Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The four rail attacks in Europe and Asia since 2004, including the most recent in India, highlight the vulnerability of passenger rail and other surface transportation systems to terrorist attack and demonstrate the need for greater focus on securing these systems. This testimony is based primarily on GAO's September 2005 passenger rail security report and selected recent program updates. Specifically, it addressees (1) the extent to which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has assessed the risks facing the U.S. passenger rail system and developed a strategy based on risk assessments for securing all modes of transportation, including passenger rail, and (2) the actions that federal agencies have taken to enhance the security of the U.S. passenger rail system."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee asked GAO to discuss its recent work related to the Department of Veterans Affairs' (VA) disability claims and appeals processing. GAO has reported and testified on this subject on numerous occasions. GAO's work has addressed VA's efforts to improve the timeliness and accuracy of decisions on claims and appeals, VA's efforts to reduce backlogs, and concerns about decisional consistency."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Since the 2000 national elections, concerns have been raised by various groups regarding the election process, including voting technologies. Beginning in 2001, GAO published a series of reports examining virtually every aspect of the elections process. GAO's complement of reports were used by Congress in framing the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which, among other things, provided for replacement of older voting equipment with more modern electronic voting systems and established the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to lead the nation's election reform efforts. GAO's later reports have raised concerns about the security and reliability of these electronic voting systems, examined the EAC's efforts to address these concerns, and surveyed state and local officials about practices used during the 2004 election, as well as plans for their systems for the 2006 election. Using its published work on electronic voting systems, GAO was asked to testify on (1) the contextual role and characteristics of electronic voting systems, (2) the range of security and reliability concerns that have been reported about these systems, (3) the experiences and management practices of states and local jurisdictions regarding these systems, and (4) the …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) has continuing efforts to modernize its airlift and tanker fleets by investing billions of dollars to modify legacy airlift systems, such as the C-5 and C-130, and procure new aircraft, such as a tanker replacement. Acquisition has been on GAO's list as a high risk area since 1990. GAO has reported that elements contributing to a sound business case for an acquisition are missing or incomplete as DOD and the services attempt to acquire new capabilities. Those elements include firm requirements, mature technologies, a knowledge-based acquisition strategy, a realistic cost estimate, and sufficient funding. Acquisition problems that include failure to limit cost growth, schedule delays, and quantity reductions persist, but fiscal realities will not allow budgets to accommodate these problems any longer. Today's testimony addresses (1) the analyses supporting the Department of Defense's (DOD) mobility capabilities and requirements and (2) actions that are needed to improve the outcomes of weapon system acquisitions. For this testimony, GAO drew from issued reports, containing statements of the scope and methodology used, as well as recently completed work not yet reported. GAO's work was performed in accordance …

Critical assemblies are exquisitely sensitive to details of the microscopic nuclear reactions that govern neutron multiplication. For this reason experimental studies of critical assemblies represent a cornerstone in the process of validating nuclear data. Several different characteristics of a critical system can be measured. The most commonly considered is the so-called effective k eigenvalue, k{sub eff}. Another well-measured property of these systems is {alpha}{sub 0}, the inverse e-folding time of the neutron population in the absence of {beta}-delayed neutrons. Through Monte Carlo calculations and appear to perturbation theory they show that for fast critical systems {alpha}{sub 0} and k{sub eff} can be viewed as lying on a single straight line for any reasonable assumptions about the underlying nuclear data. This means that the two quantities provide the same constraint on nuclear data. In principle, {alpha}{sub 0} could be associated with a very small uncertainty, and this would make the measurements for neutron multiplication rates more useful than k{sub eff} for constraining nuclear data. In practice, though, uncertainties in k{sub eff} and {alpha}{sub 0} are dominated by uncertainties in the representation of the critical system, and not by pure measurement errors for these quantities. This, together with the linear relation between …

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

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

Weekly student newspaper from Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, Texas that includes campus and local news along with advertising.

Most voting systems used in U.S. elections rely on computers in some way. The most computerized is the direct recording electronic voting machine, or DRE. In this system, votes are recorded directly onto computer memory devices. This report discusses questions that arise frequently with respect to the controversy surrounding DREs. Possible misperceptions in the debate can be classified into three categories: those relating to DREs themselves, those that relate to paper audit trails, and those that relate to recounts and audits.

Aquaculture — the farming of fish, shellfish, and other aquatic animals and plants in a controlled environment — is expanding rapidly abroad, with more modest advances in the United States. This report discusses the federal laws and regulations that guide the management of resources in open ocean and near-shore coastal areas.

Lester "Buck" Massey memorial write up including pictures of Buck watching Election Returns on Election Night 2006.

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Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

We will present our recent studies on computational actinide chemistry of complexes which are not only interesting from the standpoint of actinide coordination chemistry but also of relevance to environmental management of high-level nuclear wastes. We will be discussing our recent collaborative efforts with Professor Heino Nitsche of LBNL whose research group has been actively carrying out experimental studies on these species. Computations of actinide complexes are also quintessential to our understanding of the complexes found in geochemical, biochemical environments and actinide chemistry relevant to advanced nuclear systems. In particular we have been studying uranyl, plutonyl, and Cm(III) complexes are in aqueous solution. These studies are made with a variety of relativistic methods such as coupled cluster methods, DFT, and complete active space multi-configuration self-consistent-field (CASSCF) followed by large-scale CI computations and relativistic CI (RCI) computations up to 60 million configurations. Our computational studies on actinide complexes were motivated by ongoing EXAFS studies of speciated complexes in geo and biochemical environments carried out by Prof Heino Nitsche's group at Berkeley, Dr. David Clark at Los Alamos and Dr. Gibson's work on small actinide molecules at ORNL. The hydrolysis reactions of urnayl, neputyl and plutonyl complexes have received considerable attention due …

Over the past 15 years, microprocessor performance hasdoubled approximately every 18 months through increased clock rates andprocessing efficiency. In the past few years, clock frequency growth hasstalled, and microprocessor manufacturers such as AMD have moved towardsdoubling the number of cores every 18 months in order to maintainhistorical growth rates in chip performance. This document investigatesthe ramifications of multicore processor technology on the new Cray XT4?systems based on AMD processor technology. We begin by walking throughthe AMD single-core and dual-core and upcoming quad-core processorarchitectures. This is followed by a discussion of methods for collectingperformance counter data to understand code performance on the Cray XT3?and XT4? systems. We then use the performance counter data to analyze theimpact of multicore processors on the performance of microbenchmarks suchas STREAM, application kernels such as the NAS Parallel Benchmarks, andfull application codes that comprise the NERSC-5 SSP benchmark suite. Weexplore compiler options and software optimization techniques that canmitigate the memory bandwidth contention that can reduce computingefficiency on multicore processors. The last section provides a casestudy of applying the dual-core optimizations to the NAS ParallelBenchmarks to dramatically improve their performance.

Inversions of atmospheric CO2 mixing ratio measurements to determine CO2 sources and sinks are typically limited to coarse spatial and temporal resolution. This limits our ability to evaluate efforts to upscale chamber- and stand-level CO2 flux measurements to regional scales, where coherent climate and ecosystem mechanisms govern the carbon cycle. As a step towards the goal of implementing atmospheric budget or inversion methodology on a regional scale, a network of five relatively inexpensive CO2 mixing ratio measurement systems was deployed on towers in northern Wisconsin. Four systems were distributed on a circle of roughly 150-km radius, surrounding one centrally located system at the WLEF tower near Park Falls, WI. All measurements were taken at a height of 76 m AGL. The systems used single-cell infrared CO2 analyzers (Licor, model LI-820) rather than the siginificantly more costly two-cell models, and were calibrated every two hours using four samples known to within ± 0.2 ppm CO2. Tests prior to deployment in which the systems sampled the same air indicate the precision of the systems to be better than ± 0.3 ppm and the accuracy, based on the difference between the daily mean of one system and a co-located NOAA-ESRL system, is consistently …

The spectrum of angle-integrated undulator radiation displays a sharp edge at every harmonic photon energy. A technique utilizing this feature to measure minute changes in K-parameters of an undulator in a free-electron laser has been proposed. To date, this technique requires the use of crystal monochromators as bandpass filters whose energy centroid depends on the incident angle of the x-ray beam. In this work we propose to use the absorption edge of an appropriate element as an energy-selective detector whose response is truly independent of the angle of the x-ray beam, and hence independent of electron beam direction and emittance. We will discuss the basic design concept of the detection system and illustrate its projected performance with computer simulations.

Klebsiella oxytoca, an enterobacterium closely related to Escherichia coli and amenable to molecular genetic analysis, is a long-established model organism for studies of bacterial nitrogen assimilation. Our work concerned utilization of purines, nitrogen-rich compounds that are widespread in the biosphere. This project began with our observation that molybdenum cofactor (chlorate-resistant) mutants can use (hypo)xanthine as sole nitrogen source (Garzón et al., J. Bacteriol. 174:6298, 1992). Since xanthine dehydrogenase is a molybdoenzyme, Klebsiella must use an alternate route for (hypo)xanthine catabolsim. We identified and characterized a cluster of 22 genes that encode the enzymes, permeases and regulators for utilizing hypoxanthine and xanthine as sole nitrogen source. (Hypoxanthine and xanthine arise from deamination of adenine and guanine, respectively.) Growth and complementation tests with insertion mutants, combined with protein sequence comparisons, allow us to assign probable functions for the products of these genes and to deduce the overall pathway. We present genetic evidence that the first two enzymes for the Klebsiella purine utilization pathway have been recruited from pathways involved in catabolism of aromatic compounds. The first, HxaAB enzyme catalyzing (hypo)xanthine oxidation, is related to well-studied aromatic ring hydroxylating oxygenases such as phthalate dioxygenase. The second, HxbA enzyme catalyzing urate hydroxylation, is related …

A pilot carbon dioxide miscible flood was initiated in the Lansing Kansas City C formation in the Hall Gurney Field, Russell County, Kansas. The reservoir zone is an oomoldic carbonate located at a depth of about 2900 feet. The pilot consists of one carbon dioxide injection well and three production wells. Continuous carbon dioxide injection began on December 2, 2003. By the end of June 2005, 16.19 MM lb of carbon dioxide were injected into the pilot area. Injection was converted to water on June 21, 2005 to reduce operating costs to a breakeven level with the expectation that sufficient carbon dioxide has been injected to displace the oil bank to the production wells by water injection. By December 31, 2006, 79,072 bbls of water were injected into CO2 I-1 and 3,923 bbl of oil were produced from the pilot. Water injection rates into CO2 I-1, CO2 No.10 and CO2 No.18 were stabilized during this period. Oil production rates increased from 4.7 B/D to 5.5 to 6 B/D confirming the arrival of an oil bank at CO2 No.12. Production from wells to the northwest of the pilot region indicates that oil displaced from carbon dioxide injection was produced from Colliver …

This meeting covered several emerging areas in the plant lipid field such as the biosynthesis of cuticle components, interorganelle lipid trafficking, the regulation of lipid homeostasis, and the utilization of algal models. Stimulating new insights were provided not only based on research reports based on plant models, but also due to several excellent talks by experts from the yeast field.

We study the material interactions of a 25-kW solid-state laser, in experiments characterized by relatively large spot size sizes ({approx}3 cm) and the presence of airflow. The targets are 1-cm slabs of iron or aluminum. In the experiments with iron, we show that combustion plays an important role in heating the material. In the experiments with aluminum, there is a narrow range of intensities within which the material interactions vary from no melting at all to complete melt-through. A paint layer serves to increase the absorption. We explain these effects and incorporate them into a comprehensive computational model.

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

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