Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "As a result of widespread congressional and public interest in the federal response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, we conducted a limited investigation into allegations that military Meal, Ready-To-Eat (MRE) rations intended for use in the hurricane relief efforts were instead sold to the public on the Internet auction site eBay. We focused our efforts on confirming whether selected MREs being offered for sale on eBay were military issue and, if so, interviewing the sellers to determine how they obtained the MREs."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "As a result of widespread congressional and public interest in the federal response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita, GAO conducted an audit of the Individuals and Households Program (IHP) under Comptroller General of the United States statutory authority. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed homes and displaced millions of individuals. In the wake of these natural disasters, FEMA faced the challenge of providing assistance quickly and with minimal "red tape," while having sufficient controls to provide assurance that benefits were paid only to eligible individuals and households. In response to this challenge, FEMA provided $2,000 in IHP payments to affected households via its Expedited Assistance (EA) program. Victims who received EA may qualify for up to $26,200 in IHP assistance. As of mid-December 2005, IHP payments totaled about $5.4 billion, with $2.3 billion provided in the form of EA. These payments were made via checks, electronic fund transfers, and a small number of debit cards. GAO's testimony will provide the results to date related to whether (1) controls are in place and operating effectively to limit EA to qualified applicants, (2) indications exist of fraud and abuse in the …

Time-resolved FT-IR spectra of carbon monoxide hydrogenation over alumina-supported ruthenium were recorded on the millisecond timescale at 703 K using various H{sub 2} concentrations (1 atm total pressure). Adsorbed carbon monoxide was detected along with gas phase products methane (3016 and 1306 cm{sup -1}), water (sharp bands from 1900 - 1300 cm{sup -1}), and carbon dioxide (2348 cm{sup -1}). No other surface species were detected other than adsorbed carbon monoxide. The rate of formation of methane (2.5 {+-} 0.4 s{sup -1}) coincides with the rate of formation of carbon dioxide (3.4 {+-} 0.6 s{sup -1}), and bands due to water are observed to grow in over time. These results establish that methane and carbon dioxide originate from the same intermediate. The adsorbed carbon monoxide band is broad and unsymmetrical with a maximum at 2010 cm{sup -1} in spectra observed at 36 ms that shifts over 3000 ms to 1960 cm{sup -1} due to decreasing amounts of adsorbed carbon monoxide. Kinetic analysis of the adsorbed carbon monoxide band reveals that only a portion of the band can be temporally linked to gas phase products that we observe over the first 1000 ms of catalysis. This result suggests that we are observing …

This project was intended to advance the science of surface bonding in order to provide the functionality demanded by target fabrication requirements, as well as similar needs in other fields of importance to LLNL. We have developed and demonstrated a very powerful capability, i.e. 'single molecule force spectroscopy', that allows the strength of individual chemical bonds to be measured. This project focused on long chain molecules that are covalently bound to surfaces on one end and have complementary reactive groups that have the potential for bridging between surfaces. In biological systems, long chain tethers provide the mechanism for adhesion between dissimilar surfaces, e.g. bacteria adhesion to cells, and were found useful for developing the methodology. Polymer tethers offer the means to bridge across finite surface roughness and have the potential of forming thin, well-characterized bonds on a variety of surfaces.

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The goal of this project is to measure transport through CNTs and study effects of confinement at molecular scale. This work is motivated by several simulation papers in high profile journals that predict significantly higher transport rates of gases and liquids through carbon nanotubes as compared with similarly-sized nanomaterials (e.g. zeolites). The predictions are based on the effects of confinement, atomically smooth pore walls and high pore density. Our work will provide the first measurements that would compare to and hopefully validate the simulations. Gas flux is predicted to be >1000X greater for SWNTs versus zeolitesi. A high flux of 6-30 H2O/NT/ns {approx} 8-40 L/min for a 1cm{sup 2} membrane is also predicted. Neutron diffraction measurements indicate existence of a 1D water chain within a cylindrical ice sheet inside carbon nanotubes, which is consistent with the predictions of the simulation. The enabling experimental platform that we are developing is a semipermeable membrane made out of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes with gaps between nanotubes filled so that the transport occurs through the nanotubes. The major challenges of this project included: (1) Growth of CNTs in the suitable vertically aligned configuration, especially the single wall carbon nanotubes; (2) Development of a process …

A numerical method is described for inviscid, compressible, multi-material flow in two space dimensions. The flow is governed by the multi-material Euler equations with a general mixture equation of state. Composite overlapping grids are used to handle complex flow geometry and block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is used to locally increase grid resolution near shocks and material interfaces. The discretization of the governing equations is based on a high-resolution Godunov method, but includes an energy correction designed to suppress numerical errors that develop near a material interface for standard, conservative shock-capturing schemes. The energy correction is constructed based on a uniform pressure-velocity flow and is significant only near the captured interface. A variety of two-material flows are presented to verify the accuracy of the numerical approach and to illustrate its use. These flows assume an equation of state for the mixture based on Jones-Wilkins-Lee (JWL) forms for the components. This equation of state includes a mixture of ideal gases as a special case. Flow problems considered include unsteady one-dimensional shock-interface collision, steady interaction of an planar interface and an oblique shock, planar shock interaction with a collection of gas-filled cylindrical inhomogeneities, and the impulsive motion of the two-component mixture in …

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Education code section 54.208's exemption from tuition for students enrolled in fire science courses (RQ-0371-GA)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Eligibility of former and retires judges to sit by assignment (RQ-0377-GA)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether section 241.154(b) of the health and Safety Code or section 408.025(d) of the Labor Code governs the fees a hospital may charge a workers'compensation carrier to provide certain records in a workers' compensation proceeding (RQ-0382-GA)

This report discusses elements of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA; 42 U.S.C. §§ 4321, et seq.) relevant to streamlining, issues associated with determining project delays attributed to NEPA, common streamlining methods, and recently proposed and enacted legislative and administrative streamlining activities.

Work performed as a part of this ER sets the foundation for applications of high brightness light sources to important homeland security and nonproliferation problems. Extensive modeling has been performed with the aim to understand the performance of a class of interrogation systems that exploit nuclear resonance fluorescence to detect specific isotopes, of particular importance for national security and industry.

The information in this document summarizes the approach that is used to link FRAMES-2 with GMS. This linkage will provide the user with the ability to (1) send information to a specific model in GMS, thereby modifying the models input information, as allowed by the model developer, (2) run the executable of the numerical model contained in GMS, and (3) extract, from the appropriate GMS output, information required for consumption by downstream models, which are also linked with FRAMES-2.

The goal of this project was to develop an algorithm to detect and calculate common structural motifs in compared structures, and define a set of numerical criteria to be used for fully automated motif based protein structure classification. The Protein Data Bank (PDB) contains more than 33,000 experimentally solved protein structures, and the Structural Classification of Proteins (SCOP) database, a manual classification of these structures, cannot keep pace with the rapid growth of the PDB. In our approach called STRALCP (STRucture Alignment based Clustering of Proteins), we generate detailed information about global and local similarities between given set of structures, identify similar fragments that are conserved within analyzed proteins, and use these conserved regions (detected structural motifs) to classify proteins.

A document advertising an event called SEX (Successfully Experience the X factor) hosted by the UNT Multicultural Center on campus. Jordan K. Spradley is the speaker. At the bottom is a short description of the purpose of the event and its purpose.

A photograph of a students during the 2006 Black History Month program. They are gathered around presenters for a picture and two are wearing jackets with lettering outlined in gold.

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In early December 2005, wholesale natural gas prices topped $15 per million BTUs, more than double the prices seen last summer and seven times the prices common during the 1990s. For the 2005-2006 heating season, the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts that residences heating with gas will pay 35 percent more, on average, than they paid last winter. This testimony addresses the following: (1) the factors causing natural gas price increases, (2) how consumers are affected by these higher prices, and (3) the roles federal government agencies play in ensuring that natural gas prices are determined in a competitive and informed marketplace. This testimony is based on GAO's 2002 published work in this area, updated through interviews, examination of data, and review of relevant publications. GAO's new work was conducted from December 2005 through February 2006 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards."

This project explores the thermodynamics of dynamic deformation and failure of materials using high-speed spatially-resolved infrared (IR) measurements of temperature. During deformation mechanical work is converted to different forms of energy depending on the deformation processes. For example, it can be dissipated as heat in purely plastic deformation, stored as strain energy in dislocations in metals and in oriented polymeric molecular structures, and expended during the generation of new surfaces during damage and fracture. The problem of how this work is converted into these various forms is not well understood. In fact, there exists a controversy for the relatively simple case regarding the amount of work dissipated as heat during uniform plastic deformation. The goals of this work are to develop dynamic IR temperature measurement techniques and then apply them to gain a better understanding of the dynamic failure processes in both metals and polymeric composite materials. The experimental results will be compared against predictions of existing constitutive models and guide the development of higher fidelity models if needed.

This report includes discussion over the debate over government policy regarding industrial competitiveness and technological advancement. Technology and competitiveness, legislative initiatives, and various approaches are among topics discussed in this report.

Concern has grown in Congress and elsewhere about China's military modernization. The topic is an increasing factor in discussions over future required U.S. Navy capabilities. The issue for Congress addressed in this report is: How should China's military modernization be factored into decisions about U.S. Navy programs?

Article on the metabolic engineering of proanthocyanidins through co-expression of anthocyanidin reductase and the PAP1 MYB transcription factor.

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an interview with Warren Kerrigan. Kerrigan joined the Navy in January of 1943. He completed quartermaster and signalman school. He served as Seaman First Class and Quartermaster Striker aboard USS Frost (DE-144) in June of 1943. He also worked on the deck force aboard the ship. They made one convoy escort voyage to Casablanca between November and December. They participated in coastal escort operations with the USS Croatan (CVE-25) hunter-killer group. They operated with Escort Division 13 in the North Atlantic hunting enemy submarines. They completed patrols, and sank German submarines, from March of 1944 through April of 1945, also taking prisoners from sunken vessels. Additionally, they rescued survivors from the USS Warrington (DD-383) and escorted Franklin D. Roosevelt to Yalta. Kerrigan was discharged in January of 1946.

Isentropic compressions in a strip line geometry are performed on the GEPI facility at Centre d'etudes de Gramat in order to study isentrope, associated Hugoniot and phase changes [1] [2]. 3D GEPI configuration has been calculated here to test the new beta version of the electromagnetism package coupled with the dynamics in LS-DYNA{reg_sign} and compared with the GEPI experiment number 268.

In this paper we report on IMPACT-T, a 3D beam dynamics code for modeling high brightness beams in photoinjectors and rf linacs. IMPACT-T is one of the few codes used in the photoinjector community that has a parallel implementation, making it very useful for high statistics simulations of beam halos and beam diagnostics. It has a comprehensive set of beamline elements, and furthermore allows arbitrary overlap of their fields. It is unique in its use of space-charge solvers based on an integrated Green function to efficiently and accurately treat beams with large aspect ratio, and a shifted Green function to efficiently treat image charge effects of a cathode. It is also unique in its inclusion of energy binning in the space-charge calculation to model beams with large energy spread. Together, all these features make IMPACT-T a powerful and versatile tool for modeling beams in photoinjectors and other systems. In this paper we describe the code features and present results of IMPACT-T simulations of the LCLS photoinjectors. We also include a comparison of IMPACT-T and PARMELA results.