Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The U.S. Postal Service's (USPS) financial condition and outlook deteriorated significantly during fiscal year 2009. USPS was not able to cut costs fast enough to offset declining mail volume and revenues resulting from the economic recession and changes in the use of mail, such as electronic bill payment. In July 2009, GAO added USPS's financial condition and outlook to its High-Risk List and reported that USPS urgently needed to restructure to improve its financial viability. Declines in mail volume and revenue, large financial losses, increasing debt, and financial obligations will continue to challenge USPS. This testimony provides (1) information on USPS's financial condition and forecast and (2) GAO's perspective on the need for USPS restructuring. In addition, questions and issues are included for Congress to consider regarding USPS's proposal to reduce delivery from 6 to 5 days. This testimony is based on GAO's past and ongoing work, including its work on postal reform issues, its report adding USPS's financial condition and outlook to its High-Risk List, and updated information on USPS's financial condition and outlook."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) establishes that federal agencies must provide the public with access to government information, enabling them to learn about government operations and decisions. To help ensure proper implementation, the act requires that agencies annually report specific information about their FOIA operations, such as numbers of requests received and processed and other statistics. In work reported from 2001 to 2008, GAO examined the annual reports for major agencies, describing the status of reported implementation and any observable trends. GAO also reported on agency improvement plans developed in response to a 2005 Executive Order aimed at improving FOIA implementation, including reducing backlogs of overdue requests. GAO was asked to testify on its previous work on FOIA implementation, as well as on selected changes in the FOIA landscape resulting from legislation, policy, and guidance. To develop this testimony, GAO drew on its previous work, as well as publicly available information."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Key scientific assessments have underscored the urgency of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide to help mitigate potentially negative effects of climate change; however, many countries with significant greenhouse gas emissions, including the United States, China, and India, have not committed to binding limits on emissions to date, and carbon dioxide levels continue to rise. Recently, some policymakers have raised questions about geoengineering--large-scale deliberate interventions in the earth's climate system to diminish climate change or its potential impacts--and its role in a broader strategy of mitigating and adapting to climate change. Most geoengineering proposals fall into two approaches: solar radiation management (SRM), which offset temperature increases by reflecting a small percentage of the sun's light back into space, and carbon dioxide removal (CDR), which address the root cause of climate change by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Today's testimony focuses on GAO's preliminary observations on (1) the state of the science regarding geoengineering approaches and their effects, (2) federal involvement in geoengineering activities, and (3) the views of experts and federal officials about the extent to which federal laws and international agreements apply to geoengineering. To address these …

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

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.

Card from a floral arrangement sent to Eleanor Brown from McAdams Floral with care instructions.

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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In New York Times Co. v. Tasini, six freelance authors who had contributed articles to several publications, including The New York Times, Newsday, and Time, sued when the publishers licensed rights to copy and sell the articles to electronic databases such as Lexis/Nexis. Shortly after the Court decided Tasini, three preexisting class action infringement suits, which had been suspended pending the decision, were activated and consolidated in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. A fourth, nearly identical action was coordinated with that consolidated action. Together, these claims comprise the litigation discussed in this report.

Federal support for child care and education comes in many forms, ranging from grant programs to tax provisions. This report provides a funding overview and brief background information on federal child care, early education, and related programs (and tax provisions).

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This report documents the process used to identify source area target analytes in support of the 100-B/C remedial investigation/feasibility study addendum to DOE/RL-2008-46. This report also establishes the analyte exclusion criteria applicable for 100-B/C use and the analytical methods needed to analyze the target analytes.

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.

This report summarizes the activities of the INRA Water Research Consortium (IWRC) for the period beginning September 15, 2005 and ending December 16, 2010. This report compares accomplishments to project objectives, documents the activities associated with this project, and lists products developed during the course of the project. The Water Resources Research Needs Assessment team received funding from the Inland Northwest Research Alliance Water Resources Steering Committee to facilitate a structured needs assessment process that could provide a basis for future targeted research efforts to improve regional water resources management in the Inland Northwest region. The original INRA proposal specifically mentions the need to conduct a detailed assessment of the information and research needs of policy makers and water user groups during a period of increasing competition for scarce water supplies. A particular focus of this assessment would be to understand what types of research might facilitate water resource management during periods of drought. The specific goals of the Needs Assessment project were to: (1) Quickly ascertain the perceptions of diverse stakeholders in this region; (2) Condense this complex information into a format that can be shared with the INRA scientific panel, and (3) Develop of a realistic set of …

The long-term goal of this research was to better understand the influence of mRNA stability on gene regulation, particularly in response to hormones and the circadian clock. The primary aim of this project was to examine this using DNA microarrays, small RNA analysis and other approaches. We accomplished these objectives, although we were only able to detect small changes in mRNA stability in response to these stimuli. However, the work also contributed to a major breakthrough allowing the identification of small RNAs on a genomic scale in eukaryotes. Moreover, the project prompted us to develop a new way to analyze mRNA decay genome wide. Thus, the research was hugely successful beyond our objectives.

This Advanced Detector Research proposal presented a plan to develop an extremely fast time-of-flight detector for measuring the arrival time of beam protons scattered at small angles in high energy hadron colliders, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The proposed detectors employ a gas or quartz Cerenkov radiator which produce light when a proton passes through them, coupled to a micro-channel plate photomultiplier tube (MCP-PMT) that converts the light to an electrical pulse. The very small jitter of the pulse time provided by the MCP-PMT, combined with downstream electronics that accurately measure the pulse time results in a time-of-flight measurement of unprecedented accuracy. This ADR proposal was extremely successful, culminating in the development of a 10 ps resolution time-of-flight system, about an order of magnitude better than any time-of-flight system previously deployed at a collider experiment. The primary areas of advance were the usage of new radiator geometries providing fast detector signals, using multiple measurements to obtain a superior system resolution, and development of an electronics readout system tuned to maintain the excellent timing afforded by the detector. Test beam and laser tests have improved the knowledge of MCP-PMT’s and enabled the evaluation of the new detector concepts. In …

New simulations of graphene growth in flame environments are presented. The simulations employ a kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) algorithm coupled to molecular mechanics (MM) geometry optimization to track individual graphenic species as they evolve. Focus is given to incorporation of five-member rings and resulting curvature and edge defects. The model code has been re-written to be more computationally efficient enabling a larger set of simulations to be run, decreasing stochastic fluctuations in the averaged results. The model also includes updated rate coefficients for graphene edge reactions recently published in the literature. The new simulations are compared to results from the previous model as well as to hydrogen to carbon ratios recorded in experiment and calculated with alternate models.

Vitrification is currently the most widely used technology for the treatment of high level radioactive wastes (HLW) throughout the world. Most of the nations that have generated HLW are immobilizing in either borosilicate glass or phosphate glass. One of the primary reasons that glass has become the most widely used immobilization media is the relative simplicity of the vitrification process, e.g. melt waste plus glass forming frit additives and cast. A second reason that glass has become widely used for HLW is that the short range order (SRO) and medium range order (MRO) found in glass atomistically bonds the radionuclides and governs the melt properties such as viscosity, resistivity, sulphate solubility. The molecular structure of glass controls contaminant/radionuclide release by establishing the distribution of ion exchange sites, hydrolysis sites, and the access of water to those sites. The molecular structure is flexible and hence accounts for the flexibility of glass formulations to waste variability. Nuclear waste glasses melt between 1050-1150 C which minimizes the volatility of radioactive components such as Tc{sup 99}, Cs{sup 137}, and I{sup 129}. Nuclear waste glasses have good long term stability including irradiation resistance. Process control models based on the molecular structure of glass have been …

A paper discussing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Microfield exposure tools (METs) play a crucial role in the development of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) resists and masks, One of these tools is the SEMATECH Berkeley 0.3 numerical aperture (NA) MET, Using conventional illumination this tool is limited to approximately 22-nm half pitch resolution. However, resolution enhancement techniques have been used to push the patterning capabilities of this tool to half pitches of 18 nm and below, This resolution was achieved in a new imageable hard mask which also supports contact printing down to 22 nm with conventional illumination. Along with resolution, line-edge roughness is another crucial hurdle facing EUV resists, Much of the resist LER, however, can be attributed to the mask. We have shown that intenssionally aggressive mask cleaning on an older generation mask causes correlated LER in photoresist to increase from 3.4 nm to 4,0 nm, We have also shown that new generation EUV masks (100 pm of substrate roughness) can achieve correlated LER values of 1.1 nm, a 3x improvement over the correlated LER of older generation EUV masks (230 pm of substrate roughness), Finally, a 0.5-NA MET has been proposed that will address the needs of EUV development at the 16-nm node and beyond, The …