A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "With trillions of dollars in cross-border financial activity, U.S. tax authorities and others around the world exchange information with each other to administer and enforce compliance with the tax laws of their respective countries. GAO was asked to (1) identify and describe all income tax treaties and other such agreements between the United States and other countries, (2) describe the volume of exchange activity, types of information exchanged between the United States and its treaty partners, and request processing times, and (3) identify opportunities to improve the effectiveness of current U.S. information exchange processes and procedures. GAO analyzed agreement documents, IRS data on information exchanges, and interviewed program officials and the users of exchanged information."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Federal agencies spend over $50 billion annually on goods and services using interagency contracts, which leverage the government's buying power, simplify procuring commonly used goods and services, and allow agencies to use the contracts and expertise of other agencies. Agencies that operate interagency contracts and provide assisted acquisition services for other agencies recover their costs by charging a fee to their customers. In response to questions about fee rates and their composition, GAO assessed for selected interagency contracting programs (1) the current fee rates and trends in the fee rates, sales, costs, and revenues; (2) the extent to which programs subsidize, or are subsidized by, other programs; (3) the extent to which agencies identify, track, and forecast costs and revenues, manage reserves, and obtain approval for fee-rate changes; and (4) the extent to which agencies use contractor personnel to supplement program staffing. GAO analyzed data on six interagency contract programs at four agencies--General Services Administration (GSA), Department of the Interior (DOI), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and National Institutes of Health (NIH); reviewed agency policies; and interviewed officials from the agencies' program, policy, and financial …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In May 2011, we issued our opinion on the fiscal years 2010 and 2009 financial statements of the Congressional Award Foundation (the Foundation). We also reported on our evaluation of the Foundation's compliance with provisions of selected laws and regulations for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2010, and our consideration of the Foundation's internal control over financial reporting. [...] The purpose of this report is to present additional information on the internal control and accounting procedures issues we identified during our audit of the Foundation's fiscal years 2010 and 2009 financial statements and to provide our recommended actions to address those issues."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Energy Policy Act of 2005 was enacted in part to expedite domestic oil and gas development. Section 390 of the act authorized the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to use categorical exclusions to streamline the environmental analysis required under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) when approving certain oil and gas activities. Numerous questions have been raised about how and when BLM should use these section 390 categorical exclusions. In September 2009, GAO reported on BLM's first 3 years of experience-- fiscal years 2006 through 2008--using section 390 categorical exclusions. This testimony is based on GAO's September 2009 report (GAO-09-872) and updated with information on court decisions that have been reached since the report was issued. The testimony focuses on (1) the extent to which BLM used section 390 categorical exclusions and the benefits, if any, associated with their use; (2) the extent to which BLM complied with the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and agency guidance; (3) key concerns, if any, associated with section 390 categorical exclusions; and (4) how BLM has responded to GAO's recommendations and other recent developments. …

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

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 discusses the revolution and current conflict in Libya. The current crisis was triggered in mid-February 2011 by a chain of events in Benghazi and other eastern cities that quickly spiraled out of Qadhafi's control. Although Libyan opposition groups had called for a so-called "day of rage" on February 17 to commemorate protests that had occurred five years earlier, localized violence erupted prior to the planned national protests. As of April 25, U.S. and coalition officials stated that coalition military operations had destroyed the ability of the Libyan military to control Libyan airspace and had reduced the capability of Libyan ground forces by roughly 30%-40%.

This report looks at instances of trafficking in persons (TIP) in Latin America. It looks at current legislation in the U.S. to combat this problem.

This report provides background information and oversight issues for Congress on the Coast Guard's Deepwater acquisition programs for replacing and modernizing the service's aging fleet of deepwater-capable ships and aircraft. The Coast Guard's FY2012 budget appears to request $957.2 million in acquisition funding for Deepwater programs, including $271.6 million for aircraft, $512.0 million for surface ships and boats, and $173.6 million for other items. Congress's decisions on Deepwater acquisition programs could substantially affect Coast Guard capabilities and funding requirements, as well as contractors involved in these programs.

A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

Weekly newspaper from Dallas, Texas that includes local, state, and national news and advertising of interest to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community.

Current communications between the SLAC Linear Collider control system central host and the SLCmicros is built upon the SLAC developed SLCNET communication hardware and protocols. We will describe how the Internet Suite of protocols (TCP/IP) are used to replace the SLCNET protocol interface. The major communication pathways and their individual requirements are described. A proxy server is used to reduce the number of total system TCP/IP connections. The SLCmicros were upgraded to use Ethernet and TCP/IP as well as SLCNET. Design choices and implementation experiences are addressed.

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a next generation optical survey aimed at understanding the expansion rate of the Universe using four complementary methods: weak gravitational lensing, galaxy cluster counts, baryon acoustic oscillations, and Type Ia supernovae. To perform the survey, the DES Collaboration is building the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), a 3 square degree, 570 Megapixel CCD camera that will be mounted at the prime focus of the Blanco 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. CCD production has finished, yielding roughly twice the required 62 2k x 4k detectors. The construction of DECam is nearly finished. Integration and commissioning on a 'telescope simulator' of the major hardware and software components, except for the optics, recently concluded at Fermilab. Final assembly of the optical corrector has started at University College, London. Some components have already been received at CTIO. 'First-light' will be sometime in 2012. This oral presentation concentrates on the technical challenges involved in building DECam (and how we overcame them), and the present status of the instrument.

The symmetrized 1.6 cell S-band photocathode gun developed by the BNL/SLAC/UCLA collaboration is in operation at the Brookhaven Accelerator Test Facility (ATF). A novel emittance compensation solenoid magnet has also been designed, built and is in operation at the ATF. These two subsystems form an emittance compensated photoinjector used for beam dynamics, advanced acceleration and free electron laser experiments at the ATF. The highest acceleration field achieved on the copper cathode is 150 MV/m, and the guns normal operating field is 130 MV/m. The maximum rf pulse length is 3 {mu}s. The transverse emittance of the photoelectron beam were measured for various injection parameters. The 1 nC emittance results are presented along with electron bunch length measurements that indicated that at above the 400 pC, space charge bunch lengthening is occurring. The thermal emittance, {epsilon}{sub o}, of the copper cathode has been measured.

The PEP-II control system required a new network to support the system functions. This network, called CTLnet, is an FDDI/Ethernet based network using only TCP/IP protocols. An upgrade of the SLC Control System micro communications to use TCP/IP and SLCNET would allow all PEP-II control system nodes to use TCP/IP. CTLnet is private and separate from the SLAC public network. Access to nodes and control system functions is provided by multi-homed application servers with connections to both the private CTLnet and the SLAC public network. Monitoring and diagnostics are provided using a dedicated system. Future plans and current status information is included.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Insertion devices for Angstrom-wavelength Free Electron Laser (FEL) amplifiers driven by multi-GeV electron beams generally require distributed focusing substantially stronger than their own natural focusing fields. Over the last several years a wide variety of focusing schemes and configurations have been proposed for undulators of this class, ranging from conventional current-driven quadrupoles external to the undulator magnets to permanent magnet (PM) lattices inserted into the insertion device gap. In this paper we present design studies of a flexible high-field hybrid/PM undulator with strong superimposed planar PM focusing proposed for a 1.5 Angstrom Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) driven by an electron beam with a 1 mm-mr normalized emittance. Attainable field parameters, tuning modes, and potential applications of the proposed structure are discussed.

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.

As computing power increases exponentially, vast amount of data is created by many scientific re- search activities. However, the bandwidth for storing the data to disks and reading the data from disks has been improving at a much slower pace. These two trends produce an ever-widening data access gap. Our work brings together two distinct technologies to address this data access issue: indexing and in situ processing. From decades of database research literature, we know that indexing is an effective way to address the data access issue, particularly for accessing relatively small fraction of data records. As data sets increase in sizes, more and more analysts need to use selective data access, which makes indexing an even more important for improving data access. The challenge is that most implementations of in- dexing technology are embedded in large database management systems (DBMS), but most scientific datasets are not managed by any DBMS. In this work, we choose to include indexes with the scientific data instead of requiring the data to be loaded into a DBMS. We use compressed bitmap indexes from the FastBit software which are known to be highly effective for query-intensive workloads common to scientific data analysis. To use …

A transverse geometrical wake generated by a beam passing through a smooth flat collimator with a gradually varying gap between the upper and lower walls is considered. Based on generalization of the approach recently developed for a smooth circular taper we reduce the electromagnetic problem of the impedance calculation to the solution of two much simpler static problems - a magnetostatic and an electrostatic ones. The solution shows that in the limit of not very large frequencies, the impedance increases with the ratio h/d where h is the width and d is the distance between the collimating jaws. Numerical results are presented for the NLC Post Linac collimator.

A nonlinear equation is derived that governs the evolution of the amplitude of unstable oscillations with account of quantum diffusion effects due to the synchrotron radiation. Numerical solutions to this equation predict a variety of possible scenarios of nonlinear evolution of the instability some of which are in good qualitative agreement with experimental observations. Microwave single bunch instability in circular accelerators has been observed in many machines. The instability usually arises when the number of particles in the bunch exceeds some critical value, Nc, which varies depending on the parameters of the accelerating regime. Recent observations on the SLC damping rings at SLAC with a new low-impedance vacuum chamber revealed new interesting features of the instability. In some cases, after initial exponential growth, the instability eventually saturated at a level that remained constant through the accumulation cycle. In other regimes, relaxation-type oscillations were measured in nonlinear phase of the instability. In many cases, the instability was characterized by a frequency close to the second harmonic of the synchrotron oscillations. Several attempts have been made to address the nonlinear stage of the instability based on either computer simulations or some specific assumptions regarding the structure of the unstable mode. An attempt …

The DOE funds helped support an International Conference, Calix 2007, whose focus was on Supramolecular Chemistry. The conference was held at the University of Maryland from August 6-9, 2007 (Figure 1). The conference website is at www.chem.umd.edu/Conferences/Calix2007. This biannual conference had previously been held in the Czech Republic (2005), Canada (2003), Netherlands (2001), Australia (1999), Italy (1997), USA (Fort Worth, 1995) Japan (1993) and Germany (1991). Calixarenes are cup-shaped compounds that are a major part of Supramolecular Chemistry, for which Cram, Lehn and Pederson were awarded a Nobel Prize 20 years ago. Calixarene chemistry has expanded greatly in the last 2 decades, as these compounds are used in synthetic and mechanistic chemistry, separations science, materials science, nanoscience and biological chemistry. The organizing committee was quite happy that Calix 2007 encompassed the broad scope and interdisciplinary nature of the field. Our goal was to bring together leading scientists interested in calixarenes, molecular recognition, nanoscience and supramolecular chemistry. We believe that new research directions and collaborations resulted from an exchange of ideas between conferees. This grant from the DOE was crucial toward achieving that goal, as the funds helped cover some of the registration and accommodations costs for the speakers.