Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This report responds to a Congressional request for information on activities related to classical plant and animal breeding--creating an organism with desirable traits through controlled mating and selection without the insertion of genes from another species--that occurs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Within USDA, the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES) are the primary scientific research agencies involved in classical plant and animal breeding activities. ARS has more than 100 research facilities in the United States and abroad and received about $1.3 billion in funding for fiscal year 2006. ARS conducts research to develop and transfer solutions to agricultural problems, and its research partners include universities; crop, horticultural, and livestock producer and industry organizations; state, federal, and other research agencies or institutions; private companies; and international agricultural research centers. CSREES, which received about $1.2 billion in funding for fiscal year 2006, has the primary responsibility for providing linkages between the federal and state components of a broad-based, national agricultural research, extension, and higher education system. As Congress has noted, classical breeding is important to agricultural producers as they …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Army is implementing 44 base realignment and closure (BRAC) recommendations to construct 125 new Armed Forces Reserve Centers (AFRC) and close 387 existing reserve components facilities. The Department of Defense (DOD) expects the new AFRCs to increase recruiting and retention and create greater efficiencies by fostering jointness and consolidating functions. GAO (1) assessed the extent DOD's cost and savings estimates to implement the recommendations have changed from BRAC Commission projections and (2) determined the extent the Army has identified potential challenges that could affect BRAC implementation and has developed a plan to address these challenges. GAO analyzed DOD's publicly available BRAC budget data and interviewed officials at Army offices, including Reserve Command, National Guard Bureau, and the National Guard in five states. This report, prepared under the Comptroller General's authority to initiate evaluations, is one of a series related to the BRAC 2005 round."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Army expects significant personnel growth, more than 50 percent in some cases, at 18 domestic bases through 2011 because of the effect of implementing base realignment and closure (BRAC), overseas force rebasing, and force modularity actions. This growth creates the need for additional support infrastructure at these bases and in nearby communities. Military construction costs of over $17 billion are expected for new personnel, and communities will incur infrastructure costs as well. GAO prepared this report under the Comptroller General's authority to conduct evaluations on his own initiative. It addresses (1) the challenges and associated risks the Army faces in providing for timely infrastructure support at its gaining installations and (2) how communities are planning and funding for infrastructure to support incoming personnel and their families. GAO analyzed personnel restationing numbers, discussed planning efforts with Army and community officials, and visited nine of the larger gaining bases and nearby communities."

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In the continuous effort to improve antiproton stacking rate, a new type of equalizers has been developed and installed in antiproton accumulator. The R&D of these new equalizers is described in this paper. Equalizers are used in Fermilab antiproton stochastic cooling to compensate frequency response of the cooling system. Usually both amplitude and phase compensations are needed. However in most cases it is difficult to achieve a satisfactory compensation for both because of their interdependence. To make it more difficult is that in some cases large compensations (10 to 20 db of amplitude compensation or more than 100 degree of phase compensation) are needed near the low or high ends of a frequency band. Recently a new compensation scheme of equalizers is proposed for Fermilab antiproton accumulator. This scheme originated from the requirement to maximize the system performance resulting in a request for the phase of the cooling system transfer function to be extremely flat. For this kind of phase correction, a new type of equalizers has been developed.

Plutonium and its alloys exhibit complex phase diagrams that imply anomalous lattice dynamics near phase stability boundaries. Specifically, the TA [111] phonon branch in Ga-stabilized {delta}-Pu at room temperature shows a pronounced soft mode at the zone boundary, which suggests a possible connection to the martensitic transformation from the fcc {delta}-phase to the monoclinic {alpha}{prime}-phase at low temperatures. This work is a study of the lattice dynamics of this system by x-ray thermal diffuse scattering. The results reveal little temperature dependence of the phonon frequencies, thus indicating that kinetic phonon softening is not responsible for this phase transition.

In many regions, three dimensional characterization of the groundwater regime is limited by coarse well spacing or borehole lithologic logs of low quality. However, regulatory requirements for drinking water or site remediation may require collection of extensive chemical and water quality data from existing wells. Similarly, for wells installed in the distant past, lithologic logs may not be available, but the wells can be sampled for chemical and isotopic constituents. In these situations, a thorough analysis of trends in chemical and isotopic constituents can be a key component in characterizing the regional groundwater system. On a basin or subbasin scale, especially in areas of intensive groundwater management where artificial recharge is important, introduction of an extrinsic tracer can provide a robust picture of groundwater flow. Dissolved gases are particularly good tracers since a large volume of water can be tagged, there are no real or perceived health risks associated with the tracer, and a very large dynamic range allows detection of a small amount of tagged water in well discharge. Recent applications of the application of extrinsic tracers, used in concert with intrinsic chemical and isotopic tracers, demonstrate the power of chemical analyses in interpreting regional subsurface flow regimes.

Improvement of antiproton stacking rates has been pursued for the last twenty years at Fermilab. The last twelve months have been dedicated to improving the computer model of the Stacktail system. The production of antiprotons encompasses the use of the entire accelerator chain with the exception of the Tevatron. In the Antiproton Source two storage rings, the Debuncher and Accumulator are responsible for the accumulation of antiprotons in quantities that can exceed 2 x 10{sup 12}, but more routinely, stacks of 5 x 10{sup 11} antiprotons are accumulated before being transferred to the Recycler ring. Since the beginning of this recent enterprise, peak accumulation rates have increased from 2 x 10{sup 11} to greater than 2.3 x 10{sup 11} antiprotons per hour. A goal of 3 x 10{sup 11} per hour has been established. Improvements to the stochastic cooling systems are but a part of this current effort. This paper will discuss Stacktail system measurements and experienced system limitations.

N-Gram (n-character sequences in text documents) counting is a well-established technique used in classifying the language of text in a document. In this paper, n-gram processing is accelerated through the use of reconfigurable hardware on the XtremeData XD1000 system. Our design employs parallelism at multiple levels, with parallel Bloom Filters accessing on-chip RAM, parallel language classifiers, and parallel document processing. In contrast to another hardware implementation (HAIL algorithm) that uses off-chip SRAM for lookup, our highly scalable implementation uses only on-chip memory blocks. Our implementation of end-to-end language classification runs at 85x comparable software and 1.45x the competing hardware design.

The Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP) is a single, highly integrated technical program for maintaining the surety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. The SSP uses past nuclear test data along with current and future non-nuclear test data, computational modeling and simulation, and experimental facilities to advance understanding of nuclear weapons. It includes stockpile surveillance, experimental research, development and engineering programs, and an appropriately scaled production capability to support stockpile requirements. This integrated national program requires the continued use of current facilities and programs along with new experimental facilities and computational enhancements to support these programs. The Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC)1 is a cornerstone of the SSP, providing simulation capabilities and computational resources to support the annual stockpile assessment and certification, to study advanced nuclear-weapons design and manufacturing processes, to analyze accident scenarios and weapons aging, and to provide the tools to enable Stockpile Life Extension Programs (SLEPs) and the resolution of Significant Finding Investigations (SFIs). This requires a balanced resource, including technical staff, hardware, simulation software, and computer science solutions. In its first decade, the ASC strategy focused on demonstrating simulation capabilities of unprecedented scale in three spatial dimensions. In its second decade, ASC is focused on …

The last sentence of the second paragraph of the Executive Summary on page ix incorrectly states the period for repair. Cracks or areas of settling exceeding the 15 centimeters (6 inches) deep that extend 1.0 meter (3 feet) or more on the cover will be evaluated and repaired within 60 days of detection. The second sentence of the third paragraph of the Executive Summary on page ix incorrectly states the month that cover repair was performed while omitting the discovery of additional settling, which was repaired during the originally-stated repair month. The corrected sentence (with additional sentences added for clarification) reads, 'This area of settling on the cover was repaired in October 2006. Additional cracking was observed during the October 2006 repair that exceeded the action level and was repaired in December 2006.' The last sentence of the fourth bullet of Section 2.2 on page 5 incorrectly states the period for repair. Cracks or areas of settling exceeding the compliance criterion will be evaluated and repaired within 60 days. A repair event was omitted from Section 3.4 on page 13, which should be included as Subsection 3.4.1, 'October 26-30, 2006, Repairs'. The subtext included with this subsection should read, 'During …

Alternative gauge choices for worldsheet supersymmetry can elucidate dynamical phenomena obscured in the usual superconformal gauge. In the particular example of the tachyonic E_8 heterotic string, we use a judicious gauge choice to show that the process of closed-string tachyon condensation can be understood in terms of a worldsheet super-Higgs effect. The worldsheet gravitino assimilates the goldstino and becomes a dynamical propagating field. Conformal, but not superconformal, invariance is maintained throughout.

The self-potential (SP) response during hydraulic fracturing of intact Sierra granite was investigated in the laboratory. Excellent correlation of pressure drop and SP suggests that the SP response is created primarily by electrokinetic coupling. For low pressures, the variation of SP with pressure drop is linear, indicating a constant coupling coefficient (Cc) of -200 mV/MPa. However for pressure drops >2 MPa, the magnitude of the Cc increases by 80% in an exponential trend. This increasing Cc is related to increasing permeability at high pore pressures caused by dilatancy of micro-cracks, and is explained by a decrease in the hydraulic tortuosity. Resistivity measurements reveal a decrease of 2% prior to hydraulic fracturing and a decrease of {approx}35% after fracturing. An asymmetric spatial SP response created by injectate diffusion into dilatant zones is observed prior to hydraulic fracturing, and in most cases this SP variation revealed the impending crack geometry seconds before failure. At rupture, injectate rushes into the new fracture area where the zeta potential is different than in the rock porosity, and an anomalous SP spike is observed. After fracturing, the spatial SP distribution reveals the direction of fracture propagation. Finally, during tensile cracking in a point load device with …

We investigate the magnetic properties of the isostructural spinel-spinel interface of NiMn{sub 2}O{sub 4}(NMO)-Fe{sub 3}O{sub 4}. Although the magnetic transition temperature of the NMO film is preserved, both bulk and interface sensitive measurements demonstrate that the interface exhibits strong interfacial magnetic coupling up to room temperature. While NMO thin films have a ferrimagnetic transition temperature of 60 K, both NiFe{sub 2}O{sub 4} and MnFe{sub 2}O{sub 4} are ferrimagnetic at room temperature. Our experimental results suggest that these magnetic properties arise from a thin interdiffused region of (Fe,Mn,Ni){sub 3}O{sub 4} at the interface, leading to Mn and Ni magnetic properties similar to those of MnFe{sub 2}O{sub 4} and NiFe{sub 2}O{sub 4}.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

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

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

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

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Email from Jimmy Rocha to multiple recipients on September 13, 2007, discussing September 30th Stonewall meeting held at the new TDP Headquarters in Austin, Texas.

Clippings from The Dallas Morning News about Rev. Michael Piazza's column regarding judging another for their sexual behavior.

Email from Jimmy Rocha to multiple recipients on September 13, 2007, discussing the September 30th Stonewall meeting to be held at the new TDP Headquarters in Austin, Texas.