A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 significantly reformed contracting for payment of Medicare's $310 billion per year in fee-for-service claims. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is transitioning claims administration to 19 new entities known as Medicare Administrative Contractors (MAC) and plans to complete the process ahead of October 1, 2011, the date required by law. In 2005, GAO reported that CMS's plan to accelerate the transition could create challenges and was based on estimated costs and savings that were uncertain. In this report GAO examined (1) how CMS has implemented Medicare contracting reform; (2) how CMS assessed the performance of the MACs and what the results of its assessments have been; and (3) what CMS's costs and savings have been for Medicare contracting reform. GAO selected a sample of 6 transitions to review from among the 10 MAC contracts awarded as of June 2008, based on factors such as geographic diversity, volume of claims workload, and transition complexity. GAO analyzed CMS documents related to the MAC transitions, including performance assessments for 3 of the 6 MACs in the sample …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In March 2008, GAO designated the 2010 Census a high-risk area in part because of information technology (IT) shortcomings and uncertainty over the ultimate cost of the census, now estimated at around $15 billion. The U.S. Census Bureau (Bureau) has since made improvements to various IT systems and taken other steps to mitigate the risks to a successful census. However, last year, GAO noted that a number of challenges and uncertainties remained, and much work remained to be completed under very tight time frames. As requested, this testimony provides an update on the Bureau's readiness for an effective headcount, covering (1) the reliability of key IT systems; (2) a broad range of activities critical to an effective headcount, some of which were problematic in either earlier 2010 operations or in the 2000 Census, and (3) the quality of the Bureau's cost estimates. The testimony is based on previously issued and ongoing GAO work."

This presentation discusses open access policies at the University of North Texas (UNT). The topics include an introduction to open access, a discussion of open access policies, and implementation ideas for workflow and technology support.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

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.

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.

The research described herein was undertaken to provide needed physical property descriptions of the Hanford transuranic tank sludges under conditions that might exist during retrieval, treatment, packaging and transportation for disposal. The work addressed the development of a fundamental understanding of the types of systems represented by these sludge suspensions through correlation of the macroscopic rheological properties with particle interactions occurring at the colloidal scale in the various liquid media. The results of the work have advanced existing understanding of the sedimentation and aggregation properties of complex colloidal suspensions. Bench scale models were investigated with respect to their structural, colloidal and rheological properties that should be useful for the development and optimization of techniques to process the wastes at various DOE sites.

Email from Daniel Graney to "All" on March 25, 2010, discussing the details about TSDC Executive Committee conference call meeting on March 28, 2010.

Email from Daniel Graney to Al Daniels on March 25, 2010, discussing 2009 through 2010 Texas Stonewall Democratic Caucus budget. Profit & loss budget overview made on July 2010 through June 2011 for the Texas Stonewall Democratic Caucus.

Email from Daniel Graney to Al Daniels on March 25, 2010 discussing checking the PO Box for donations.

Email from Daniel Graney to Al Daniels on March 25, 2010, discussing Texas Stonewall Democratic Caucus budget from July 1, 2009 through June 30, 2010. Also, there are profit & loss budget overviews made on July 2009 through June 2010.

Email from Daniel Graney to "All" on March 25, 2010 discussing the fundraising letters to openly LGBT elected officials in Texas.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

The purpose of this CRADA extension which effectively ended in 2003 was to quantify the effect of iron-sulfide formation on the fouling propensity of crude oil. The specific objectives are focused on fouling of the Crude Distillation Unit (CDU-1) at the Shell Refinery in Mobile, Alabama. The technical approach consists of analyzing the plant data, chemical analysis of crude oil to detect key precursors, performing refinery tests using the Argonne Field Fouling Unit, and verifying the effectiveness of a physical device of tube insert and enhanced tubes to change threshold conditions and thereby reducing fouling.

Existence of the magnetic monopole is compatible with the fundamental laws of nature, however, this illusive particle has yet to be detected experimentally. In this work, we show that an electric charge near the topological surface state induces an image magnetic monopole charge due to the topological magneto-electric effect. The magnetic field generated by the image magnetic monopole can be experimentally measured, and the inverse square law of the field dependence can be determined quantitatively. We propose that this effect can be used to experimentally realize a gas of quantum particles carrying fractional statistics, consisting of the bound states of the electric charge and the image magnetic monopole charge.

Using an RPA approximation, we have calculated the strengths of the singlet and triplet pairing interactions which arise from the exchange of spin and orbital fluctuations for a 2-orbital model of the Fe-pnictide superconductors. When the system is doped with F, the electron pockets become dominant and we find that the strongest pairing occurs in the singlet d-wave pairing and the triplet p-wave pairing channels, which compete closely. The pairing structure in the singlet d-wave channel corresponds to a superposition of near neighbor intra-orbital singlets with a minus sign phase difference between the d{sub xz} and d{sub yz} pairs. The leading pairing configuration in the triplet channel also involves a nearest neighbor intra-orbital pairing. We find that the strengths of both the singlet and triplet pairing grow, with the singlet pairing growing faster, as the onsite Coulomb interaction approaches the value where the S = 1 particle-hole susceptibility diverges.

The purpose of this report is to provide a concise but comprehensive overview of Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Climate Research Facility instrumentation status. The report is divided into the following five sections: (1) new instrumentation in the process of being acquired and deployed, (2) field campaigns, (3) existing instrumentation and progress on improvements or upgrades, (4) proposed future instrumentation, and (5) Small Business Innovation Research instrument development.

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Topological insulators are new states of quantum matter with surface states protected by the time-reversal symmetry. In this work, we perform first-principle electronic structure calculations for Sb{sub 2}Te{sub 3}, Sb{sub 2}Se{sub 3}, Bi{sub 2}Te{sub 3} and Bi{sub 2}Se{sub 3} crystals. Our calculations predict that Sb{sub 2}Te{sub 3}, Bi{sub 2}T e{sub 3} and Bi{sub 2}Se{sub 3} are topological insulators, while Sb{sub 2}Se{sub 3} is not. In particular, Bi{sub 2}Se{sub 3} has a topologically non-trivial energy gap of 0.3eV , suitable for room temperature applications. We present a simple and unified continuum model which captures the salient topological features of this class of materials. These topological insulators have robust surface states consisting of a single Dirac cone at the {Lambda} point.