A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Minority banks can play an important role in serving the financial needs of historically underserved communities and growing populations of minorities. For this reason, the Financial Institutions, Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 (FIRREA) established goals that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) must work toward to preserve and promote such institutions (support efforts). To evaluate their efforts, as well as those of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Reserve, GAO (1) reviewed the profitability of minority banks, (2) identified the regulators' support and assessment efforts, and (3) obtained the views of minority banks on the regulators' efforts. GAO reviewed financial data from FDIC, interviewed regulators, and surveyed all minority banks."

Two-dimensional confined systems, such as substrate-supported incommensurate layers, are of interest because their structural and electronic properties may differ from those of bulk materials. While advances in experimental techniques have resulted in the growth of many such interesting systems, progress can often be hampered by the lack of an atomistic-scale understanding of the structure, especially for incommensurate systems. In this work, we develop an atomic-scale model for an ordered incommensurate gold-sulfide (AuS) adlayer that has been previously demonstrated to exist on the Au(111) surface, following sulfur deposition and annealing to 450 K. We introduce theoretical techniques within density functional theory to take into account charge transfer in an incommensurate system and model scanning tunneling microscopy images, which are in good agreement with experiment. Our simulations indicate that this model is remarkably robust. We analyze the nature of bonding in this structure using state-of-the-art Wannier-function based techniques. Our analysis provides a natural explanation for the extraordinary robustness and unusual stoichiometry of this layer. This structure and its chemistry have implications for related S-Au interfaces, such as those in self-assembled monolayers of thiols on Au substrates.

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

Daily student newspaper from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

Weekly student newspaper from the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas that includes campus news and commentaries along with advertising.

Weekly student newspaper from Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, Texas that includes campus and local news along with advertising.

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An ARAMS/FRAMES utility entitled ''Joint Frequency Data (JFD) Generator'' provides the capability of creating joint frequency tables. The resultant JFD tables contain summaries of the frequency of occurrence of meteorological dispersion, wind speed, and wind direction that are required as input in climatological air dispersion models. The JFD Generator computations are made by an updated version of the EPA STAR (STAbility ARray) program. Surface observations are combined with computed seasonally and diurnally varying solar flux rates to estimate the ambient atmospheric dispersion rates, represented as a stability category. The wind speeds and directions are obtained directly from the hourly surface observation data. The product is a file in a format that can be directly read by an air dispersion model. The JFD Generator can input hourly meteorological surface observation data in CD-144, Samson, and SCRAM data formats. An enhanced joint frequency table file that can be read directly by the ARAMS/FRAMES interface is produced. The output file has a format can be used by the MEPAS air dispersion program or can be modified for input to other models requiring joint frequency input.

This taxonomic key was devised to support development of a Rapid Bioassessment Protocol using ants at the Savannah River Site. The emphasis is on ''rapid'' and, because the available keys contained a large number of genera not known to occur at the Savannah River Site, we found that the available keys were unwieldy. Because these keys contained more genera than we would likely encounter and because this larger number of genera required both more couplets in the key and often required examination of characters that are difficult to assess without higher magnifications (60X or higher) more time was required to process samples. In developing this set of keys I recognize that the character sets used may lead to some errors but I believe that the error rate will be small and, for the purpose of rapid bioassessment, this error rate will be acceptable provided that overall sample sizes are adequate. Oliver and Beattie (1996a, 1996b) found that for rapid assessment of biodiversity the same results were found when identifications were done to morphospecies by people with minimal expertise as when the same data sets were identified by subject matter experts. Basset et al. (2004) concluded that it was not as …

In a recent article it was argued that dynamic heterogeneity in d-dimensional glass formers is a manifestation of an order-disorder phenomenon in the d+1 dimensions of spacetime. By considering a dynamical analogue of the free energy, evidence was found for phase coexistence between active and inactive regions of spacetime, and it was suggested that this phenomenon underlies the glass transition. Here we develop these ideas further by investigating in detail the one-dimensional Fredrickson-Andersen (FA) model in which the active and inactive phases originate in the reducibility of the dynamics. We illustrate the phase coexistence by considering the distributions of mesoscopic spacetime observables. We show how the analogy with phase coexistence can be strengthened by breaking microscopic reversibility in the FA model, leading to a non-equilibrium theory in the directed percolation universality class.

It will be challenging to measure the temporal profile of the hard X-ray SASE beam independently from the electron beam in the LCLS and other 4th generation light sources. A fast interaction mechanism is needed that can be probed by an ultrafast laser pulse in a pump-probe experiment. It is proposed to exploit the rotation in polarization of light reflected from a thin magnetized film, known as the surface magneto optic Kerr effect (SMOKE), to witness the absorption of the x-ray pulse in the thin film. The change in spin orbit coupling induced by the x-ray pulse occurs on the subfemtosecond time scale and changes the polarization of the probe beam. The limitation to the technique lies with the bandwidth of the probe laser pulse and how short the optical pulse can be made. The SMOKE mechanism will be described and the choices of materials for use with 1.5 {angstrom} x-rays. A schematic description of the pump-probe geometry for x-ray diagnosis is also described.

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

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

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

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

The accelerated development of digital libraries and archives, in tandem with efficient search engines and the computational ability to retrieve and parse massive amounts of information, are making it possible to quantify the time evolution of scientific literatures. These data are but one piece of the tangible recorded evidence of the processes whereby scientists create and exchange information in their journeys towards the generation of knowledge. As such, these tools provide a proxy with which to study our ability to innovate. Innovation has often been linked with prosperity and growth and, consequently, trying to understand what drives scientific innovation is of extreme interest. Identifying sets of population characteristics, factors, and mechanisms that enable scientific communities to remain at the cutting edge, accelerate their growth, or increase their ability to re-organize around new themes or research topics is therefore of special significance. Yet generating a quantitative understanding of the factors that make scientific fields arise and/or become more or less productive is still in its infancy. This is precisely the type of knowledge most needed for promoting and sustaining innovation. Ideally, the efficient and strategic allocation of resources on the part of funding agencies and corporations would be driven primarily by …

Semiweekly newspaper from Carthage, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

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

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

Funeral program for Mrs. Lorene Nelson, born March 20, 1918 and died September 28, 2006. The funeral was held Wednesday, October 4, 2006 at St. Paul United Methodist Church, officiated by Rev. Dr. A. L. Marcus Freeman, III. Funeral arrangements were made through Carter-Taylor-Williams Mortuary and she was buried in Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery near San Antonio, Texas.

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Federal farm support, food assistance, agricultural trade, marketing, and rural development policies are governed by a variety of separate laws. Many of these laws periodically have been evaluated, revised, and renewed through an omnibus, multi-year farm bill. This report discusses the "farm bill" and it's components.

This report discusses the federal and private sector responses to 9/11.