Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense's (DOD) military compensation package, which is a myriad of pays and benefits, is an important tool to attract and retain the number and quality of active duty servicemembers it needs to fulfill its mission. Compensation can be appropriate and adequate to attract and retain servicemembers when it is competitive with civilian compensation. However, comparisons between military and civilian compensation present both limitations and challenges. As we noted in 1986, exact compensation comparisons are not possible because no data exist which would allow an exact comparison of military and civilian personnel with the same levels of work experience. Also, nonmonetary considerations complicate military and civilian pay comparisons because their value cannot be quantified. Specifically, military service is unique in that the working conditions for active duty service carry the risk of death and injury during wartime and the potential for frequent, long deployments unlike most civilian jobs. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 required that we conduct a study comparing pay and benefits provided by law to members of the Armed Forces with that of comparably situated private-sector employees to assess how …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 amended the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA). This is GAO's third report in response to the LDA's requirement for GAO to annually (1) determine the extent to which lobbyists can demonstrate compliance with the LDA by providing support for information on their registrations and reports, (2) identify challenges and potential improvements to compliance for registered lobbyists, and (3) describe the efforts the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia (the Office) has made to improve its enforcement of the LDA. GAO reviewed a random sample of 134 lobbying disclosure reports filed from the fourth quarter of calendar year 2008 through the third quarter of calendar year 2009. GAO also selected two random samples of federal political campaign contributions reports from year-end 2008 through midyear 2009. GAO sampled 100 reports listing contributions and 100 reports listing no contributions. This methodology allowed GAO to generalize to the population of 53,756 disclosure reports, 10,928 contributions reports, and 22,572 reports with no contributions. GAO also met with officials from the Office regarding efforts to focus resources on lobbyists who …

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.

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.

Weekly student newspaper from the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas that includes campus news and commentaries along with advertising.

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

Developing a predictive understanding of subsurface flow and transport is complicated by the disparity of scales across which controlling hydrological properties and processes span. Conventional techniques for characterizing hydrogeological properties (such as pumping, slug, and flowmeter tests) typically rely on borehole access to the subsurface. Because their spatial extent is commonly limited to the vicinity near the wellbores, these methods often can not provide sufficient information to describe key controls on subsurface flow and transport. The field of hydrogeophysics has evolved in recent years to explore the potential that geophysical methods hold for improving the quantification of subsurface properties and processes relevant for hydrological investigations. This chapter is intended to familiarize hydrogeologists and water resource professionals with the state-of-the-art as well as existing challenges associated with hydrogeophysics. We provide a review of the key components of hydrogeophysical studies, which include: geophysical methods commonly used for shallow subsurface characterization; petrophysical relationships used to link the geophysical properties to hydrological properties and state variables; and estimation or inversion methods used to integrate hydrological and geophysical measurements in a consistent manner. We demonstrate the use of these different geophysical methods, petrophysical relationships, and estimation approaches through several field-scale case studies. Among other applications, …

DOWTHERM A oil is being considered for use as a heat transfer fluid in experiments to help in the design of heat transfer components for the Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP). In conjection with the experiments RELAP5-3D/ATHENA will be used to help design and analyzed the data generated by the experiments. Inorder to use RELAP5-3D the thermophysical properties of DOWTHERM A were implemented into the fluids package of the RELAP5-3D/ATHENA computer propgram. DOWTHERM A properties were implemented in RELAP5-3D/ATHENA using thermophysical property data obtain from a Dow Chemical Company brochure. The data were curve fit and the polynomial equations developed for each required property were input into a fluid property generator. The generated data was then compared to the orginal DOWTHERM A data to verify that the fluid property data generated by the RELAP5-3D/ATHENA code was representitive of the original input data to the generator.

A search for dijet resonance production in a four-jet all-hadronic final state from the D0 detector at Fermilab's Tevatron is presented. The data set, acquired at a p{bar p} center-of-mass energy of {radical}s = 1.96 TeV, contains primarily multijet events and represents approximately 1 fb{sup -1} of data. The cross section limits for associated Higgs production and Technicolor processes are determined through a background subtraction method using data to estimate the background. This four-jet channel is potentially very powerful, but is extremely challenging due to the large multijet background from QCD processes. Background rejection is performed by utilizing b-tagging, pre-selection cuts, a multi-variate boosted decision tree discriminant, and the correlated information contained in the M(bb) and M(jj) dijet invariant masses. The search for V H (WH+ZH) processes yields a 95% confidence level observed upper limit of 20.4 pb on the VH cross section for a Higgs mass of 115 GeV/c{sup 2}. Additionally, a 95% confidence level observed upper limit of 16.7 pb was set for a Higgs boson mass of 125 GeV/c{sup 2} and 24.6 pb was set for a Higgs boson mass of 135 GeV/c{sup 2}. The same data set was used to place limits on the Technicolor process …

One of the challenges in the chemistry of actinide and lanthanide (f-ion) is quantifying exchange coupling between f-ions. While qualitative information about exchange coupling may be readily obtained using the diamagnetic substitution approach, obtaining quantitative information is much more difficult. This article describes how exchange coupling may be quantified using the susceptibility of a magnetically isolated analog, as in the diamagnetic substitution approach, along with the anisotropy of the ground state as determined by EPR spectroscopy. Several examples are used to illustrate and test this approach.

Policy makers will most likely need to make decisions about climate policy before climate scientists have resolved all relevant uncertainties about the impacts of climate change. This study demonstrates a risk-assessment methodology for evaluating uncertain future climatic conditions. We estimate the impacts of climate change on U.S. state- and national-level economic activity from 2010 to 2050. To understand the implications of uncertainty on risk and to provide a near-term rationale for policy interventions to mitigate the course of climate change, we focus on precipitation, one of the most uncertain aspects of future climate change. We use results of the climate-model ensemble from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report 4 (AR4) as a proxy for representing climate uncertainty over the next 40 years, map the simulated weather from the climate models hydrologically to the county level to determine the physical consequences on economic activity at the state level, and perform a detailed 70-industry analysis of economic impacts among the interacting lower-48 states. We determine the industry-level contribution to the gross domestic product and employment impacts at the state level, as well as interstate population migration, effects on personal income, and consequences for the U.S. trade balance. We …

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), National Cyber Security Division (NSCD), Control Systems Security Program (CSSP), contracted Sandia National Laboratories to develop a generic methodology for prioritizing cyber-vulnerable, critical infrastructure assets and the development of mitigation strategies for their loss or compromise. The initial project has been divided into three discrete deliverables: (1) A generic methodology report suitable to all Critical Infrastructure and Key Resource (CIKR) Sectors (this report); (2) a sector-specific report for Electrical Power Distribution; and (3) a sector-specific report for the water sector, including generation, water treatment, and wastewater systems. Specific reports for the water and electric sectors are available from Sandia National Laboratories.

The solid-state properties of most elements are now well understood on the basis of quantum physics - with few exceptions, notably the element number 94, plutonium. Plutonium has six crystalline phases at ambient pressure, some of which are separated by unusual phase transitions with large discontinuities in volume, exhibit negative thermal expansion coefficients, or form exotic low-symmetry structures. The main challenge to explain these anomalous properties is that the characteristic ingredient of actinides, the 5f electronic states, are in the cross-over regime between the localized and delocalized (itinerant) behaviour in Pu. The early part of the actinide series with the 5f states being itinerant, i.e. part of the metallic bond, culminates with Pu; starting with Am (Z = 95), the 5f states are localized, nonbonding, and resemble the 4f states in lanthanides. Both itinerant and localized regimes are well covered by existing theories, but they cannot be simply interpolated due to the importance of dynamical electron-electron correlations. Here we present accurate quantum Monte Carlo calculations achieving previously inaccessible resolution. Obtained results demonstrate that interplay of the full Coulomb interaction vertex with spin-orbital coupling is crucial for understanding the experimentally observed spectral properties of plutonium near the Fermi level.

Electric-drive vehicles enabled by power- and energy-dense batteries promise to improve vehicle efficiency and help reduce society's dependence on fossil fuels. Next generation plug-in hybrid vehicles and battery electric vehicles may also enable vehicles to be powered by electricity generated from clean, renewable resources; however, to increase the commercial viability of such vehicles, the cost, performance and life of the vehicles batteries must be further improved. This work illustrates a virtual design process to optimize the performance and life of large-format lithium ion batteries. Beginning with material-level kinetic and transport properties, the performance and life of multiple large-format cell designs are evaluated, demonstrating the impact of macroscopic design parameters such as foil thickness, tab location, and cell size and shape under various cycling conditions. Challenges for computer-aided engineering of large-format battery cells, such as competing requirements and objectives, are discussed.

It can be natural to believe that many of the traditional issues of scale have been eliminated or at least greatly reduced via cloud computing. That is, if one can create a seemingly wellfunctioning cloud application that operates correctly on small or moderate-sized problems, then the very nature of cloud programming abstractions means that the same application will run as well on potentially significantly larger problems. In this paper, we present our experiences taking MODISAzure, our satellite data processing system built on the Windows Azure cloud computing platform, from the proof-of-concept stage to a point of being able to run on significantly larger problem sizes (e.g., from national-scale data sizes to global-scale data sizes). To our knowledge, this is the longest-running eScience application on the nascent Windows Azure platform. We found that while many infrastructure-level issues were thankfully masked from us by the cloud infrastructure, it was valuable to design additional redundancy and fault-tolerance capabilities such as transparent idempotent task retry and logging to support debugging of user code encountering unanticipated data issues. Further, we found that using a commercial cloud means anticipating inconsistent performance and black-box behavior of virtualized compute instances, as well as leveraging changing platform capabilities over …

The project scope was to install a diesel generated power source to deep well 4 in addition to the existing commercial power source. The diesel power source and its fuel supply system shall be seismically qualified to withstand a Performance Category 4 (PC-4) seismic event. This diesel power source will permit the deep well to operate during a loss of commercial power. System design will incorporate the ability to select and transfer power between the new diesel power source and commercial power sources for the the deep well motor and TRA-672 building loads.

Solute transport in fractured porous media is typically 'non-Fickian'; that is, it is characterized by early breakthrough and long tailing and by nonlinear growth of the Green function-centered second moment. This behavior is due to the effects of (1) multirate diffusion occurring between the highly permeable fracture network and the low-permeability rock matrix, (2) a wide range of advection rates in the fractures and, possibly, the matrix as well, and (3) a range of path lengths. As a consequence, prediction of solute transport processes at the macroscale represents a formidable challenge. Classical dual-porosity (or mobile-immobile) approaches in conjunction with an advection-dispersion equation and macroscopic dispersivity commonly fail to predict breakthrough of fractured porous media accurately. It was recently demonstrated that the continuous time random walk (CTRW) method can be used as a generalized upscaling approach. Here we extend this work and use results from high-resolution finite element-finite volume-based simulations of solute transport in an outcrop analogue of a naturally fractured reservoir to calibrate the CTRW method by extracting a distribution of retention times. This procedure allows us to predict breakthrough at other model locations accurately and to gain significant insight into the nature of the fracture-matrix interaction in naturally fractured …

Longitudinal space-charge fields can generate substantial distortion of the rf-generated potential wells, fill the extraction kicker gap in the beam, affect the incoherent synchrotron tune spread, and have the potential for causing instability and longitudinal emittance growth. The net effective voltage per turn resulting from the space-charge self voltage and the ring inductive wall impedance ?0L is proportional to the slope of the beam current distribution e{beta}c {lambda}(s) and can be expressed as: V{sub s} = {partial_derivative}{lambda}(s)/{partial_derivative}s [g{sub 0}Z{sub 0}/2{beta}{gamma}{sup 2} - {omega}{sub 0}L]e{beta}cR where R = c/{omega}{sub 0} is the average machine radius, Z{sub 0} = 377 Ohm and g{sub 0} = 1 + 2ln(b/a) is the geometric space-charge constant, a and b are the beam radii and vacuum-chamber aperture. By introduction a tunable inductance L, e.g. of ferrite rings, the term in brackets and, consequently, the space-charge effect may be substantially reduced or canceled at some chosen energy [1]. This concept has been experimentally proven at the LANL Proton Storage Ring at LANL where three inductive inserts, each consisting of 30 'cores' of a cylindrically shaped ferrite with thickness of 1 inch, inner diameter of 5 inches, and an outer diameter of 8 inches, were installed. The magnetic …

Grid-connected photovoltaic installations grew by 40% in 2009 compared with installations in 2008. California and New Jersey have the largest markets. Growth occurred in the residential and utility markets, but non-residential customer-sited installations did not change compared with the installations in 2008. Two small solar thermal electric plants were connected to the grid in 2009 with a combined capacity of 7 MW. The future prospects for solar thermal electric plants look bright, although developers are not expected to complete any new large plants until at least 2011. Solar water heating and solar space heating annual installations grew by 40% in 2008 compared with 2007. Hawaii, California, Puerto Rico, and Florida dominate this market. Solar pool heating annual installation capacity fell by 1% in 2008 following a dramatic decline of 15% in solar pool heating capacity in 2007 compared with 2006. Florida and California are the largest markets for solar pool heating. The economic decline in the real estate markets in Florida and California likely led to the decrease in pool installations and thus the dramatic decline in capacity installed of solar pool systems in 2007.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.