Recital presented at the College of Music Recital Hall in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Music (BM) degree

Worldwide incidence of cutaneous malignant melanoma has increased substantially, and no screening program has yet demonstrated reduction in mortality. We evaluated the education, self examination and targeted screening campaign at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) from its beginning in July 1984 through 1996. The thickness and crude incidence of melanoma from the years before the campaign were compared to those obtained during the 13 years of screening. Melanoma mortality during the 13-year period was based on a National Death Index search. Expected yearly deaths from melanoma among LLNL employees were calculated by using California mortality data matched by age, sex, and race/ethnicity and adjusted to exclude deaths from melanoma diagnosed before the program began or before employment at LLNL. After the program began, crude incidence of melanoma thicker than 0.75 mm decreased from 18 to 4 cases per 100,000 person-years (p = 0.02), while melanoma less than 0.75mm remained stable and in situ melanoma increased substantially. No eligible melanoma deaths occurred among LLNL employees during the screening period compared with a calculated 3.39 expected deaths (p = 0.034). Education, self examination and selective screening for melanoma at LLNL significantly decreased incidence of melanoma thicker than 0.75 mm and reduced …

This Biennial Environmental Compliance Report (BECR) documents compliance with environmental regulations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), a facility designed and authorized for the safe disposal of transuranic (TRU) radioactive waste. This BECR covers the reporting period from April 1, 2004, to March 31, 2006. As required by the WIPP Land Withdrawal Act (LWA) (Public Law [Pub. L.] 102-579, as amended by Pub. L. 104-201), the BECR documents United States (U.S.) Department of Energy (DOE) compliance with regulations and permits issued pursuant to the following: (1) Title 40 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Part 191, Subpart A, "Environmental Standards for Management and Storage"; (2) Clean Air Act (CAA) (42 United States Code [U.S.C.] §7401, et seq.); (3) Solid Waste Disposal Act (SWDA) (42 U.S.C. §§6901-6992, et seq.); (4) Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) (42 U.S.C. §§300f, et seq.); (5) Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) (15 U.S.C. §§2601, et seq.); (6) Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) (42 U.S.C. §§9601, et seq.); and all other federal and state of New Mexico laws pertaining to public health and safety or the environment.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

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

This report gives an overview of food stamps, nutrition programs, and activities covered in the 2002 farm bill.

Weekly newspaper from Port Aransas, Texas on Mustang Island that includes local, state and national news along with extensive advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

This survey defines the problem of anomaly detection and provides an overview of existing methods. The methods are categorized into two general classes: generative and discriminative. A generative approach involves building a model that represents the joint distribution of the input features and the output labels of system behavior (e.g., normal or anomalous) then applies the model to formulate a decision rule for detecting anomalies. On the other hand, a discriminative approach aims directly to find the decision rule, with the smallest error rate, that distinguishes between normal and anomalous behavior. For each approach, we will give an overview of popular techniques and provide references to state-of-the-art applications.

Virtualization has become increasingly popular for enabling full system isolation, load balancing, and hardware multiplexing. This wide-spread use is the result of novel techniques such as paravirtualization that make virtualization systems practical and efficient. Paravirtualizing systems export an interface that is slightly different from the underlying hardware but that significantly streamlines and simplifies the virtualization process. In this work, we investigate the efficacy of using paravirtualizing software for performance-critical HPC kernels and applications. Such systems are not currently employed in HPC environments due to their perceived overhead. However, virtualization systems offer tremendous potential for benefiting HPC systems by facilitating application isolation, portability, operating system customization, and program migration. We present a comprehensive performance evaluation of Xen, a low-overhead, Linux-based, virtual machine monitor (VMM), for paravirtualization of HPC cluster systems at Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL). We consider four categories of micro-benchmarks from the HPC Challenge (HPCC) and LLNL ASCI Purple suites to evaluate a wide range of subsystem-specific behaviors. In addition, we employ macro-benchmarks and HPC application to evaluate overall performance in a real setting. We also employ statistically sound methods to compare the performance of a paravirtualized kernel against three popular Linux operating systems: RedHat Enterprise 4 (RHEL4) for …

This work was performed as part of a broader effort to automate analytical methods for determining plutonium and other radioisotopes in environmental samples. The work described here represented a screening study to evaluate the effect of applying ultrasonic irradiation to dissolve high-fired plutonium oxide. The major findings of this work can be summarized as follows: (1) High-fired plutonium oxide does not undergo measurable dissolution when sonicated in nitric acid solutions, even at a high concentration range of nitric acid where the calculated thermodynamic solubility of plutonium oxide exceeds the ?g/mL level. (2) Applying organic complexants (nitrilotriacetic acid) and reductants (hydroxyurea) in 1.5 M nitric acid does not significantly increase the dissolution compared with digestion in nitric acid alone. Nearly all (99.5%) of the plutonium oxide remains undissolved under these conditions. (3) The action of a strong inorganic reductant, titanium trichloride in 25 wt% HCl, results in 40% dissolution of the plutonium oxide when the titanium trichloride concentration is ?1 wt% under sonication. (4) Oxidative treatment of plutonium oxide by freshly dissolved AgO ({approx}20 mg/mL) in 1.5 M nitric acid with sonication resulted in 95% plutonium oxide dissolution. However, the same treatment of plutonium oxide mechanically mixed with 50 mg of …

The Stardust spacecraft collected thousands of particles from comet 81P/Wild 2 and returned them to Earth for laboratory study. The preliminary examination of these samples shows that the nonvolatile portion of the comet is an unequilibrated assortment of materials that have both presolar and solar system origin. The comet contains an abundance of silicate grains that are much larger than predictions of interstellar grain models, and many of these are high-temperature minerals that appear to have formed in the inner regions of the solar nebula. Their presence in a comet proves that the formation of the solar system included mixing on the grandest scales. Stardust was the first mission to return solid samples from a specific astronomical body other than the Moon. The mission, part of the NASA Discovery program, retrieved samples from a comet that is believed to have formed at the outer fringe of the solar nebula, just beyond the most distant planet. The samples, isolated from the planetary region of the solar system for billions of years, provide new insight into the formation of the solar system. The samples provide unprecedented opportunities both to corroborate astronomical (remote sensing) and sample analysis information (ground truth) on a known …

This work was performed as part of a broader effort to automate analytical methods for determination of plutonium and other radioisotopes in environmental samples. The work described here represented a screening study to determine the potential for applying ultrasonic irradiation to sample digestion. Two standard reference materials (SRMs) were used in this study: Columbia River Sediment and Rocky Flats Soil. The key experiments performed are listed below along with a summary of the results. The action of nitric acid, regardless of its concentration and liquid-to-solid ratio, did not achieve dissolution efficiency better that 20%. The major fraction of natural organic matter (NOM) remained undissolved by this treatment. Sonication did not result in improved dissolution for the SRMs tested. The action of hydrofluoric acid at concentrations of 8 M and higher achieved much more pronounced dissolution (up to 97% dissolved for the Rocky Flats soil sample and up to 78% dissolved for the Columbia River Sediment sample). Dissolution efficiency remains constant for solid-to-liquid ratios of up to 0.05 to 1 and decreases for the higher loadings of the solid phase. Sonication produced no measurable effect in improving the dissolution of the samples compared with the control digestion experiments. Combined treatment of …

Water is a precious commodity, especially in the arid southwest region of the US, where there is a limited supply of both surface water and ground water. Ground water has a variety of uses (such as agricultural, commercial, and domestic) in the Death Valley regional ground-water flow system (DVRFS) of southern Nevada and eastern California. The DVRFS, an area of about 100,000 square kilometers, contains very complex geology and hydrology. Using a computer model to represent this complex system the US Geological Survey (USGS) simulated ground-water flow in the Death Valley region for use with US Department of Energy (DOE) projects in southern Nevada. The model was created to help address contaminant cleanup activities associated with the underground nuclear testing conducted from 1951 to 1992 at the Nevada Test Site and to support the licensing process for the Nation's proposed geologic repository for high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

Oxygen is a primary indicator of whether anaerobic reductive dechlorination and similar redox based processes contribute to natural attenuation remedies at chlorinated solvent contaminated sites. Thus, oxygen is a viable indicator parameter for documenting that a system is being sustained in an anaerobic condition. A team of researchers investigated the adaptation of an optical sensor that was developed for oceanographic applications. The optical sensor, because of its design and operating principle, has potential for extended deployment and sensitivity at the low oxygen levels relevant to natural attenuation. The results of the research indicate this tool will be useful for in situ long-term monitoring applications, but that the traditional characterization tools continue to be appropriate for characterization activities.

Most approaches to increasing heat transfer rates in the convection sections of gas-fired process heaters involve the incorporation of fins, baffles, turbulizers, etc. to increase either the heat transfer surface area or turbulence or both. Although these approaches are effective in increasing the heat transfer rates, this increase is invariably accompanied by an associated increase in convection section pressure drop as well as, for heaters firing ‘dirty’ fuel mixtures, increased fouling of the tubes – both of which are highly undesirable. GTI has identified an approach that will increase heat transfer rates without a significant increase in pressure drop or fouling rate. Compared to other types of heat transfer enhancement approaches, the proposed dimpled tube approach achieves very high heat transfer rates at the lowest pressure drops. Incorporating this approach into convection sections of chemical industry fired process heaters may increase energy efficiency by 3-5%. The energy efficiency increase will allow reducing firing rates to provide the required heating duty while reducing the emissions of CO2 and NOx.

This survey gives an overview of popular generative models used in the modeling of stochastic temporal systems. In particular, this survey is organized into two parts. The first part discusses the discrete-time representations of dynamic Bayesian networks and dynamic relational probabilistic models, while the second part discusses the continuous-time representation of continuous-time Bayesian networks.

The objectives of the overall collaborative EMSP effort (with which this project is associated) were to characterize sorption and desorption processes of U(VI) on pristine and contaminated Hanford sediments over a range of sediment facies and materials properties and to relate such characterization both to fundamental molecular-scale understanding and field-scale models of geochemistry and mass transfer. The research was intended to provide new insights on the mechanisms of U(VI) retardation at Hanford, and to allow the development of approaches by which laboratory-developed geochemical models could be upscaled for defensible field-scale predictions of uranium transport in the environment. Within this broader context, objectives of the JHU-based project were to test hypotheses regarding the coupled roles of adsorption and impermeable-zone diffusion in controlling the fate and transport of U(VI) species under conditions of comparatively short-term exposure. In particular, this work tested the following hypotheses: (1) the primary adsorption processes in the Hanford sediment over the pH range of 7 to 10 are surface complexation reactions of aqueous U(VI) hydroxycarbonate and carbonate complexes with amphoteric edge sites on detrital phyllosilicates in the silt/clay size fraction; (2) macroscopic adsorption intensity (at given aqueous conditions) is a function of mineral composition and aquatic chemistry; and …

There has been a significant progress in ab initio approaches to the structure of light nuclei. Starting from realistic two- and three-nucleon interactions the ab initio no-core shell model (NCSM) predicts low-lying levels in p-shell nuclei. It is a challenging task to extend ab initio methods to describe nuclear reactions. We present here a brief overview of the first steps taken toward nuclear reaction applications. In particular, we discuss our calculation of the {sup 7}Be(p,{gamma}){sup 8}B S-factor. We also present our first results of the {sup 3}He({alpha},{gamma}){sup 7}Be S-factor and of the S-factor of the mirror reaction {sup 3}H({alpha},{gamma}){sup 7}Li. The {sup 7}Be(p,{gamma}){sup 8}B and {sup 3}He({alpha},{gamma}){sup 7}Be reactions correspond to the most important uncertainties in solar model predictions of neutrino fluxes.

Previously conducted preliminary investigations within the deep Delaware and Val Verde sub-basins of the Permian Basin complex documented bottom hole temperatures from oil and gas wells that reach the 120-180C temperature range, and occasionally beyond. With large abundances of subsurface brine water, and known porosity and permeability, the deep carbonate strata of the region possess a good potential for future geothermal power development. This work was designed as a 3-year project to investigate a new, undeveloped geographic region for establishing geothermal energy production focused on electric power generation. Identifying optimum geologic and geographic sites for converting depleted deep gas wells and fields within a carbonate environment into geothermal energy extraction wells was part of the project goals. The importance of this work was to affect the three factors limiting the expansion of geothermal development: distribution, field size and accompanying resource availability, and cost. Historically, power production from geothermal energy has been relegated to shallow heat plumes near active volcanic or geyser activity, or in areas where volcanic rocks still retain heat from their formation. Thus geothermal development is spatially variable and site specific. Additionally, existing geothermal fields are only a few 10’s of square km in size, controlled by the …

Semi-weekly newspaper from Livingston, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with advertising.

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

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