Email overload, even after spam filtering, presents a serious productivity challenge for busy professionals and executives. One solution is automated prioritization of incoming emails to ensure the most important are read and processed quickly, while others are processed later as/if time permits in declining priority levels. This paper presents a study of machine learning approaches to email prioritization into discrete levels, comparing ordinal regression versus classier cascades. Given the ordinal nature of discrete email priority levels, SVM ordinal regression would be expected to perform well, but surprisingly a cascade of SVM classifiers significantly outperforms ordinal regression for email prioritization. In contrast, SVM regression performs well -- better than classifiers -- on selected UCI data sets. This unexpected performance inversion is analyzed and results are presented, providing core functionality for email prioritization systems.

We have fielded a neutron imaging system at the National Ignition Facility to collect images of fusion neutrons produced in the implosion of inertial confinement fusion experiments and scattered neutrons from (n, n') reactions of the source neutrons in the surrounding dense material. A description of the neutron imaging system will be presented, including the pinhole array aperture, the line-of-sight collimation, the scintillator-based detection system and the alignment systems and methods. Discussion of the alignment and resolution of the system will be presented. We will also discuss future improvements to the system hardware.

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Accelerator science and technology have evolved as accelerators became larger and important to a broad range of science. Physical Review Special Topics - Accelerators and Beams was established to serve the accelerator community as a timely, widely circulated, international journal covering the full breadth of accelerators and beams. The history of the journal and the innovations associated with it are reviewed.

Parameters have been studied for a high luminosity e{sup +}e{sup -} collider operating at the Upsilon 4S that would deliver a luminosity of 1 to 4 x 10{sup 36}/cm{sup 2}/s. This collider, called a Super-B Factory, would use a combination of linear collider and storage ring techniques. In this scheme an electron beam and a positron beam are stored in low-emittance damping rings similar to those designed for a Linear Collider (LC) or the next generation light source. A LC style interaction region is included in the ring to produce sub-millimeter vertical beta functions at the collision point. A large crossing angle (+/- 24 mrad) is used at the collision point to allow beam separation. A crab-waist scheme is used to reduce the hourglass effect and restore peak luminosity. Beam currents of 1.8 A at 4 x 7 GeV in 1251 bunches can produce a luminosity of 10{sup 36}/cm{sup 2}/s with upgrade possibilities. Such a collider would produce an integrated luminosity of about 10,000 fb{sup -1} (10 ab{sup -1}) in a running year (10{sup 7} sec) at the {gamma}(4S) resonance. Further possibilities include having longitudinally polarized e- at the IR and operating at the J/Psi and Psi beam energies.

An experimental campaign to tune the initial shock compression sequence of capsule implosions on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) was initiated in late 2010. The experiments use a NIF ignition-scale hohlraum and capsule that employs a reentrant cone to provide optical access to the shocks as they propagate in the liquid deuterium-filled capsule interior. The strength and timing of the shock sequence is diagnosed with velocity interferometry that provides target performance data used to set the pulse shape for ignition capsule implosions that follow. From the start, these measurements yielded significant new information on target performance, leading to improvements in the target design. We describe the results and interpretation of the initial tuning experiments.