Network methods for project selection based on optimizing environmental impact (open access)

Network methods for project selection based on optimizing environmental impact

"Traditionally, transportation road networks have been designed for minimal congestion. Unfortunately, such approaches do not guarantee minimal vehicle emissions. Given the negative impacts of vehicle pollutants as well as tighter national air quality standards, it is critical for regions to be able to identify capacity modifications to road networks such that vehicle emission are minimal. This ability combined with land use changes and opportunities for non-auto travel are paramount in helping regions improve air quality."
Date: August 2010
Creator: Duthie, Jennifer Clare; Waller, S. Travis & Ferguson, Erin M.
Object Type: Report
System: The Portal to Texas History
A comprehensive examination of heavy vehicle emissions factors (open access)

A comprehensive examination of heavy vehicle emissions factors

"This report summarized the findings from reviewing the literature on several topics that are related to heavy vehicle emissions including engine and fuel types, vehicle technologies that can be used to reduce or mitigate vehicle emission, the factors that affect vehicle emission, vehicle emissions modeling, and current and future policy requiring accurate accounting of heavy vehicle emission."
Date: August 2010
Creator: Thompson, Melissa Renee; Unnikrishnan, Avinash; Conway, Alison J. & Walton, C. Michael
Object Type: Report
System: The Portal to Texas History
A Road Pricing Methodology for Infrastructure Cost Recovery (open access)

A Road Pricing Methodology for Infrastructure Cost Recovery

"The purpose of this research is to provide a theoretical framework for future commercial vehicle user-charging using real-time vehicle weight and configuration information collected using weigh-in-motion systems" (p. i).
Date: August 2010
Creator: Walton, C. Michael & Conway, Alison J.
Object Type: Report
System: The Portal to Texas History
Predicting the Incremental Effects on Transit Ridership Due to Bus-on-Shoulder Operations (open access)

Predicting the Incremental Effects on Transit Ridership Due to Bus-on-Shoulder Operations

Report exploring how the residents of Austin, Texas would respond to a Bus-on-Shoulder operation on local freeways, which allows buses to use the freeway shoulder as a passing lane.
Date: August 2010
Creator: Machemehl, Randy B. & Pappas, Elani
Object Type: Report
System: The Portal to Texas History
Texas Attorney General Opinion: GA-0789 (open access)

Texas Attorney General Opinion: GA-0789

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a county’s disclosure on its website of driver’s license photographs received from the Department of Public Safety would violate the Motor Vehicle Records Disclosure Act of the federal Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (RQ-0799-GA)
Date: August 23, 2010
Creator: Texas. Attorney-General's Office.
Object Type: Text
System: The Portal to Texas History
Texas Attorney General Opinion: GA-0790 (open access)

Texas Attorney General Opinion: GA-0790

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Combining real property and improvements on one parcel identification number or taxpayer account for appraisal district record purposes (RQ-0827-GA)
Date: August 23, 2010
Creator: Texas. Attorney-General's Office.
Object Type: Text
System: The Portal to Texas History
Texas Attorney General Opinion: GA-0791 (open access)

Texas Attorney General Opinion: GA-0791

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Use ad management of a county jail commissary fund under Local Government Code section 351.0415 (RQ-0841-GA)
Date: August 23, 2010
Creator: Texas. Attorney-General's Office.
Object Type: Text
System: The Portal to Texas History
Texas Attorney General Opinion: GA-0792 (open access)

Texas Attorney General Opinion: GA-0792

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Status of particular tracts of land annexed into one groundwater conservation district and subsequently included in special legislation creating a different district (RQ-0817-GA)
Date: August 26, 2010
Creator: Texas. Attorney-General's Office.
Object Type: Text
System: The Portal to Texas History
Texas Attorney General Opinion: GA-0793 (open access)

Texas Attorney General Opinion: GA-0793

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a school district may access and use a county’s right-of-way to install fiber optic cable (RQ-0818-GA)
Date: August 26, 2010
Creator: Texas. Attorney-General's Office.
Object Type: Text
System: The Portal to Texas History
Texas Attorney General Opinion: GA-0794 (open access)

Texas Attorney General Opinion: GA-0794

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether section 11.1513 of the Education Code prohibits a school superintendent tow home final selection of personnel is delegated from employing persons related to trustees of his district (RQ-0842-GA)
Date: August 26, 2010
Creator: Texas. Attorney-General's Office.
Object Type: Text
System: The Portal to Texas History
Texas Attorney General Opinion: GA-0795 (open access)

Texas Attorney General Opinion: GA-0795

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Jurisdiction over land that is annexed by two separate special district (RQ-0812-GA)
Date: August 27, 2010
Creator: Texas. Attorney-General's Office.
Object Type: Text
System: The Portal to Texas History
Pesticide Registration and Tolerance Fees: An Overview (open access)

Pesticide Registration and Tolerance Fees: An Overview

None
Date: August 11, 2010
Creator: unknown
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Medicare Physician Payment Updates and the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) System (open access)

Medicare Physician Payment Updates and the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) System

None
Date: August 6, 2010
Creator: unknown
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Renewable Energy Programs in the 2008 Farm Bill (open access)

Renewable Energy Programs in the 2008 Farm Bill

This report discuses the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 (P.L. 110-246, the 2008 farm bill) that extends and expands many of the renewable energy programs originally authorized in the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002.
Date: August 13, 2010
Creator: Stubbs, Megan
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Administration’s Proposal to Reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act: Comparison to Current Law (open access)

Administration’s Proposal to Reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act: Comparison to Current Law

This report discusses the challenges and consequences of reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Moreover, the report outlines the Department of Education's (ED) ideas for reform in the reauthorization. Finally, the reforms are compared to the current policy the ESEA possesses.
Date: August 3, 2010
Creator: Skinner, Rebecca R.; Lomax, Erin D.; Dortch, Cassandria; Kuenzi, Jeffrey J. & McCallion, Gail
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Form 1099 Information Reporting Requirements as Modified by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (open access)

Form 1099 Information Reporting Requirements as Modified by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

This report discusses the modifications to IRC § 6041 made by § 9006 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and briefly discusses the penalties that can be imposed on persons that do not comply with these information reporting requirements.
Date: August 6, 2010
Creator: Pettit, Carol A. & Liu, Edward C.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Immigration of Foreign Workers: Labor Market Tests and Protections (open access)

Immigration of Foreign Workers: Labor Market Tests and Protections

This report discusses §1611, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which requires companies receiving Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funding to comply with the more rigorous labor market rules of H-1B dependent companies if they hire foreign workers on H-1B visas.
Date: August 27, 2010
Creator: Wasem, Ruth Ellen
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Intelligence Issues for Congress (open access)

Intelligence Issues for Congress

This report discusses the efforts currently underway to improve coordination and encourage better analysis amongst the various agencies within the U.S. Intelligence Community, especially with regard to the ongoing and prominent issue of international terrorism. In particular, this report addresses the false intelligence regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the current efforts in Iraq and Iran in general.
Date: August 6, 2010
Creator: Best, Richard A., Jr.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Health Care Fraud and Abuse Laws Affecting Medicare and Medicaid: An Overview (open access)

Health Care Fraud and Abuse Laws Affecting Medicare and Medicaid: An Overview

This report provides an overview of some of the more commonly used statutes used to fight health care fraud and abuse and discusses some of the changes made to these statutes by PPACA.
Date: August 10, 2010
Creator: Staman, Jennifer
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act: Regulations to be Issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (open access)

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act: Regulations to be Issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

None
Date: August 25, 2010
Creator: Copeland, Curtis W.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
PRIDE Surveillance Projects Data Packaging Project Information Package Specification Version 1.1 (open access)

PRIDE Surveillance Projects Data Packaging Project Information Package Specification Version 1.1

Information Package Specification version 1.1 describes an XML document format called an information package that can be used to store information in information management systems and other information archives. An information package consists of package information, the context required to understand and use that information, package metadata that describes the information, and XML signatures that protect the information. The information package described in this specification was designed to store Department of Energy (DOE) and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) information and includes the metadata required for that information: a unique package identifier, information marking that conforms to DOE and NNSA requirements, and access control metadata. It is an implementation of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model archival information package tailored to meet NNSA information storage requirements and designed to be used in the computing environments at the Y-12 National Security Complex and at other NNSA sites.
Date: August 31, 2010
Creator: Kelleher, D. M.; Shipp, R. L. & Mason, J. D.
Object Type: Report
System: The UNT Digital Library
Modified magnetic ground state in NiMn2O4 thin films (open access)

Modified magnetic ground state in NiMn2O4 thin films

We demonstrate the stabilization of a magnetic ground state in epitaxial NiMn2O4 (NMO) thin films not observed in their bulk counterpart. Bulk NMO exhibits a magnetic transition from a paramagnetic phase to a collinear ferrimagnetic moment configuration below 110 K and to a canted moment configuration below 70 K. By contrast, as-grown NMO films exhibit a single magnetic transition at 60 K and annealed films exhibit the magnetic behavior found in bulk. Cation inversion and epitaxial strain are ruled out as possible causes for the new magnetic ground state in the as-grown films. However, a decrease in the octahedral Mn{sup 4+}:Mn{sup 3+} concentration is observed and likely disrupts the double exchange that produces the magnetic state at intermediate temperatures. X-ray magnetic circular dichroism and bulk magnetometry indicate a canted ferrimagnetic state in all samples at low temperature. Together these results suggest that the collinear ferrimagnetic state observed in bulk NMO at intermediate temperatures is suppressed in the as grown NMO thin films due to a decrease in octahedral Mn{sup 4+} while the canted moment ferrimagnetic ordering is preserved below 60 K.
Date: August 3, 2010
Creator: Nelson-Cheeseman, B. B.; Chopdekar, R. V.; Toney, M. F.; Arenholz, E.; Suzuki, Y. & Iwata, J.M.
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library
Electronic structure and spectroscopy of nucleic acid bases: Ionization energies, ionization-induced structural changes, and photoelectron spectra (open access)

Electronic structure and spectroscopy of nucleic acid bases: Ionization energies, ionization-induced structural changes, and photoelectron spectra

We report high-level ab initio calculations and single-photon ionization mass spectrometry study of ionization of adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C) and guanine (G). For thymine and adenine, only the lowest-energy tautomers were considered, whereas for cytosine and guanine we characterized five lowest-energy tautomeric forms. The first adiabatic and several vertical ionization energies were computed using equation-of-motion coupled-cluster method for ionization potentials with single and double substitutions. Equilibrium structures of the cationic ground states were characterized by DFT with the {omega}B97X-D functional. The ionization-induced geometry changes of the bases are consistent with the shapes of the corresponding molecular orbitals. For the lowest-energy tautomers, the magnitude of the structural relaxation decreases in the following series G > C > A > T, the respective relaxation energies being 0.41, 0.32, 0.25 and 0.20 eV. The computed adiabatic ionization energies (8.13, 8.89, 8.51-8.67 and 7.75-7.87 eV for A,T,C and G, respectively) agree well with the onsets of the photoionization efficiency (PIE) curves (8.20 {+-} 0.05, 8.95 {+-} 0.05, 8.60 {+-} 0.05 and 7.75 {+-} 0.05 eV). Vibrational progressions for the S{sub 0}-D{sub 0} vibronic bands computed within double-harmonic approximation with Duschinsky rotations are compared with previously reported experimental photoelectron spectra.
Date: August 2, 2010
Creator: Bravaya, Ksenia B.; Kostko, Oleg; Dolgikh, Stanislav; Landau, Arie; Ahmed, Musahid & Krylov, Anna I.
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library
Sensor Configuration Selection for Discrete-Event Systems under Unreliable Observations (open access)

Sensor Configuration Selection for Discrete-Event Systems under Unreliable Observations

Algorithms for counting the occurrences of special events in the framework of partially-observed discrete event dynamical systems (DEDS) were developed in previous work. Their performances typically become better as the sensors providing the observations become more costly or increase in number. This paper addresses the problem of finding a sensor configuration that achieves an optimal balance between cost and the performance of the special event counting algorithm, while satisfying given observability requirements and constraints. Since this problem is generally computational hard in the framework considered, a sensor optimization algorithm is developed using two greedy heuristics, one myopic and the other based on projected performances of candidate sensors. The two heuristics are sequentially executed in order to find best sensor configurations. The developed algorithm is then applied to a sensor optimization problem for a multiunit- operation system. Results show that improved sensor configurations can be found that may significantly reduce the sensor configuration cost but still yield acceptable performance for counting the occurrences of special events.
Date: August 1, 2010
Creator: Lin, Wen-Chiao; Yoo, Tae-Sic & Garcia, Humberto E.
Object Type: Article
System: The UNT Digital Library