes requirements for the design, development, and operation of the CRWMS. It specifically addresses the top-level governing laws and regulations (e.g., ''Nuclear Waste Policy Act'' (NWPA), 10 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Part 63, 10 CFR Part 71, etc.) along with specific policy, performance requirements, interface requirements, and system architecture. The CRD shall be used as a vehicle to incorporate …

Weekly newspaper from The Colony, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

As part of the ongoing international DECOVALEX project, fourresearch teams used five different models to simulate coupled thermal,hydrological, and mechanical (THM) processes near underground wasteemplacement drifts. The simulations were conducted for two genericrepository types, one with open and the other with back-filled repositorydrifts, under higher and lower post-closure temperature, respectively. Inthe completed first model inception phase of the project, a goodagreement was achieved between the research teams in calculating THMresponses for both repository types, although some disagreement inhydrological responses are currently being resolved. Good agreement inthe basic thermal-mechanical responses was also achieved for bothrepository types, even though some teams used relatively simplifiedthermal-elastic heat-conduction models that neglect complex near-fieldthermal-hydrological processes. The good agreement between the complexand simplified process models indicates that the basic thermal-mechanicalresponses can be predicted with a relatively high confidencelevel.

A suite of test problems has been developed to examine contact behavior within the nonlinear, three-dimensional, explicit finite element analysis (FEA) code DYNA3D (Lin, 2005). The test problems address the basic functionality of the contact algorithms, including the behavior of various kinematic, penalty, and Lagrangian enforcement formulations. The results from the DYNA3D analyses are compared to closed form solutions to verify the contact behavior. This work was performed as part of the Verification and Validation efforts of LLNL W Program within the NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program. DYNA3D models the transient dynamic response of solids and structures including the interactions between disjoint bodies (parts). A wide variety of contact surfaces are available to represent the diverse interactions possible during an analysis, including relative motion (sliding), separation and gap closure (voids), and fixed relative position (tied). The problem geometry may be defined using a combination of element formulations, including one-dimensional beam and truss elements, two-dimensional shell elements, and three-dimensional solid elements. Consequently, it is necessary to consider various element interactions for each contact algorithm being verified. Most of the contact algorithms currently available in DYNA3D are examined; the exceptions are the Type 4--Single Surface Contact and Type 11--SAND algorithms. …

A suite of test problems has been developed to examine contact behavior within the nonlinear, three-dimensional, explicit finite element analysis (FEA) code DYNA3D (Lin, 2005). The test problems use multiple interfaces and a combination of enforcement methods to assess the basic functionality of the contact algorithms. The results from the DYNA3D analyses are compared to closed form solutions to verify the contact behavior. This work was performed as part of the Verification and Validation efforts of LLNL W Program within the NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program. DYNA3D models the transient dynamic response of solids and structures including the interactions between disjoint bodies (parts). A wide variety of contact surfaces are available to represent the diverse interactions possible during an analysis, including relative motion (sliding), separation and gap closure (voids), and fixed relative position (tied). The problem geometry may be defined using a combination of element formulations, including one-dimensional beam and truss elements, two-dimensional shell elements, and three-dimensional solid elements. Consequently, it is necessary to consider various element interactions during contact. This report and associated test problems examine the scenario where multiple bodies interact with each other via multiple interfaces. The test problems focus on whether any ordering issues …

The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA, P.L. 103- 414, 47 USC 1001-1010), enacted October 25, 1994, is intended to preserve the ability of law enforcement officials to conduct electronic surveillance effectively and efficiently despite the deployment of new digital technologies and wireless services that have altered the character of electronic surveillance. CALEA requires telecommunications carriers to modify their equipment, facilities, and services, wherever reasonably achievable, to ensure that they are able to comply with authorized electronic surveillance actions.

We report observations of electron beam-induced light from GaN nanowires grown by chemical vapor deposition. GaN nanowires were modified in-situ with deposited opaque platinum coatings to estimate the extent to which light is channeled to the ends of nanowires. Some evidence of light channeling was found, but wire microstructure and defects play an important role in light scattering and transport, limiting the extent to which light is confined. Optical interconnects are powerful components presently applied for high bandwidth communications among high-performance processors. Future circuits based on nanometer-scale components could similarly benefit from optical information transfer among processing blocks. Strong light channeling (and even lasing) has been observed in GaN nanowires, suggesting that these structures could be useful building blocks in a future networked electro-optical processor. However, the extent to which defects and microstructure control optical performance in nanowire waveguides has not been measured. In this study, we use electron microscopy and in-situ modification of individual nanowires to begin to correlate wire structure with light transport efficiency through GaN nanowires tens of microns long.

The formation and evolution of stars and galaxies is a complex process that involves the cooling and collapse of dense interstellar clouds as well as energetic feedback on these clouds. Interstellar dust grains are central to the radiative transfer, thermal balance, and molecular processes in these clouds and can provide an important diagnostic. Hence, the effects of energetic processing of interstellar dust may have significant consequences. r This may be studied in our own Galaxy, where observations have shown that an appreciable fraction of silicates formed in the outflows from red giants and supergiants have a crystalline structure. Yet, the fraction of crystalline silicates in the interstellar medium is very small, pointing towards an efficient crystalline crystalline-to to-amorphous conversion process. Here we report experimental and modeling results that show that relatively ''low'' energy (0.1 - 5.0 GeV) heavy ion cosmic rays can rapidly ({approx}70 Million yrs) amorphize crystalline silicate grains ejected by stars into the interstellar medium. The implications of this are briefly discussed. We also examine the effects of cosmic ray processing of silicates in the solar system and in stellar debris disks. In the latter systems, cosmic ray processing may play a role for grains trapped in resonance …

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

The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 reduced marginal tax rates, provided marriage tax penalty relief, provided temporary relief from the alternative minimum tax, and increased the child tax credit. Congress approved similar tax measures in 2003 and 2004, but all are set to expire after 2010.

This report discusses government efforts to increase efficiency. One approach being implemented to reduce duplicative spending and improve cross-agency collaboration is the use of enterprise architecture (EA) planning across the federal government. An EA serves as a blueprint of the business operations of an organization, and the information and technology needed to carry out these functions.

Video recording from The Black Academy of Arts and Letters recorded during their Fine Arts Extravaganza event in 2006. This video features students 4th through 8th grade from DISD schools performing band, choir, dance, and theatre pieces in both classic and contemporary styles. This video is Part 1 of 2 of the event.

Video recording from The Black Academy of Arts and Letters recorded during their Fine Arts Extravaganza event in 2006. This video features students 4th through 8th grade from DISD schools performing band, choir, dance, and theatre pieces in both classic and contemporary styles. This video is Part 2 of 2 of the event.

Video footage from The Black Academy of Arts and Letters recorded during the 2006 "Fine Arts Extravaganza" performance held on May 10th. The footage shows students 4th through 8th grade from DISD schools performing band, choir, dance, and theatre pieces in both classic and contemporary styles.