A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Active Protection Systems (APS) protect vehicles from attack by detecting and intercepting missiles or munitions. In 2005, the lead systems integrator for the Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) program sought proposals for an APS developer and design and to deliver APS prototypes on vehicles by fiscal year 2009. Raytheon was chosen the APS developer. At the same time, the Department of Defense's Office of Force Transformation (OFT) evaluated near-term APS for potential use in Iraq. GAO was asked to review the Army's actions on APS/FCS: (1) the process for selecting the subcontractor to develop an APS for FCS and if potential conflicts of interest were avoided; (2) the timing of the trade study and if it followed a consistent methodology to evaluate alternatives, and the results; (3) the role the Army and Boeing played in selecting the developer; and (4) the process followed to provide a near-term APS solution for current forces."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The U.S. transportation sector is almost entirely dependent on oil, a condition that poses significant economic and environmental risks. Biofuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel, have the potential to displace oil use in transportation fuel. GAO was asked to describe the status of and impediments to expanding biofuel production, distribution infrastructure, and compatible vehicles as well as federal policy options to overcome the impediments. GAO was also asked to assess the extent to which the Department of Energy (DOE) has developed a strategic approach to coordinate the expansion of biofuel production, infrastructure, and vehicles and has evaluated the effectiveness of biofuel tax credits. GAO interviewed representatives and reviewed studies and data from DOE, states, industry, and other sources."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Anticipating the expiration of the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) current authorization at the end of fiscal year 2007, the administration submitted a proposal on February 14, 2007, for reauthorizing FAA and the excise taxes that fund most of its budget. This proposal would introduce cost-based charges for commercial users of air traffic control services, eliminate many current taxes, substantially raise fuel taxes for general aviation users to pay for their use of air traffic control services, and charge commercial and general aviation users a fuel tax to pay primarily for airport capital improvements. In January 2007, FAA released the results of a recently completed cost allocation study in support of the administration's proposal for transitioning to user fees. FAA and the administration used this study to determine the factors that drive the costs of providing air traffic control services, allocate these costs to various users of air traffic control services, and support the development of alternative methods to recover those costs. On March 21, 2007, we testified before the House Subcommittee on Aviation, providing our observations on selected changes to FAA's funding and budget structure contained in the …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Using advanced systems and trained specialists located in 122 weather forecast offices throughout the country, the National Weather Service (NWS) provides storm and flood warnings and weather forecasts to protect life and property and to enhance the national economy. To improve the efficiency of its operations, in November 2006, NWS approved an effort to develop a prototype of an alternative way of operating. Under this prototype, weather forecasting offices would share selected responsibilities. GAO (1) determined the status of and plans for the prototype, (2) evaluated whether the prototype's justification was sufficient, (3) determined whether NWS's plans to evaluate the prototype are adequate, (4) evaluated whether NWS is sufficiently involving stakeholders in its prototype plans, and (5) determined how NWS plans to ensure that there will be no degradation of service during and after the prototype. To do so, GAO analyzed agency documentation and interviewed program officials and stakeholders."

A new cathode design has been proposed for the Flash X-Ray (FXR) induction linear accelerator with the goal of lowering the beam emittance. The original design uses a conventional Pierce geometry and applies a peak field of 134 kV/cm (no beam) to the velvet emission surface. Voltage/current measurements indicate that the velvet begins emitting near this peak field value and images of the cathode show a very non-uniform distribution of plasma light. The new design has a flat cathode/shroud profile that allows for a peak field stress of 230 kV/cm on the velvet. The emission area is reduced by about a factor of four to generate the same total current due to the greater field stress. The relatively fast acceleration of the beam, approximately 2.5 MeV in 10 cm, reduces space charge forces that tend to hollow the beam for a flat, non-Pierce geometry. The higher field stress achieved with the same rise time is expected to lead to an earlier and more uniform plasma formation over the velvet surface. Simulations and initial testing are presented.

The lack of an acceptable intrusion monitoring solution limits the deployment of 10GE (10 Gigabit-per-second Ethernet) technology across the LLNL's unclassified network infrastructure. The desire to operate at 10GE motivates us to evaluate the functionality and performance of a 10GE intrusion monitoring solution, the Force10 P10.

The HPC community is preparing to deploy petaflop-scale computing platforms that may include hundreds of thousands to millions of computational cores over the next 3 years. Such explosive growth in concurrency creates daunting challenges for the design and implementation of the I/O system. In this work, we first analyzed the I/O practices and requirements of current HPC applications and used them as criteria to select a subset of microbenchmarks that reflect the workload requirements. Our analysis led to selection of IOR, an I/O benchmark developed by LLNL for the ASCI Purple procurement, as our tool to study the I/O performance on two HPC platforms. We selected parameterizations for IOR that match the requirements of key I/O intensive applications to assess its fidelity in reproducing their performance characteristics.

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Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Bill introduced by the Texas House of Representatives relating to three-point seat belts on buses that transport schoolchildren.

Bill introduced by the Texas House of Representatives relating to voluntary student expression of religious viewpoints in public schools.

Bill introduced by the Texas Senate relating to the Texas Youth Commission and the prosecution of certain offenses and delinquent conduct in the Texas Youth Commission and certain other criminal justice agencies; providing penalties.

Bill introduced by the Texas Senate relating to programs for the enhancement of air quality, including energy efficiency standards in state purchasing and energy consumption; providing penalties.

Weekly newspaper from Dallas, Texas that includes local, state, and national news and advertising of interest to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community.

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The Senate publishes its rules, precedents, and other related information so that Senators and their staff have convenient access to the Senate’s legislative procedures and can gauge how those procedures are likely to apply in various situations. Information about the Senate’s legislative procedures is published in four official documents. This report discusses these documents.

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Two-dimensional MHD simulations are performed using the ZEUS-2D code to investigate the dynamics of a collapsar that generates a GRB jet, taking account of realistic equation of state, neutrino cooling and heating processes, magnetic fields, and gravitational force from the central black hole and self-gravity. It is found that neutrino heating processes are not efficient enough to launch a jet in this study. It is also found that a jet is launched mainly by B{sub {phi}} fields that are amplified by the winding-up effect. However, since the ratio of total energy relative to the rest-mass energy in the jet is not as high as several hundred, we conclude that the jets seen in this study are not GRB jets. This result suggests that general relativistic effects will be important to generating a GRB jet. Also, the accretion disk with magnetic fields may still play an important role in launching a GRB jet, although a simulation for much longer physical time ({approx}10-100 s) is required to confirm this effect. It is shown that a considerable amount of {sup 56}Ni is synthesized in the accretion disk. Thus, there will be a possibility for the accretion disk to supply the sufficient amount of …

The research supported by DOE funding addressed the fundamental issues of understanding and modeling of hydrologic processes in relation to regional and global climate change. The emphasis of this research effort was on the application of isentropic modeling and analysis to advance the accuracy of the simulation of all aspects of the hydrologic cycle including clouds and thus the climate state regionally and globally. Simulation of atmospheric hydrologic processes by the UW hybrid isentropic coordinate models provided fundamental insight into global monsoonal circulations, and regional energy exchange in relation to the atmospheric hydrologic cycle. Inter-comparison of UW hybrid model simulations with those from the NCAR Community Climate Model and other climate and numerical weather prediction (NWP) models investigated the increased accuracies gained in modeling long-range transport in isentropic coordinates and isolated differences in modeling of the climate state. The inter-comparisons demonstrated advantages in the simulation of the transport of the hydrologic components of the climate system and provided insight into the more general problems of simulating hydrologic processes, aerosols and chemistry for climate. This research demonstrated the viability of the UW isentropic-eta model for long-term integration for climate and climate change studies and documented that no insurmountable barriers exist to …

This report contains individual radiological protection surveillance data developed during 2006 for adult members of a select group of families living on Utrok Atoll. These Group I volunteers all underwent a whole-body count to determine levels of internally deposited cesium-137 ({sup 137}Cs) and supplied a bioassay sample for analysis of plutonium isotopes. Measurement data were obtained and the results compared with an equivalent set of measurement data for {sup 137}Cs and plutonium isotopes from a second group of adult volunteers (Group II) who were long-term residents of Utrok Atoll. For the purposes of this comparison, Group II volunteers were considered representative of the general population on Utrok Atoll. The general aim of the study was to determine residual systemic burdens of fallout radionuclides in each volunteer group, develop data in response to addressing some specific concerns about the preferential uptake and potential health consequences of residual fallout radionuclides in Group I volunteers, and generally provide some perspective on the significance of radiation doses delivered to volunteers (and the general Utrok Atoll resident population) in terms of radiological protection standards and health risks. Based on dose estimates from measurements of internally deposited {sup 137}Cs and plutonium isotopes, the data and information …

We investigate the outflow propagation in the collapsar in the context of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) with 2D relativistic hydrodynamic simulations. We vary the specific internal energy and bulk Lorentz factor of the injected outflow from non-relativistic regime to relativistic one, fixing the power of the outflow to be 10{sup 51}erg s{sup -1}. We observed the collimated outflow, when the Lorentz factor of the injected outflow is roughly greater than 2. To the contrary, when the velocity of the injected outflow is slower, the expanding outflow is observed. The transition from collimated jet to expanding outflow continuously occurs by decreasing the injected velocity. Different features of the dynamics of the outflows would cause the difference between the GRBs and similar phenomena, such as, X-ray flashes.

Spectroscopy, structure, and energy transfer of transient radicals in combustion Period: 4/15/04-12/31/06 PI: Hai-Lung Dai, Department of Chemistry, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104 dai@sas.upenn.edu A newly developed approach based on nanosecond time resolved Fourier Transform IR Emission Spectroscopy (TR-FTIRES) has been applied to the investigation of the spectroscopy and structure of unknown transient radicals that are important in combustion processes. Several radicals including deuterated-vinyl, cyanooxomethyl (OCCN) and ketenyl (HCCO) whose vibrational structure has not been determined have been examined. The transient radical species is produced with high vibrational excitation through UV photolysis of a precursor molecule. The IR emission from the highly excited species through its IR active vibrational modes is detected with fast time resolution using the TR-FTIR technique. A new two-dimensional cross-spectra correlation technique has been developed for analyzing the time-resolved FTIR emission spectra. This analysis reveals the common set of emission bands from the same target radical in the emission spectra obtained using different precursors. The spectroscopic approach also allows the reactions of the excited radical and the photolysis reaction of the precursor molecules to be characterized. All these information are fundamentally important to the understanding of chemical dynamics of radicals as well as the combustion …

This STTR Phase I research program was on the development of high temperature (400 to 650 C), secondary batteries with roundtrip efficiency > 90% for integration with a 3 to 10 kW solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) system. In fulfillment of this objective, advanced planar high temperature rechargeable batteries, comprised of an alkali metal ion conducting, highly refractory, beta'' alumina solid electrolyte (BASE) sandwiched between liquid sodium (or potassium) anode and liquid metal salt cathode, were developed at MSRI. The batteries have been successfully demonstrated at a working temperature as high as 600 C. To our knowledge, so far no work has been reported in the literature on planar rechargeable batteries based on BASE, and results obtained in Phase I for the very first time demonstrated the viability of planar batteries, though relatively low temperature tubular-based sodium-sulfur batteries and ZEBRA batteries have been actively developed by very limited non U.S. companies. The results of this Phase I work have fulfilled all the goals and stated objectives, and the achievements showed much promise for further, substantial improvements in battery design and performance. The important results of Phase I are briefly described in what follows: (1) Both Na-BASE and K-BASE discs and …

It has been estimated that an RF cavity Beam Position Monitor (BPM) could provide a position measurement resolution of less than one nanometer. We have developed a high resolution cavity BPM and associated electronics. A triplet comprised of these BPMs was installed in the extraction line of the Accelerator Test Facility (ATF) at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) for testing with its ultra-low emittance beam. The three BPMs were each rigidly mounted inside an alignment frame on six variable-length struts which could be used to move the BPMs in position and angle. We have developed novel methods for extracting the position and tilt information from the BPM signals including a robust calibration algorithm which is immune to beam jitter. To date, we have demonstrated a position resolution of 15.6 nm and a tilt resolution of 2.1 {mu}rad over a dynamic range of approximately {+-} 20 {mu}m.