A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Agencies can use several different types of contracts to leverage the government's buying power for goods and services. These include interagency contracts--where one agency uses another's contract for its own needs--such as the General Services Administration (GSA) and the Department of Veterans Affairs multiple award schedule (MAS) contracts, multiagency contracts (MAC) for a wide range of goods and services, and governmentwide acquisition contracts (GWAC) for information technology. Agencies spent at least $60 billion in fiscal year 2008 through these contracts and similar single-agency enterprisewide contracts. However, concerns exist about duplication, oversight, and a lack of information on these contracts, and pricing and management of the MAS program. GAO was asked to assess the reasons for establishing and the policies to manage these contracts; the effectiveness of GSA tools for obtaining best MAS contract prices; and GSA's management of the MAS program. To do this, GAO reviewed statutes, regulations, policies, contract documentation and data, and interviewed officials from OMB and six agencies."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In July and August 2009, the federal government implemented the Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save (CARS) program, or "Cash for Clunkers," a temporary vehicle retirement program that offered consumers a monetary credit ($3,500 or $4,500) to trade in an older vehicle for a new, more fuel-efficient one. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) was responsible for administering the program, and GAO was required to review the program's administration. This report examines (1) what is known to date about the extent to which the CARS program achieved its objectives; (2) what stakeholders' experiences were with the CARS program; and (3) how the CARS program compares to other selected domestic and international vehicle retirement programs. To address these issues, GAO reviewed the CARS legislation and implementing regulations, a required NHTSA report to Congress on the program's efficacy, and CARS program transaction data. GAO also contacted officials from NHTSA and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); representatives of industry organizations and academics; as well as CARS program stakeholders, including representatives from consumer groups, scrap and salvage industries, automobile manufacturers, vehicle dealerships, and charities. GAO also interviewed officials from …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Currently, 437 civilian nuclear power reactors are operating in 29 countries, and 56 more are under construction. After the Chernobyl accident, representatives of over 50 nations, including the United States, participated in the development of the Convention on Nuclear Safety, a treaty that seeks to promote the safety of civilian nuclear power reactors. The Convention has been in force since 1996. GAO was asked to assess (1) parties' views on the benefits and limitations of the Convention, (2) efforts to improve implementation of the Convention, and (3) how International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) programs complement the Convention's safety goals. GAO surveyed the 64 parties to the Convention for which it was in force at the time of GAO's review and analyzed the responses of the 32 that completed it, analyzed relevant documents, and interviewed U.S. and foreign officials."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Veterans Benefits, Health Care, and Information Technology Act of 2006 (the 2006 Act) requires the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to give priority to veteranowned and service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses (VOSB and SDVOSB) when awarding contracts to small businesses. This testimony discusses preliminary views on (1) the extent to which VA met its prime contracting goals for SDVOSBs and VOSBs in fiscal years 2007-2009, and (2) VA's progress in implementing procedures to verify the ownership, control, and veteran status of firms in its mandated database. GAO obtained and analyzed data on VA's contracting activities, and reviewed a sample of verified businesses to assess VA's verification program."

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.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Letter from John Cornyn to Eleanor Brown congratulating her on receiving the Congressional Gold Medal and thanking her for her service as a WASP.

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.

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a special type of porous material with a number of unique properties, including exceptionally high surface areas, large internal pore volumes (void space) and tunable pore sizes. These materials are prepared through the assembly of molecular building blocks into ordered three-dimensional structures. The bulk properties of the MOF are determined by the nature of the building blocks and, as such, these materials can be designed with special characteristics that cannot be realized in other sorbent materials, like activated carbons. For example, MOFs can be constructed with binding sites or pockets that can exhibit selectivity for specific analytes. Alternatively, the framework can be engineered to undergo reversible dimensional changes (or 'breathing') upon interaction with an analyte, effectively trapping the molecule of interest in the lattice structure. In this report, we have surveyed the 4000 different MOF structures reported in the open literature and provided recommendations for specific MOF materials that should be investigated as sorbents for this project.

Algebraic multigrid (AMG) solvers have proven to be extremely efficient on distributed-memory architectures. However, when executed on modern multicore cluster architectures, we face new challenges that can significantly harm AMG's performance. We discuss our experiences on such an architecture and present a set of techniques that help users to overcome the associated problems, including thread and process pinning and correct memory associations. We have implemented most of the techniques in a MultiCore SUPport library (MCSup), which helps to map OpenMP applications to multicore machines. We present results using both an MPI-only and a hybrid MPI/OpenMP model.

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 Sludge Treatment Project (STP) is responsible for the disposition of sludge contained in the six engineered containers and Settler tank within the 105-K West (KW) Basin. The STP is retrieving and transferring sludge from the Settler tank into engineered container SCS-CON-230. Then, the STP will retrieve and transfer sludge from the six engineered containers in the KW Basin directly into a Sludge Transport and Storage Containers (STSC) contained in a Sludge Transport System (STS) cask. The STSC/STS cask will be transported to T Plant for interim storage of the STSC. The STS cask will be loaded with an empty STSC and returned to the KW Basin for loading of additional sludge for transportation and interim storage at T Plant. CH2MHILL Plateau Remediation Company (CHPRC) contracted with Fauske & Associates, LLC (FAI) to perform thermal and gas generation analyses for interim storage of STP sludge in the Sludge Transport and Storage Container (STSCs) at T Plant. The sludge types considered are settler sludge and sludge originating from the floor of the KW Basin and stored in containers 210 and 220, which are bounding compositions. The conditions specified by CHPRC for analysis are provided in Section 5. The FAI report (FAI/10-83, …

We study finite temperature properties of a generic spin-orbital model relevant to transition metal compounds, having coupled quantum Heisenberg-spin and Ising-orbital degrees of freedom. The model system undergoes a phase transition, consistent with that of a 2D Ising model, to an orbitally ordered state at a temperature set by short-range magnetic order. At low temperatures the orbital degrees of freedom freeze-out and the model maps onto a quantum Heisenberg model. The onset of orbital excitations causes a rapid scrambling of the spin spectral weight away from coherent spin-waves, which leads to a sharp increase in uniform magnetic susceptibility just below the phase transition, reminiscent of the observed behavior in the Fe-pnictide materials.

We have made an experimental study of the tunneling density of states (DOS) in strong ferromagnetic thin films (CoFe) in proximity with a thick superconducting film (Nb) as a function of d{sub F}, the ferromagnetic thickness. Remarkably, we find that as d{sub F} increases, the superconducting DOS exhibits a scaling behavior in which the deviations from the normal-state conductance have a universal shape that decreases exponentially in amplitude with characteristic length d* {approx} 0.4 nm. We do not see oscillations in the DOS as a function of d{sub F}, as expected from predictions based on the Usadel equations, although an oscillation in T{sub c}(d{sub F}) has been seen in the same materials.

We present the prospects for a future joint gamma-ray and radio survey of southern hemisphere sources using the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) and the upcoming Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope. ASKAP is a next generation radio telescope designed to perform surveys at GHz frequencies at a much higher survey speed than previous radio telescopes, and is scheduled to start engineering observations in 2011. The survey capabilities of both Fermi LAT and ASKAP are described, and the planned science surveys for ASKAP are summarized. We give some expected details of the Variable and Slow Transient (VAST) survey using ASKAP, which will search for transients on timescales from 5 seconds to years. Some observational properties of faint and transient sources seen at gamma-ray and radio wavelengths are summarized, and prospects and strategies for using ASKAP survey data for LAT source counterpart identification are summarized.

As discovered by Ohtomo et al., a large sheet charge density with high mobility exists at the interface between SrTiO{sub 3} and LaAlO{sub 3}. Based on transport, spectroscopic and oxygen-annealing experiments, we conclude that extrinsic defects in the form of oxygen vacancies introduced by the pulsed laser deposition process used by all researchers to date to make these samples is the source of the large carrier densities. Annealing experiments show a limiting carrier density. We also present a model that explains the high mobility based on carrier redistribution due to an increased dielectric constant.

We constrain the apex of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa unitarity triangle with measurements of B {yields} K*{pi} amplitudes from analyses of B{sup 0} {yields} K{sup +}{pi}{sup -}{pi}{sup 0} and B{sup 0} {yields} K{sub S}{pi}{sup +}{pi}{sup -} decays. This constraint is consistent with the world average. The B{sup 0} {yields} K{sup +}{pi}{sup -}{pi}{sup 0} decay mode is reconstructed from a sample of 454 million B{sup 0}{bar B}{sup 0} events collected by the BABAR detector at SLAC. We measure direct CP violation in B{sup 0} {yields} K*{sup +}{pi}{sup -} decays at the level of 3{sigma} when measurements from both B{sup 0} {yields} K{sup +}{pi}{sup -}{pi}{sup 0} and B{sup 0} {yields} K{sub S}{pi}{sup +}{pi}{sup -} decays are combined.

We explore the general phenomenology of resonant inelastic scattering (RIXS) using CuB{sub 2}O{sub 4}, a network of CuO{sub 4} plaquettes electronically isolated by B{sup +3} ions. Spectra show a small number of well-separated features, and we exploit the simple electronic structure to explore RIXS phenomenology by developing a calculation which allows for intermediate-state effects ignored in standard approaches. These effects are found to be non-negligible and good correspondence between our model and experiment leads to a simple picture of such phenomenology as the genesis of d {yields} d excitations at the K edge and intermediate-state interference effects.

Extra dimensions provide a very useful tool in addressing a number of the fundamental problems faced by the Standard Model. The following provides a very basic introduction to this very broad subject area as given at the VIII School of the Gravitational and Mathematical Physics Division of the Mexican Physical Society in December 2009. Some prospects for extra dimensional searches at the 7 TeV LHC with {approx}1 fb{sup -1} of integrated luminosity are provided.