A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Underground storage tanks that leak hazardous substances can contaminate nearby groundwater and soil. Under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), tank owners and operators are primarily responsible for paying to clean up releases from their tanks. They can demonstrate their financial responsibility by using, among other options, publicly funded state financial assurance funds. Such funds function like insurance and are intended to ensure timely cleanup. These funds also pay to clean up releases from tanks without a viable owner, as does the federal Leaking Underground Storage Tank (LUST) Trust Fund. GAO was asked to report on (1) states' estimates of the public costs to clean up known releases, (2) states' primary sources of cleanups funding and their viability, and (3) federal sources to address these releases. GAO surveyed all states and discussed key issues with EPA and selected state officials."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Active Protection Systems (APS) protect vehicles from attack by detecting and intercepting missiles or munitions. In 2005, the lead systems integrator for the Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) program sought proposals for an APS developer and design and to deliver APS prototypes on vehicles by fiscal year 2009. Raytheon was chosen the APS developer. At the same time, the Department of Defense's Office of Force Transformation (OFT) evaluated near-term APS for potential use in Iraq. GAO was asked to review the Army's actions on APS/FCS: (1) the process for selecting the subcontractor to develop an APS for FCS and if potential conflicts of interest were avoided; (2) the timing of the trade study and if it followed a consistent methodology to evaluate alternatives, and the results; (3) the role the Army and Boeing played in selecting the developer; and (4) the process followed to provide a near-term APS solution for current forces."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Since September 11, 2001, the Department of Defense (DOD) has mobilized more than 500,000 reservists. As reservists demobilize, concerns exist about difficulties with their civilian employment. Public Law 109-163 required GAO to report on reservists' civilian employer data and employment matters. GAO assessed (1) the status of DOD's efforts to capture reservists' employer data; (2) DOD, Labor, Justice, and Office of Special Counsel processes to track and address reservists' Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) complaints; and (3) the four federal agencies' efforts to track reservists' USERRA complaints related to disabilities incurred while on active duty. GAO reviewed policies and procedures for reporting and tracking complaints; DOD's civilian employer database for reservists and reservists' USERRA complaints; and data reliability and quality checks."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In fiscal year 2006, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) paid approximately $2.1 billion in education assistance benefits to more than 470,000 beneficiaries and about $19 million to state approving agencies (SAA) to assess whether schools and training programs offer education of sufficient quality for veterans to receive VA education assistance benefits when attending them. Qualified individuals--veterans, service persons, reservists, and certain spouses and dependents--receive benefits through a number of education assistance programs for the pursuit of various types of programs, such as a degree program, vocational program, apprenticeship, or on-the-job training. The Departments of Education (Education) and Labor (Labor) also assess education and training programs for various purposes, primarily for awarding student aid and providing apprenticeship assistance. In 2006, under Title IV of the Higher Education Act, Education provided nearly $77 billion in student aid in the form of both grants and loans. The Department of Education assesses and certifies postsecondary institutions for participation in Title IV programs through various oversight functions to ensure that these schools meet federal administrative and financial requirements and that they are accredited and licensed. Similarly, under the National Apprenticeship …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The U.S. transportation sector is almost entirely dependent on oil, a condition that poses significant economic and environmental risks. Biofuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel, have the potential to displace oil use in transportation fuel. GAO was asked to describe the status of and impediments to expanding biofuel production, distribution infrastructure, and compatible vehicles as well as federal policy options to overcome the impediments. GAO was also asked to assess the extent to which the Department of Energy (DOE) has developed a strategic approach to coordinate the expansion of biofuel production, infrastructure, and vehicles and has evaluated the effectiveness of biofuel tax credits. GAO interviewed representatives and reviewed studies and data from DOE, states, industry, and other sources."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is engaged in efforts to replace the Space Shuttle with the next generation of human space flight systems and implement the President's space exploration policy. To do this, NASA must recruit, develop, and retain certain critical skills in its workforce, guided by its strategic human capital management plan. GAO was asked to examine the extent to which NASA (1) has aligned its human capital planning framework with its strategic mission and programmatic goals and (2) is recruiting, developing, and retaining critically skilled personnel, given future workforce needs. To address these objectives, GAO reviewed NASA's policies, planning, and implementation documents; reviewed budget documents and performance and accountability reports; and interviewed cognizant agency officials. To assess NASA's efforts to recruit, develop, and retain critically skilled personnel, we analyzed demographics data, and critical skills information; NASA's policy, procedures and guidance for recruiting and hiring; and implementation of information systems programs, and processes that support human capital management and planning. We are not making any recommendations in this report."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In order to participate in certain federal programs, such as federal student financial aid, postsecondary institutions must be accredited by an accrediting agency recognized by the Department of Education (Education). Accreditation ensures that schools provide basic levels of quality in their educational programs, and Education recognizes those agencies it concludes can reliably determine the quality of education provided by the schools and programs they accredit. Since 1952, Education has recognized the American Bar Association (ABA) as an accrediting agency for law schools. ABA accreditation is important to the 195 law schools it accredits because it allows their graduates the flexibility to take the Bar exam in any jurisdiction in the United States. The Department of Education requires that all recognized accrediting agencies periodically reapply for continued recognition. The Secretary of Education's accreditation advisory group, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), considered the ABA's most recent application for continued recognition in December 2006. The ABA was originally scheduled for review in December 2005, but Education postponed it twice based on the large volume of public comments that had to be reviewed, as well …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Using advanced systems and trained specialists located in 122 weather forecast offices throughout the country, the National Weather Service (NWS) provides storm and flood warnings and weather forecasts to protect life and property and to enhance the national economy. To improve the efficiency of its operations, in November 2006, NWS approved an effort to develop a prototype of an alternative way of operating. Under this prototype, weather forecasting offices would share selected responsibilities. GAO (1) determined the status of and plans for the prototype, (2) evaluated whether the prototype's justification was sufficient, (3) determined whether NWS's plans to evaluate the prototype are adequate, (4) evaluated whether NWS is sufficiently involving stakeholders in its prototype plans, and (5) determined how NWS plans to ensure that there will be no degradation of service during and after the prototype. To do so, GAO analyzed agency documentation and interviewed program officials and stakeholders."

The purpose of this paper is to report on processing of raw waveform data from 4547 events recorded at 12 stations between 2001 and 2005 by the Salton Sea Geothermal Field (SSGF) seismic network. We identified a central region of the network where vertically elongated distributions of hypocenters have previously been located from regional network analysis. We process the data from the local network by first autopicking first P and S arrivals; second, improving these with hand picks when necessary; then, using cross-correlation to provide very precise P and S relative arrival times. We used the HypoDD earthquake location algorithm to locate the events. We found that the originally elongated distributions of hypocenters became more tightly clustered and extend down the extent of the study volume at 10 Km. However, we found the shapes to depend on choices of location parameters. We speculate that these narrow elongated zones of seismicity may be due to stress release caused by fluid flow.

The objective of this task was to demonstrate that metal hydrides could be produced by mechanical alloying in the quantities needed to support the tritium production facilities at the Savannah River Site. The objective for the FY07 portion of this task was to demonstrate the production of Zr-Fe getter materials by mechanical alloying and begin to optimize the milling parameters. Three starting compositions (ratios of elemental Zr and Fe powders) were selected and attritor milled under argon for times of 8 to 60 hours. Hexane and liquid nitrogen were used as process control agents. In general, milling times of at least 24 hours were required to form the desired Zr{sub 2}Fe and Zr{sub 3}Fe phases, although a considerable amount of unalloyed Zr and Fe remained. Milling in liquid nitrogen does not appear to provide any advantages over milling in hexane, particularly due to the formation of ZrN after longer milling times. Carbides of Zr formed during some of the milling experiments in hexane. Formation of carbides during milling appears to be much less of an issue than formation of nitrides, although some of the phases that were not able to be identified in the XRD results may also be carbides. …

We analyze data from the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) Electron Beam Ion Trap (EBIT) that simulates a CIE plasma by sweeping the electron beam to approximate a Maxwellian velocity distribution. These results are compared to spectra of confirmed astronomical CIE plasmas (e.g. outer regions of x-ray clusters) observed by XMM/RGS. We utilize the Photon Clean Method (PCM) to quantify these spectra (EBIT and XMM/RGS) in the form of ratios of Fe L lines in the emission complex near 1 keV. The variances of line fluxes are measured with bootstrap methods (Efron 1979). Both of these observations are further compared with theoretical predictions of Fe L line fluxes from APED and similar atomic databases.

This report documents the laboratory testing and analyses as directed under the test plan, RPP PLAN-34065, and documented in laboratory notebooks HNF 2742 and HNF-N-473-1. The purpose of this study was to evaluate and compare the electrochemical corrosion and pitting susceptibility of the 304 and 316L stainless steel in the acidified reducing solution that will be contained in either the secondary waste receiving tank or concentrate tank.

Decision-making in the face of uncertainty requires an understanding of the probabilistic mechanisms that govern the complex behavior of these systems. This issue applies to many domains: financial investments, disease control, military planning and homeland security. In each of these areas, there is a practical need for efficient resource-bounded reasoning capabilities to support optimal decision-making. Specifically, given a highly complex system, with numerous random variables and their dynamic interactions, how do we monitor such a system and detect crucial events that might impact our decision making process? More importantly, how do we perform this reasoning efficiently--to an acceptable degree of accuracy in real time--when there are only limited computational power and sensory capabilities? These questions encapsulate nontrivial key issues faced by many high-profile Laboratory missions: the problem of efficient inference and dynamic sensor deployment for risk/uncertainty reduction. By leveraging solid ideas such as system decomposition into loosely coupled subsystems and smart resource allocation among these subsystems, we can parallelize inference and data acquisition for faster and improved computational performance. In this report, we propose technical approaches for developing algorithmic tools to enable future scientific and engineering endeavors to better achieve the optimal use of limited resources for maximal return of …

The Geochemical Rate/RNA Integration Study (GRIST) project sought to correlate biogeochemical flux rates with measurements of gene expression and mRNA abundance to demonstrate the application of molecular approaches to estimate the presence and magnitude of a suite of biogeochemical processes. The study was headed by Lee Kerkhoff of Rutgers University. In this component of the GRIST study, we characterized ambient nutrient concentrations and measured uptake rates for dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN, ammonium, nitrate and nitrite) and dissolved organic nitrogen (urea and dissolved free amino acids) during two diel studies at the Long-Term Ecosystem Observatory (LEO-15) on the New Jersey continental shelf.

Executive Summary Despite advances in technology, power system operators must assimilate overwhelming amounts of data to keep the grid operating. Analyses of recent blackouts have clearly demonstrated the need to enhance the operator’s situation awareness (SA). The long-term objective of this research is to integrate valuable technologies into the grid operator environment that support decision making under normal and abnormal operating conditions and remove non-technical barriers to enable the optimum use of these technologies by individuals working alone and as a team. More specifically, the research aims to identify methods and principles to increase SA of grid operators in the context of system conditions that are representative or common across many operating entities and develop operationally relevant experimental methods for studying technologies and operational practices which contribute to SA. With increasing complexity and interconnectivity of the grid, the scope and complexity of situation awareness have grown. New paradigms are needed to guide research and tool development aimed to enhance and improve operations. In reviewing related research, operating practices, systems, and tools, the present study established a taxonomy that provides a perspective on research and development surrounding power grid situation awareness and clarifies the field of human factors/SA for grid operations. …

The lack of an acceptable intrusion monitoring solution limits the deployment of 10GE (10 Gigabit-per-second Ethernet) technology across the LLNL's unclassified network infrastructure. The desire to operate at 10GE motivates us to evaluate the functionality and performance of a 10GE intrusion monitoring solution, the Force10 P10.

The purpose of this report is to compile information and conclusions gathered as part of three separate tasks undertaken as part of the overall project, “Modeling EERE Deployment Programs,” sponsored by the Planning, Analysis, and Evaluation office within the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). The purpose of the project was to identify and characterize the modeling of deployment programs within the EERE Technology Development (TD) programs, address improvements to modeling in the near term, and note gaps in knowledge where future research is needed.

Technical Design Report (TDR) describes the preliminary design of the NOvA accelerator upgrades, NOvA detectors, detector halls and detector sites. Compared to the March 2006 and November 2006 NOvA Conceptual Design Reports (CDR), critical value engineering studies have been completed and the alternatives still active in the CDR have been narrowed to achieve a preliminary technical design ready for a Critical Decision 2 review. Many aspects of NOvA described this TDR are complete to a level far beyond a preliminary design. In particular, the access road to the NOvA Far Detector site in Minnesota has an advanced technical design at a level appropriate for a Critical Decision 3a review. Several components of the accelerator upgrade and new neutrino detectors also have advanced technical designs appropriate for a Critical Decision 3a review. Chapter 1 is an Executive Summary with a short description of the NOvA project. Chapter 2 describes how the Fermilab NuMI beam will provide a narrow band beam of neutrinos for NOvA. Chapter 3 gives an updated overview of the scientific basis for the NOvA experiment, focusing on the primary goal to extend the search for {nu}{sub {mu}} {yields} {nu}{sub e} oscillations and measure the sin{sup 2}(2{theta}{sub 13}) parameter. …

We have performed a complete moment tensor analysis of the seismic event, which occurred on Monday August 6, 2007 at 08:48:40 UTC 21 km from Mt.Pleasant, Utah. In our analysis we utilized complete three-component seismic records recorded by the USArray, University of Utah, and EarthScope seismic arrays. The seismic waveform data was integrated to displacement and filtered between 0.02 to 0.10 Hz following instrument removal. We used the Song et al. (1996) velocity model to compute Green's functions used in the moment tensor inversion. A map of the stations we used and the location of the event is shown in Figure 1. In our moment tensor analysis we assumed a shallow source depth of 1 km consistent with the shallow depth reported for this event. As shown in Figure 2 the results point to a source mechanism with negligible double-couple radiation and is composed of dominant CLVD and implosive isotropic components. The total scalar seismic moment is 2.12e22 dyne cm corresponding to a moment magnitude (Mw) of 4.2. The long-period records are very well matched by the model (Figure 2) with a variance reduction of 73.4%. An all dilational (down) first motion radiation pattern is predicted by the moment tensor …

This report discuses programs with in the World Trade Organization (WTO) regarding trade between members.

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This report is on Arts in Education: Background and Legislation.

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