A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Surface coal mining in the mountainous areas of Appalachia--often called "mountaintop mining"--generates controversy, in part because of its scale and the post-mining appearance of the land. Yet there is limited public access to information on the size, location, and life span of these operations, or on how the land can be expected to look afterward. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) was asked to report on the characteristics of (1) surface coal mining and (2) reclaimed lands that were disturbed by surface coal mining in the mountainous, eastern part of Kentucky and in West Virginia, where most such mining occurs. Federal and state law requires mining operators to obtain permits before mining. Among other things, the permits identify the acres under open permit (the acres subject to mining associated with a permit that has not been closed) and how the land will be reclaimed--including the post-mining land use, whether the approximate original contour (AOC) of the land will be restored, and the extent to which excess earth, rock, and other materials (known as "spoil") are placed in nearby valleys. For this study, GAO relied on electronic databases …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "On October 3, 2008, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA) was signed into law. EESA authorized the Secretary of the Treasury to implement the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and established the Office of Financial Stability (OFS) within the Department of the Treasury (Treasury) to do so. EESA requires the annual preparation of financial statements for TARP, and further requires GAO to audit these statements. GAO audited OFS's fiscal year 2009 financial statements for TARP to determine whether, in all material respects, (1) the financial statements were fairly stated, and (2) OFS management maintained effective internal control over financial reporting. GAO also tested OFS's compliance with selected provisions of laws and regulations. We will be separately reporting to OFS on additional details concerning the findings in this report along with recommendations for corrective actions. In commenting on a draft of this report, the Assistant Secretary, Office of Financial Stability, stated OFS concurred with the two significant deficiencies in its internal control over financial reporting GAO identified. He also stated that OFS is committed to correcting the deficiencies."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Intellectual property (IP) is an important component of the U.S. economy. U.S. government efforts to protect and enforce IP rights domestically and overseas are crucial to safeguarding innovation and preventing significant losses to U.S. industry and IP rights owners as well as addressing health and safety risks resulting from the trade in counterfeit and pirated goods. The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008 (PRO-IP Act) created a new interagency IP enforcement advisory committee and authorized the President to appoint an Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) position within the Executive Office of the President to chair the new committee. In September 2009, the President submitted his nomination to the Senate for confirmation and, on December 3, 2009, the Senate confirmed Victoria Espinel as the first IPEC. This testimony will address two topics on IP protection and enforcement in anticipation of some of the challenges ahead in implementing the PRO-IP Act: (1) lessons learned from past efforts to coordinate IP protection and enforcement and (2) observations on a recent initiative to place IP attaches overseas to promote and protect IP rights, based on our field work …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses the Department of State's (State) Bureau of Diplomatic Security (Diplomatic Security), which is responsible for the protection of people, information, and property at over 400 embassies, consulates, and domestic locations. Since the 1998 bombings of U.S. Embassies in East Africa, the scope and complexity of threats facing Americans abroad and at home has increased. Diplomatic Security must be prepared to counter threats such as crime, espionage, visa and passport fraud, technological intrusions, political violence, and terrorism. The statement today is based on a GAO report that was issued on November 12, 2009. It will discuss (1) the growth of Diplomatic Security's missions and resources and (2) the challenges Diplomatic Security faces in conducting its work. To address these objectives in our report, GAO (1) interviewed numerous officials at Diplomatic Security headquarters, several domestic facilities, and 18 international postings; (2) analyzed Diplomatic Security and State budget and personnel data; and (3) assessed challenges facing Diplomatic Security through analysis of interviews with personnel positioned domestically and internationally, budget and personnel data provided by State and Diplomatic Security, and planning and strategic documentation. GAO conducted this performance audit …

This report describes policy recommendations for coastal and marine spatial planning in order to protect ecosystems while continuing to allow economic activity.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Mannford, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

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

Photocopy of an envelope addressed to Texas Stonewall Democratic Caucus from Stonewall Democrats of the Rio Grande Valley, postmarked on December 9, 2009.

December report of the U.S. Congressional Oversight Panel describing their activities and findings regarding the U.S. Treasury's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), including sections on the background and evolution of TARP, and an analysis of its accomplishments and shortcomings.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Gas hydrates sediments have the potential of providing a huge amount of natural gas for human use. Hydrate sediments have been found in many different regions where the required temperature and pressure conditions have been satisfied. Resource exploitation is related to the safe dissociation of the gas hydrate sediments. Basic depressurization techniques and thermal stimulation processes have been tried in pilot efforts to exploit the resource. There is a growing interest in gas hydrates all over the world due to the inevitable decline of oil and gas reserves. Many different countries are interested in this valuable resource. Unsurprisingly, developed countries with limited energy resources have taken the lead in worldwide gas hydrates research and exploration. The goal of this research project is to collect information in order to record and evaluate the relative strengths and goals of the different gas hydrates programs throughout the world. A thorough literature search about gas hydrates research activities has been conducted. The main participants in the research effort have been identified and summaries of their past and present activities reported. An evaluation section discussing present and future research activities has also been included.

We report measurements of Time-Dependent CP asymmetries in several b {yields} s penguin dominated hadronic B decays, where New Physics contributions may appear. We find no significant discrepancies with respect to the Standard Model expectations.

If the energy spread of a beam is larger then the Pierce parameter, the FEL gain length increases dramatically and the FEL output gets suppressed. We show that if the energy distribution of such a beam is made oscillatory on a small scale, the gain length can be considerably decreased. Such an oscillatory energy distribution is generated by first modulating the beam energy with a laser via the mechanism of inverse FEL, and then sending it through a strong chicane. We show that this approach also works for the optical klystron enhancement scheme. Our analytical results are corroborated by numerical simulations.

AdS/QCD, the correspondence between theories in a modified five-dimensional anti-de Sitter space and confining field theories in physical space-time, provides a remarkable semiclassical model for hadron physics. Light-front holography allows hadronic amplitudes in the AdS fifth dimension to be mapped to frame-independent light-front wavefunctions of hadrons in physical space-time, thus providing a relativistic description of hadrons at the amplitude level. We identify the AdS coordinate z with an invariant light-front coordinate {zeta} which separates the dynamics of quark and gluon binding from the kinematics of constituent spin and internal orbital angular momentum. The result is a single-variable light-front Schroedinger equation with a confining potential which determines the eigenspectrum and the light-front wavefunctions of hadrons for general spin and orbital angular momentum. The mapping of electromagnetic and gravitational form factors in AdS space to their corresponding expressions in light-front theory confirms this correspondence. Some novel features of QCD are discussed, including the consequences of confinement for quark and gluon condensates. The distinction between static structure functions, such as the probability distributions computed from the square of the light-front wavefunctions, versus dynamical structure functions which include the effects of rescattering, is emphasized. A new method for computing the hadronization of quark and …

In this contribution we present results from the NLO computation of the production of a W boson in association with three jets in hadronic collisions. The results are obtained by combining two programs: BlackHat for the virtual one-loop matrix elements and Sherpa for the real-emission contributions. We present results for the Tevatron and the LHC, and address the issue of the choice of a common factorization and renormalization scale for this process.

By analyzing the pulse to pulse intensity fluctuations of the radiation emitted by a charge particle in the incoherent part of the spectrum, it is possible to extract information about the spatial distribution of the beam. At the Advanced Light Source (ALS) of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, we have developed and successfully tested a simple scheme based on this principle that allows for the absolute measurement of the rms bunch length. A description of the method and the experimental results are presented.

The combination of Anti-de Sitter space (AdS) methods with light-front holography leads to a semi-classical first approximation to the spectrum and wavefunctions of meson and baryon light-quark bound states. Starting from the bound-state Hamiltonian equation of motion in QCD, we derive relativistic light-front wave equations in terms of an invariant impact variable {zeta} which measures the separation of the quark and gluonic constituents within the hadron at equal light-front time. These equations of motion in physical space-time are equivalent to the equations of motion which describe the propagation of spin-J modes in anti-de Sitter (AdS) space. Its eigenvalues give the hadronic spectrum, and its eigenmodes represent the probability distribution of the hadronic constituents at a given scale. Applications to the light meson and baryon spectra are presented. The predicted meson spectrum has a string-theory Regge form M{sup 2} = 4{kappa}{sup 2}(n + L + S = 2); i.e., the square of the eigenmass is linear in both L and n, where n counts the number of nodes of the wavefunction in the radial variable {zeta}. The space-like pion form factor is also well reproduced. One thus obtains a remarkable connection between the description of hadronic modes in AdS space and …

Closeout of Award #DE-FG02-CH11320. Final Technical Report: The project was effectively executed pursuant to the terms of the award.

We search for a light Higgs boson A{sup 0} in the radiative decay Y(3S) {yields} {gamma}A{sup 0}, A{sup 0} {yields} T{sup +}T{sup -}, T{sup +} {yields} e{sup +}{nu}{sub e}{nu}{sub T}, or T{sup +} {yields} {mu}{sup +} {nu}{sub {mu}T}. The data sample contains 122 x 10{sup 6} Y(3S) events recorded with the BABAR detector. We find no evidence for a narrow structure in the studied T{sup +}T{sup -} invariant mass region of 4.03 < m{sub T{sup +}T{sup -}} < 10.10 GeV/c{sup 2}. We exclude at the 90% confidence level (C.L.) a low-mass Higgs boson decaying to T{sup +}T{sup -} with a product branching fraction B(Y(3S) {yields} {gamma}A{sup 0}) x B(A{sup 0} {yields} T{sup +}T{sup -}) > (1.5-16) x 10{sup -5} across the mT{sup +}T{sup -} range. We also set a 90% C.L. upper limit on the T{sup +}T{sup -} decay of the {eta}{sub b} at B({eta}{sub b} {yields} T{sup +}T{sup -}) < 8%.

At the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) the Controls Department (CD) is developing a physics application framework based on the Java(tm) programming language developed by Sun Microsystems. This paper will discuss the first application developed using this approach: a new Orbit Display. The software is being developed by several individuals in reusable Java packages. It relies on the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) toolkit for data collection and XAL - A Java based Hierarchy for Application Programming for model parameters. The Orbit Display tracks and displays electron paths through the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) in both a graphical, beam line plot, and tabular format. It contains many features that may be unique to SLAC and is meant to be used both in the control room and by individuals in their offices or at home. Unique features include BSA Beam Synchronous Acquisition (BSA), Orbit Fitting, and Buffered Acquisition.

We study an impedance due to coherent synchrotron radiation (CSR) generated by a short bunch of charged particles passing through a dipole magnet of finite length in a vacuum chamber of a given cross section. In our method we decompose the electromagnetic field of the beam over the eigenmodes of the toroidal chamber and derive a system of equations for the expansion coefficients in the series. The general method is further specialized for a toroidal vacuum chamber of a rectangular cross section where the eigenmodes can be computed analytically. We also develop a computer code that calculates the CSR impedance for a toroid of rectangular cross section. Numerical results obtained with the code are presented in the paper.

We present next-to-leading order QCD predictions for a variety of distributions in W + 3-jet production at both the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider. We include all subprocesses and incorporate the decay of the W boson into leptons. Our results are in excellent agreement with existing Tevatron data and provide the first quantitatively precise next-to-leading order predictions for the LHC. We include all terms in an expansion in the number of colors, confirming that the specific leading-color approximation used in our previous study is accurate to within three percent. The dependence of the cross section on renormalization and factorization scales is reduced significantly with respect to a leading-order calculation. We study different dynamical scale choices, and find that the total transverse energy is significantly better than choices used in previous phenomenological studies. We compute the one-loop matrix elements using on-shell methods, as numerically implemented in the BlackHat code. The remaining parts of the calculation, including generation of the real-emission contributions and integration over phase space, are handled by the SHERPA package.

The concept of Power Electronic Building Blocks (PEBBs) has its origin in the U.S. Navy during the last decade of the past century. As compared to a more conventional or classical design approach, a PEBB-oriented design approach combines various potential advantages such as increased modularity, high availability and simplified serviceability. This relatively new design paradigm for power conversion has progressively matured since then and its underlying philosophy has been clearly and successfully demonstrated in a number of real-world applications. Therefore, this approach has been adopted here to design a Marx-topology modulator for an International Linear Collider (ILC) environment where easy serviceability and high availability are crucial. This paper describes various aspects relating to the design of a 32-cell Marx-topology ILC klystron modulator. The concept of nested droop correction is introduced and illustrated. Several design considerations including cosmic ray withstand, power cycling capability, fault tolerance, etc., are discussed. Details of the design of a Marx cell PEBB are included.