Article on the first-principles theory of metal-alkaline earth oxide interfaces.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Under the public benefit conveyance (PBC) program, state or local governments and certain nonprofits can obtain surplus real property for public uses. The General Services Administration (GSA) has responsibility for the program but has delegated authority to the Department of Defense (DOD) for properties disposed of as part of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process. Several "sponsoring agencies" ensure that properties are used as agreed to by grantees. GAO (1) determined the number, types, and locations of PBC properties disposed of in fiscal years 2000 through 2004, (2) assessed efforts to ensure that the properties are used as agreed to, and (3) identified any challenges facing agencies and grantees."

A statement of record issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Terrorist attacks on U.S. chemical facilities could damage public health and the economy. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) coordinates federal efforts to protect these facilities from attacks. GAO was asked to provide a statement for the record based on its report Homeland Security: DHS Is Taking Steps to Enhance Security at Chemical Facilities, but Additional Authority Is Needed (GAO-06-150, January 27, 2006), GAO reviewed (1) DHS's actions to develop a strategy to protect chemical plants, assist with the industry's security efforts, and coordinate with other federal agencies, (2) industry security initiatives, (3) DHS's authorities and the need for additional security legislation, and (4) stakeholders' views on any requirements to use safer technologies."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In fiscal year 2005, federal and Native American lands supplied about 35 percent of the oil and 26 percent of the natural gas produced in the United States. Companies that lease these lands to produce oil and natural gas pay royalties to the Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service (MMS) based on a percentage (the royalty rate) of the cash value of the oil and natural gas produced and sold. As an alternative to collecting cash royalty payments, MMS has the option to take a percentage of the actual oil and natural gas produced (referred to as "taking royalties in kind") and selling it themselves or using it for other purposes, such as filling the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). MMS reported collecting $7.4 billion in fiscal year 2001 and $8 billion in fiscal year 2005 in cash royalty payments and in revenue from its own royalty-in-kind sales of oil and natural gas. While these total royalty revenues increased by about 8 percent from 2001 to 2005, oil and natural gas prices rose substantially more--about 90 percent for oil and 30 percent for natural gas. Consequently, Congress …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) effort to modernize the nation's air traffic control (ATC) system has been listed by GAO as a high risk program for more than a decade now, due to systemic management and acquisition problems. Two relatively new organizations housed within FAA--the Air Traffic Organization (ATO) and the Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO)--have been given the bulk of the responsibility for planning and implementing these modernization efforts. Congress created ATO to be a performance-based organization that would improve the culture, structure, and processes and improve accountability in the ATC modernization program. Congress created JPDO, made up of seven partner agencies, to coordinate the federal and nonfederal stakeholders necessary to plan a transition from the current air transportation system to the "next generation air transportation system" (NGATS). This testimony is based on GAO's recently completed and ongoing studies of the ATC modernization program. GAO provides information on (1) the status of ATO's efforts to implement processes and other initiatives aimed at efficiently managing and modernizing the current ATC system and (2) the status of JPDO's planning efforts and the key challenges that JPDO faces in …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Alaska Native corporations (ANC) were created to settle land claims with Alaska Natives and foster economic development. In 1986, legislation passed that allowed ANCs to participate in the Small Business Administration's (SBA) 8(a) program. Since then, Congress has extended special procurement advantages to 8(a) ANC firms, such as the ability to receive sole-source contracts for any dollar amount and to own multiple subsidiaries in the 8(a) program. We were asked to testify on an earlier report where we identified (1) trends in the government's 8(a) contracting with ANC firms, (2) the reasons agencies have awarded 8(a) solesource contracts to ANC firms and the facts and circumstances behind some of these contracts, and (3) how ANCs are using the 8(a) program. GAO also evaluated SBA's oversight of 8(a) ANC firms. GAO made recommendations aimed at improving SBA's oversight of 8(a) ANC contracting activity and ensuring that procuring agencies properly oversee 8(a) contracts they award to ANC firms. The procuring agencies generally agreed with our recommendation. SBA expressed concern with aspects of the report and disagreed with several of our recommendations. We believe implementation of our recommendations would provide better …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Wildland fires can burn or threaten both federal and nonfederal lands and resources, including homes in or near wildlands, an area commonly called the wildland-urban interface. Agreements between federal and nonfederal firefighting entities provide the framework for working together and sharing the costs of fire suppression efforts. GAO was asked to (1) review how federal and nonfederal entities share the costs of suppressing fires that burn or threaten both of their lands and resources and (2) identify any concerns that these entities may have with the existing cost-sharing framework. This testimony is based on GAO's May 2006 report Wildland Fire Suppression: Lack of Clear Guidance Raises Concerns about Cost Sharing between Federal and Nonfederal Entities (GAO-06-570)."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Staggers Rail Act of 1980 largely deregulated the freight railroad industry, giving the railroads freedom to price their services according to market conditions and encouraging greater reliance on competition to set rates. The act recognized the need for railroads to use demand-based differential pricing in the deregulated environment and to recover costs by setting higher rates for shippers with fewer transportation alternatives. The act also recognized that some shippers might not have access to competitive alternatives and might be subject to unreasonably high rates. It established a threshold for rate relief and granted the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Surface Transportation Board (STB) the authority to develop a rate relief process for those "captive" shippers. This testimony provides preliminary results on GAO's ongoing work and addresses (1) the changes that have occurred in the freight railroad industry since the enactment of the Staggers Rail Act, including changes in rail rates and competition in the industry, (2) the alternative approaches that have been proposed and could be considered to address remaining competition and captivity concerns, and (3) the projections for freight traffic demand over the next 15 to …

The dispersion of pollutants from the ground by turbulent winds is difficult to model in general. However, for flat homogeneous terrain and steady wind conditions, if the wind profile is modeled with a power-law dependence on height, the advection-dispersion equation has an exact solution. In this paper the analytical solution is compared to a numerical simulation of the coupled air-ground system for a leaking underground gas storage, with a power-law velocity profile that was fit to the logarithmic velocity profile used in the simulation. The two methods produced similar results far from the boundaries, but the boundary conditions had a strong effect; the simulation imposed boundary conditions at the edge of a finite domain while the analytic solution imposes them at infinity. The reverse seepage from air to ground was shown in the simulation to be very small, and the sharp contrast between time scales suggests that air and ground can be modeled separately, with gas emissions from the ground model used as inputs to the air model.

Total and partial charge-changing cross sections have been measured for argon projectiles at 400 MeV/nucleon in carbon, aluminum, copper, tin and lead targets; cross sections for hydrogen were also obtained, using a polyethylene target. The validity of weak and strong factorization properties has been investigated for partial charge-changing cross sections; preliminary cross section values obtained for carbon, neon and silicon at 290 and 400 MeV/nucleon and iron at 400 MeV/nucleon, in carbon, aluminum, copper, tin and lead targets have been also used for testing these properties. Two different analysis methods were applied and both indicated that these properties are valid, without any significant difference between weak and strong factorization. The factorization parameters have then been calculated and analyzed in order to find some systematic behavior useful for modeling purposes.

This report covers the period from June 2005 through May 2006. During this, the third year of our program, our research has focused mainly on applying the surrogate reaction technique and our newly developed surrogate ratio method to deduce neutron induced fission cross sections on uranium nuclei. The year has been marked by continued scientific progress, by the arrival of new personnel, by a growth in the numbers of students working in the group and by a continuation of our experimental program and close collaboration with staff and scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The beam dynamics for a quasi-isochronous lattice differs from that in the usual case of a lattice with a large positive momentum compaction factor. In particular, the quasi-isochronous lattice allows us to double the number of bunches which may be an attractive option for colliders. However, microwave instability and, as we show, longitudinal head-tail instability set the threshold for the beam current.

Immiscibility in the trevorite (NiFe{sub 2}O{sub 4}) - franklinite (ZnFe{sub 2}O{sub 4}) spinel binary is investigated by reacting 1:1:2 molar ratio mixtures of NiO, ZnO and Fe{sub 2}O{sub 3} in a molten salt solvent at temperatures in the range 400-1000 C. Single phase stability is demonstrated down to about 730 C (the estimated consolute solution temperature, T{sub cs}). A miscibility gap/solvus exists below Tcs. The solvus becomes increasingly asymmetric at lower temperatures and extrapolates to n - values = 0.15, 0.8 at 300 C. A thermodynamic analysis, which accounts for changes in configurational and magnetic ordering entropies during cation mixing, predicts solvus phase compositions at room temperature in reasonable agreement with those determined by extrapolation of experimental results. The delay between disappearance of magnetic ordering above T{sub C} = 590 C (for NiFe{sub 2}O{sub 4}) and disappearance of a miscibility gap at T{sub cs} is explained by the persistence of long-range ordering correlations in a quasi-paramagnetic region above T{sub C}.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

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

This report discusses U.S.-Pakistan relationship marked by periods of both cooperation and discord, which was transformed by the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States into the enlistment of Pakistan as a key ally in U.S.-led counterterrorism efforts. This report outlines key aspects of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, as well as of Pakistan's economic conditions, political environment, handling of ongoing separatist violence, and nuclear nonproliferation.

This report discusses Lost Jobs, Trade, Outsourcing, and wages, A Rising Level of Trade and Economic Well-Being and Implications for Economic Policy.

This report outlines the background and original passage of the ILSA (Iran-Libya Sanctions Act), its key provisions which excluded Libya from the act, its implementation and effectiveness and the proposed modifications and extensions to the ILSA.

Linage report from May 2006 that details ad revenue from Texas Daily Newspaper Association members.

Clipping of an article about a law requiring public disclosure of the occupations of major campaign donors.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

This progress report is submitted under a contract between the Special Project Office of DARPA and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The Project Manager at DARPA is Dr. Michael Zatman. Our purpose under this contract is to investigate interactions between electromagnetic waves and a class of buried targets located in multilayered media with rough interfaces. In this report, we investigate three preliminary problems. In each case our specific goal is to understand various aspects of the electromagnetic wave interaction mechanisms with targets in layered media. The first problem, discussed in Section 2, is that of low-frequency electromagnetic backscattering from a tunnel that is cut into a lossy dielectric half-space. In this problem, the interface between the upper (free space) region and the lower (ground) region is smooth. The tunnel is assumed to be a cylindrical free-space region of infinite extent in its axial direction and with a diameter that is small in comparison to the free-space wavelength. Because its diameter is small, the tunnel can be modeled as a buried ''wire'' described by an equivalent impedance per unit length. In Section 3 we extend the analysis to include a statistically rough interface between the air and ground regions. The interface is …

We present a model of dynamics to account for the possible impact of space charge on the equilibrium emittances in storage rings and apply the model to study the current design of the International Linear Collider (ILC) damping rings.