A two-part Delphi Survey was given to transportation experts attending the Asilomar Conference on Transportation and Energy in August, 2011. The survey asked respondents about trends in the US transportation sector in 2030. Topics included: alternative vehicles, high speed rail construction, rail freight transportation, average vehicle miles traveled, truck versus passenger car shares, vehicle fuel economy, and biofuels in different modes. The survey consisted of two rounds -- both asked the same set of seven questions. In the first round, respondents were given a short introductory paragraph about the topic and asked to use their own judgment in their responses. In the second round, the respondents were asked the same questions, but were also given results from the first round as guidance. The survey was sponsored by Argonne National Lab (ANL), the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL), and implemented by University of California at Davis, Institute of Transportation Studies. The survey was part of the larger Transportation Energy Futures (TEF) project run by the Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Of the 206 invitation letters sent, 94 answered all questions in the first round (105 answered at least one question), and 23 of those answered all …

The note describes results of studies of the single bunch stability in the low energy ring (LER) of the PEP-II B-factory. Simulations describe the potential well distortion (PWD) obtained by numerical solution of the Haiisinski equation and results on the beam stability obtained with the code TRISIM. Both longitudinal and transverse wake fields are taken into account. Preliminary estimates indicate that single bunch in the LER of the PEP-II B-factory has to be stable, both longitudinally and transversely, at the maximum design bunch current 1.8 mA (beam current 3A). However, realistic wakes of the machine has been constructed only recently using results of the extensive numerical simulations of the vacuum components of the ring. Additional to that, the code TRISIM, a simulation program for single-bunch collective effects written by one of the authors (G. S.), became recently available. This allows us to study beam stability in a more reliable way than it is possible analytically.

We report preliminary results on the chiral and deconfinement aspects of the QCD transition at finite temperature using the Highly Improved Staggered Quark (HISQ) action on lattices with temporal extent of N{sub {tau}} = 6 and 8. The chiral aspects of the transition are studied in terms of quark condensates and the disconnected chiral susceptibility. We study the deconfinement transition in terms of the strange quark number susceptibility and the renormalized Polyakov loop. We made continuum estimates for some quantities and find reasonably good agreement between our results and the recent continuum extrapolated results obtained with the stout staggered quark action.

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