Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Homeownership counseling can help consumers learn about buying a home and give them tools to deal with setbacks that could keep them from making timely mortgage payments. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) approves and provides grants to housing counseling agencies and has also implemented a requirement that borrowers seeking federally insured reverse mortgages through the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) program receive counseling before taking out a HECM. The U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) has also implemented a counseling requirement as part of its mortgage modification efforts under the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). This statement discusses (1) what research suggests about the effectiveness of homeownership counseling and the challenges of conducting such research, (2) shortcomings that prior GAO work found in federal agencies' implementation of homeownership counseling requirements, and (3) the status of efforts to establish an Office of Housing Counseling within HUD. In preparing this statement, GAO relied on its past work on homeownership counseling, including a review of research and interviews with federal agency staff on implementing and evaluating counseling programs."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "After supporting a Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) acquisition strategy that called for a competitive engine development of the F135 and F136 engines, the Department of Defense (DOD) stopped requesting funding for the F136 alternate engine in its fiscal year 2007 budget request, but the Congress continued to fund it through the 2010 budget. In February 2010, DOD projected that it would cost an additional $2.9 billion through 2016 to support an alternate engine program. DOD decided that an engine competition would not likely generate enough long-term savings to justify this up-front investment and subsequently terminated the alternate engine program. In 2010, at congressional request, we reviewed the basis for DOD's $2.9 billion funding projection and reported that the projection did not include the same level of fidelity and precision normally associated with a detailed, comprehensive cost estimate and that the amount of up-front investment needed could be lower if two key assumptions in DOD's analysis were changed. Moreover, since DOD's projection and our last review, several fundamental changes in the JSF aircraft and engine programs have taken place. We examined the potential implications of these changes to the …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Globalization has placed increasing demands on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in ensuring the safety and effectiveness of drugs marketed in the United States. The pharmaceutical industry has increasingly relied on global supply chains in which each manufacturing step may be outsourced to foreign establishments. As part of its efforts, FDA may conduct inspections of foreign drug manufacturing establishments, but there are concerns that the complexity of the drug manufacturing supply chain and the volume of imported drugs has created regulatory challenges for FDA. FDA has begun taking steps to address some of these concerns, such as the establishment of overseas offices. This statement discusses (1) FDA's inspection of foreign drug manufacturing establishments, (2) the information FDA has on these establishments, and (3) recent FDA initiatives to improve its oversight of the supply chain. The statement presents findings based primarily on GAO reports since 2008 related to FDA's oversight of the supply chain. These reports include Food and Drug Administration: Overseas Offices Have Taken Steps to Help Ensure Import Safety, but More Long-Term Planning Is Needed (GAO-10-960, Sept. 30, 2010) and Drug Safety: FDA Has Conducted More …

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Bi-weekly student newspaper from Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

This report gives an overview of current intelligence issues of interest to the 112th Congress. It includes background and analysis including most recent development, ongoing Congressional concerns, specific issues for the 112th Congress, and a summary of related legislation from the 109th through the 112th Congresses.

Weekly newspaper from Rusk, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with extensive advertising.

Weekly student newspaper from Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, Texas that includes campus and local news along with advertising.

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 chapter 603, Texas Government Code, is applicable to notaries public (RQ-0968-GA)

Interest in capturing the energy of the sun is rising as demands for renewable energy sources increase. One area of developing research is the use of concentrating solar power (CSP), where the solar energy is concentrated by using mirrors to direct the sunlight towards a collector filled with a heat transfer fluid (HTF). The HTF transfers the collected energy into pressurized steam, which is used to generate energy. The greater the energy collected by the HTF, the more efficent the electrical energy production is, thus the overall efficiency is controlled by the thermal fluid. Commercial HTFs such as Therminol{reg_sign} (VP-1), which is a blend of biphenyl and diphenyl oxide, have a significant vapor pressure, especially at elevated temperatures. In order for these volatile compounds to be used in CSP systems, the system either has to be engineered to prevent the phase change (i.e., volatilization and condensation) through pressurization of the system, or operate across the phase change. Over thirty years ago, a class of low-melting organic compounds were developed with negligible vapor pressure. These compounds are referred to as ionic liquids (ILs), which are organic-based compounds with discrete charges that cause a significant decrease in their vapor pressure. As a …

This paper describes the mechanical design of the primary mirror that images the visible portion of the synchrotron radiation (SR) extracted from the High Energy Ring (HER) of the PEP-II B-Factory. During off-axis operation, the water-cooled GlidCop mirror is subjected to a heat flux in excess of 2000 W/cm2. When on-axis imaging occurs, the heat flux due to scattered SR, resistive wall losses and Higher-Order-Mode (HOM) heating is estimated at 1 W/cm2. The imaging surface is plated with Electroless Nickel to improve its optical characteristics. The design requirements for the primary mirror are listed and discussed. Calculated mechanical distortions and stresses experienced by the mirror during on-axis and off-axis operation will be presented.

The event-by-event fission model FREYA is extended to spontaneous fission of actinides and a variety of neutron observables are studied for spontaneous fission and fission induced by thermal neutrons with a view towards possible applications for SNM detection. We have shown that event-by-event models of fission, such as FREYA, provide a powerful tool for studying fission neutron correlations. Our results demonstrate that these correlations are significant and exhibit a dependence on the fissioning nucleus. Since our method is phenomenological in nature, good input data are especially important. Some of the measurements employed in FREYA are rather old and statistics limited. It would be useful to repeat some of these studies with modern detector techniques. In addition, most experiments made to date have not made simultaneous measurements of the fission products and the prompt observables, such as neutron and photons. Such data, while obviously more challenging to obtain, would be valuable for achieving a more complete understanding of the fission process.

For long term stability analysis time variation of tunes is important. We have proposed and tested a technique for measuring the magnitude of this variation. This was made possible by using tune extraction algorithms that require small number of turns thus giving an instantaneous tune of the machine. In this paper we demonstrate the measured effect of the tune modulation with 60 Hz power supplies ripple, power line interference from SLAC linac operating at 30 Hz repetition rate, and nonperiodic variation.

Hierarchically semiseparable (HSS) matrix algorithms are emerging techniques in constructing the superfast direct solvers for both dense and sparse linear systems. Here, we develope a set of novel parallel algorithms for the key HSS operations that are used for solving large linear systems. These include the parallel rank-revealing QR factorization, the HSS constructions with hierarchical compression, the ULV HSS factorization, and the HSS solutions. The HSS tree based parallelism is fully exploited at the coarse level. The BLACS and ScaLAPACK libraries are used to facilitate the parallel dense kernel operations at the #12;ne-grained level. We have appplied our new parallel HSS-embedded multifrontal solver to the anisotropic Helmholtz equations for seismic imaging, and were able to solve a linear system with 6.4 billion unknowns using 4096 processors, in about 20 minutes. The classical multifrontal solver simply failed due to high demand of memory. To our knowledge, this is the #12;first successful demonstration of employing the HSS algorithms in solving the truly large-scale real-world problems. Our parallel strategies can be easily adapted to the parallelization of the other rank structured methods.

In the context of preserving the polarization of proton beams, the source of vertical dispersion in RHIC is analyzed. Contributions to dispersion from non-coupling sources and coupling sources are compared. Based on the analysis of sources for dispersion, the right actuator for correcting dispersion is determined and a corresponding algorithm is developed.

Recent results from the BaBar Collaboration in the sector of B decays to open Charm are presented. Some of the results represent new precision measurements and QCD tests, some other analysis is aimed to the study of rare decays and search for new physics. Branching fractions for the modes observed for the first time are highlighted. A few results are presented also in the baryon sector.

This final report describes work conducted for the Department of Energy (DOE NETL) on development of a novel polymer membrane process for pre-combustion CO{sub 2} capture from coalfired syngas (award number DE-FE0001124). The work was conducted by Membrane Technology and Research, Inc. (MTR) from September 15, 2009, through December 14, 2011. Tetramer Technologies, LLC (Tetramer) was our subcontract partner on this project. The National Carbon Capture Center (NCCC) at Wilsonville, AL, provided access to syngas gasifier test facilities. The main objective of this project was to develop a cost-effective membrane process that could be used in the relatively near-term to capture CO{sub 2} from shifted syngas generated by a coal-fired Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) power plant. In this project, novel polymeric membranes (designated as Proteus™ membranes) with separation properties superior to conventional polymeric membranes were developed. Hydrogen permeance of up to 800 gpu and H{sub 2}/CO{sub 2} selectivity of >12 was achieved using a simulated syngas mixture at 150°C and 50 psig, which exceeds the original project targets of 200 gpu for hydrogen permeance and 10 for H{sub 2}/CO{sub 2} selectivity. Lab-scale Proteus membrane modules (with a membrane area of 0.13 m{sup 2}) were also developed using scaled-up Proteus …

Email from Evans Harris to other Dallas Way members discussing a survey for a project on LGBT history.

Weekly newspaper from Cuero, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with advertising.

Part two of an interview with Dr. James Oliver Griffin, who was a school administrator during integration. Griffin discusses his involvement with desegregating Hamilton Park, the school he was principal of.

Daily newspaper from Sweetwater, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Daily student newspaper from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas that includes local, state, and campus news along with advertising.

This report discusses trade and economic relationship between the United States and Canada, which conduct the world’s largest bilateral trade relationship.

The overmoded rf transmission and pulsed power compression system for SLAC's Next Linear Collider (NLC) program requires a high degree of transmission efficiency and mode purity to be economically feasible. To this end, a number of new, high power components and systems have been developed at X-band, which transmit rf power in the low loss, circular TE01 mode with negligible mode conversion. In addition, a highly efficient SLED-II* pulse compressor has been developed and successfully tested at high power. The system produced a 200 MW, 250 ns wide pulse with a near-perfect flat-top. In this paper we describe the design and test results of the high power pulse compression system using SLED-II. The NLC rf systems use low loss highly over-moded circular waveguides operating in the TE01 mode. The efficiency of the systems is sensitive to the mode purity of the mode excited inside these guides. We used the so called flower petal mode transducer [2] to excite the TE01 mode. This type of mode transducer is efficient, compact and capable of handling high levels of power. To make more efficient systems, we modified this device by adding several mode selective chokes to act as mode purifiers. To manipulate the …