Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) is authorized under the River and Harbor Act of 1922 to issue contracts with a continuing contracts clause to carry out certain projects. This allows the Corps to award multi-year contracts without having received appropriations to cover the full contract amount. The Corps has used these contracts for decades, but modified their use in 2005, in response to congressional committee concerns that their use may have been ineffective. GAO was asked to determine (1) the number and dollar amount of continuing contracts the Corps awarded during fiscal years 2003?2005; (2) the circumstances in which the Corps used continuing contracts in fiscal years 2003-2005; and (3) how the Corps' process for approving and using continuing contracts changed since 2005, and whether the changes reduced the use of these contracts. For these objectives, GAO reviewed the Corps' contracting data, a random sample of 107 continuing contracts, and districts' requests to use continuing contracts"

Tests were performed to assess the suitability of the location of the air sampling probe on the 296-S-21 stack according to the criteria of ANSI N13.1-1999, Sampling and Monitoring Releases of Airborne Radioactive Substances from the Stacks and Ducts of Nuclear Facilities. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory conducted most tests on a 3.67:1 scale model of the stack. CH2MHill also performed some limited confirmatory tests on the actual stack. The tests assessed the capability of the air-monitoring probe to extract a sample representative of the effluent stream. The tests were conducted for the practical combinations of operating fans and addressed: (1) Angular Flow--The purpose is to determine whether the velocity vector is aligned with the sampling nozzle. The average yaw angle relative to the nozzle axis should not be more than 20. The measured values ranged from 5 to 11 degrees on the scale model and 10 to 12 degrees on the actual stack. (2) Uniform Air Velocity--The gas momentum across the stack cross section where the sample is extracted should be well mixed or uniform. The uniformity is expressed as the variability of the measurements about the mean, the coefficient of variance (COV). The lower the COV value, the more …

This report talks about Atmospheric Dispersal and Deposition of Tephra fron a Potential Volcanic Eruption at Yucca Mountain, Nevada

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

Photograph of the University of North Texas Library Mall as a 360-degree panoramic including Willis Library on the far left, the bottom portion of the Hurley Administration Building, and parts of the University Union and Eagle Student Services buildings.

BlueGene/L (BG/L), developed through a partnership between IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), is currently the world's largest system both in terms of scale with 131,072 processors and absolute performance with a peak rate of 367 TFlop/s. BG/L has led the Top500 list the last four times with a Linpack rate of 280.6 TFlop/s for the full machine installed at LLNL and is expected to remain the fastest computer in the next few editions. However, the real value of a machine like BG/L derives from the scientific breakthroughs that real applications can produce by successfully using its unprecedented scale and computational power. In this paper, we describe our experiences with eight large scale applications on BG/L from several application domains, ranging from molecular dynamics to dislocation dynamics and turbulence simulations to searches in semantic graphs. We also discuss the challenges we faced when scaling these codes and present several successful optimization techniques. All applications show excellent scaling behavior, even at very large processor counts, with one code even achieving a sustained performance of more than 100 TFlop/s, clearly demonstrating the real success of the BG/L design.

This work was performed by Advanced Resources International (ARI) on behalf of the United States Department of Energy (DOE) in order to develop a user-friendly, PC-based interface that couples DOE's BOAST 98 software with the Monte Carlo simulation technique. The objectives of the work were to improve reservoir management and maximize oil recoveries by understanding and quantifying reservoir uncertainty as well as improving the capabilities of DOE's BOAST 98 software by incorporating a probabilistic module in the simulator. In this model, probability distributions can be assigned to unknown input parameters such as permeability, porosity, etc. Options have also been added to the input file to be able to vary relative permeability curves as well as well spacing. Hundreds of simulations can then automatically be run to explore the many combinations of uncertain reservoir parameters across their spectrum of uncertainty. Output data such as oil rate and water rate can then be plotted. When historical data are available, they can be uploaded and a least-square error-function run between the simulation data and the history data. The set of input parameters leading to the best match is thus determined. Sensitivity charts (Tornado plots) that rank the uncertain parameters according to the impact …

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

We review the recently developed bootstrap method for the computation of high-multiplicity QCD amplitudes at one loop. We illustrate the general algorithm step by step with a six-point example. The method combines (generalized) unitarity with on-shell recursion relations to determine the not cut-constructible, rational terms of these amplitudes. Our bootstrap approach works for arbitrary configurations of gluon helicities and arbitrary numbers of external legs.

This report is on Broadband Internet Access and the Digital Divide: Federal Assistance Programs.

The Brownfields Act authorizes the Environmental Protection Agency to award grants for the assessment and cleanup of sites that pose a less serious threat to human health and the environment than sites addressed by the Superfund program. The authorization expired on September 30, 2006. In the 109th Congress, a reauthorization bill, H.B. 5810, was reported from the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure on July 28, 2006, but went no further. This report contains information on the EPA's involvement in the program, EPA appropriations, Housing and Urban Development's involvement in the program and appropriations, other federal Brownfield programs, and Congressional actions of the 109th and 110th Congresses as related to the programs.

This report discusses the production and prospects of Caspian Oil and Gas.

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

On May 22, 2000, as required by Congress in its 1980 Amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a Regulatory Determination on Wastes from the Combustion of Fossil Fuels. On the basis of information contained in its 1999 Report to Congress: Wastes from the Combustion of Fossil Fuels, the EPA concluded that coal combustion wastes (CCWs), also known as coal combustion by-products (CCBs), did not warrant regulation under Subtitle C of RCRA, and it retained the existing hazardous waste exemption for these materials under RCRA Section 3001(b)(3)(C). However, the EPA also determined that national regulations under Subtitle D of RCRA were warranted for CCWs that are disposed of in landfills or surface impoundments. The EPA made this determination in part on the basis of its findings that 'present disposal practices are such that, in 1995, these wastes were being managed in 40 percent to 70 percent of landfills and surface impoundments without reasonable controls in place, particularly in the area of groundwater monitoring; and while there have been substantive improvements in state regulatory programs, we have also identified gaps in State oversight' (EPA 2000). The 1999 Report to Congress (RTC), however, …

Mantle anisotropy along the Red Sea and across the Arabian Peninsula was analyzed using shear-wave splitting recorded by stations from three different seismic networks: the largest, most widely distributed array of stations examined across the Arabian Peninsula to date. Stations near the Gulf of Aqaba display fast orientations aligned parallel to the Dead Sea Transform Fault, most likely related to the strike-slip motion between Africa and Arabia However, most of our observations across Arabia are statistically the same (at a 95% confidence level), with north-south oriented fast directions and delay times averaging about 1.4 s. Since end-member models of fossilized anisotropy and present-day asthenospheric flow do not adequately explain these observations, we interpret them as a combination of plate and density driven flow in the asthenosphere. Combining northeast oriented flow associated with absolute plate motion with northwest oriented flow associated with the channelized Afar upwelling along the Red Sea produces a north-south resultant that matches the observations and supports models of active rifting.

This article provides comments on "Solvation Parameters. 2. A Simplified Molecular Topology to Generate Easily Optimized Values," published in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling.

This report discusses the following aspects of the congressional appropriations process: the annual appropriations cycle; types of appropriations measures; spending ceilings for appropriations associated with the annual budget resolution; and the relationship between authorization and appropriation measures.

Weekly newspaper from Dallas, Texas that includes local, state, and national news and advertising of interest to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community.

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "During the course of our work for Congress examining the space acquisition workforce, we learned that the Department of Defense (DOD) may not be periodically publishing a list of designated critical acquisition positions as required by statute. We are bringing this matter to your attention not only because it is a requirement to publish this data, but because having it is critical to effectively managing DOD's current workforce. Operating without this critical information may result in flawed decisions regarding this part of the workforce and may put the organization's ability to sustain its mission or function effectively at risk. The designation "critical acquisition positions," according to the 1990 Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act (DAWIA), refers to certain senior-level military and civilian positions that carry significant responsibility and primarily consist of supervisory, oversight, and management duties in the DOD acquisition system. They are a key factor in ensuring that DOD acquisitions--some of which are very expensive and critical to the success of current combat operations--are effectively managed. In accordance with DAWIA and as was later codified in Title 10 of the United States Code, the Secretary of Defense is …

Ga-stabilized {delta}-Pu undergoes small changes in density with time. These have been associated with four different causes: an initial reversible expansion that saturates after a short time; a continuous change that can be attributed to the in-growth of helium and actinide daughter products from the radioactive decay of plutonium; possible void swelling; and phase instability. We review our present understanding of these processes and evaluate their contributions to density changes. It is shown that the initial transient expansion is intimately connected with the metastability of the {delta}-phase at ambient temperature.

The report discusses an uncapped exemption and an uncapped exemption targeted at liquidity issues.

Daily newspaper from Chickasha, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the nation's primary medical and behavioral research agency. NIH's need for leased space has more than doubled since 1996 to about 3.9 million square feet in 2005. In 1996, General Services Administration (GSA) delegated leasing authority to NIH that includes performing budget scoring and prospectus analysis. In light of NIH's increased use of leased space, GAO was asked to address two issues: (1) Is NIH complying with budget scorekeeping guidelines and Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) requirements for implementing the guidelines to determine if a lease should be classified as operating or capital and ensure that no violations of the Antideficiency Act occur because of improper budget scorekeeping? and (2) Is NIH complying with the congressional prospectus process for both leases and alterations to leased buildings? To address these issues we interviewed leasing and financial officials, reviewed laws and reviewed budget scoring and prospectus analysis of 59 leases."