Iraq's political transition from the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein to a plural polity that encompasses varying sects and ideological and political factions has been accomplished through a series of elections that began in 2005. However, disputes regarding various communities' claims on power and economic resources has contributed to popular frustration and continued political unrest. This report discusses these issues.

Throughout its history, Congress has engaged in oversight of the executive branch - the review, monitoring, and supervision of the implementation of public policy. The first several Congresses inaugurated such important oversight techniques as special investigations, reporting requirements, resolutions of inquiry, and use of the appropriations process to review executive activity. Contemporary developments, moreover, have increased the legislature's capacity and capabilities to check on and check the Executive. Public laws and congressional rules have measurably enhanced Congress's implied power under the Constitution to conduct oversight.

This document provides information on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) area, regional, and Watermaster office locations.

This report looks at the background of Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) in the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which was created by Congress. It then discusses how the 112th Congress is considering legislative action to extend the TAA - including two issues: how necessary or appropriate the extension is, and whether or not three proposed bills should be voted upon separately.

This report evaluates the purpose, membership, financing, and focus of the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) activities. It also discusses the role of Congress in shaping U.S. policy at the IMF and concludes by addressing key issues, both legislative and oversight-related, that Congress may wish to consider, including: the role of the IMF as a lender of last resort; the adequacy of IMF resources; and the effectiveness of IMF surveillance.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers attracts congressional attention because its projects can have significant local and regional economic benefits and environmental effects, in addition to their water resource development purposes. This report provides an overview of the Corps civil works program. It covers the congressional authorization and appropriation process, the standard project development process, and other Corps activities and authorities. It also includes an Appendix on the evolution of Corps civil works missions and authorities and a description of the limits on the Corps' role in levee accreditation and improvements for the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).

This report covers the legal causes and implications of Davis v. United States. The Supreme Court will consider whether evidence that was seized in violation of the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights is admissible at trial because the police seized the evidence in good-faith reliance on then-controlling case law.

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.

Bill introduced by the Texas House of Representatives relating to appointments made in and the appeal of certain suits affecting the parent-child relationship.

Bill introduced by the Texas House of Representatives relating to agreements between neighboring municipalities regarding jurisdiction of cases in municipal courts.

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This report examines the relationships between selected variables of economic strength and crime. It begins with an overview of crime rates during times of economic recession in the United States. It then reviews the existing literature in the field analyzing various data sets that examine whether the unemployment rate and foreclosures can be related to increases in the national crime rate.

This report looks at inadequacies present in the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) which prevent the Center from adequately performing its duty. These inadequacies include issues with agency organization, lack of resources, and a focus on threats from Yemen over domestic threats.

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This report looks at the history of Medicaid program as it relates to state flexibility in offering HCBS.

In a linear accelerator, it is important to achieve a good alignment between all of its components (such as quadrupoles, RF cavities, beam position monitors et al.), in order to better preserve the beam quality during acceleration. After the survey of the main linac components, there are several beam-based alignment (BBA) techniques to be applied, to further optimize the beam trajectory and calculate the corresponding steering magnets strength. Among these techniques the most simple and straightforward one is the one-to-one (1-to-1) steering technique, which steers the beam from quad center to center, and removes the betatron oscillation from quad focusing. For a future linear collider such as the International Linear Collider (ILC), the initial beam emittance is very small in the vertical plane (flat beam with {gamma}{epsilon}{sub y} = 20-40nm), which means the alignment requirement is very tight. In this note, we evaluate the emittance growth with one-to-one correction algorithm employed, both analytically and numerically. Then the ILC main linac accelerator is taken as an example to compare the vertical emittance growth after 1-to-1 steering, both from analytical formulae and multi-particle tracking simulation. It is demonstrated that the estimated emittance growth from the derived formulae agrees well with the results …

Alternative chicane-type beam lines are proposed for exact emittance exchange between horizontal phase space (x; x{prime}) and longitudinal phase space (z; {delta}). Methods to achieve exact phase space exchanges, i.e. mapping x to z, x{prime} to {delta}, z to x and {delta} to x{prime} are suggested. Methods to mitigate the thick-lens effect of the transverse cavity on emittance exchange are discussed. Some applications of the phase space exchanger and the feasibility of an emittance exchange experiment with the proposed chicane-type beam line at SLAC are discussed.

Recent advances in the understanding of reactivity trends for chemistry at transition metal surfaces have enabled in silico design of heterogeneous catalysts in a few cases. Current status of the field is discussed with an emphasis on the role of coupling between theory and experiment and future challenges.

The discovery and exploration of Supersymmetry in a model-independent fashion will be a daunting task due to the large number of soft-breaking parameters in the MSSM. In this paper, we explore the capability of the ATLAS detector at the LHC ({radical}s = 14 TeV, 1 fb{sup -1}) to find SUSY within the 19-dimensional pMSSM subspace of the MSSM using their standard transverse missing energy and long-lived particle searches that were essentially designed for mSUGRA. To this end, we employ a set of {approx} 71k previously generated model points in the 19-dimensional parameter space that satisfy all of the existing experimental and theoretical constraints. Employing ATLAS-generated SM backgrounds and following their approach in each of 11 missing energy analyses as closely as possible, we explore all of these 71k model points for a possible SUSY signal. To test our analysis procedure, we first verify that we faithfully reproduce the published ATLAS results for the signal distributions for their benchmark mSUGRA model points. We then show that, requiring all sparticle masses to lie below 1(3) TeV, almost all(two-thirds) of the pMSSM model points are discovered with a significance S > 5 in at least one of these 11 analyses assuming a 50% …

Photonic band gap (PBG) dielectric fibers with hollow cores are being studied both theoretically and experimentally for use as laser driven accelerator structures. The hollow core functions as both a longitudinal waveguide for the transverse-magnetic (TM) accelerating fields and a channel for the charged particles. The dielectric surrounding the core is permeated by a periodic array of smaller holes to confine the mode, forming a photonic crystal fiber in which modes exist in frequency pass-bands, separated by band gaps. The hollow core acts as a defect which breaks the crystal symmetry, and so-called defect, or trapped modes having frequencies in the band gap will only propagate near the defect. We describe the design of 2-D hollow-core PBG fibers to support TM defect modes with high longitudinal fields and high characteristic impedance. Using as-built dimensions of industrially-made fibers, we perform a simulation analysis of the first prototype PBG fibers specifically designed to support speed-of-light TM modes.

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HEATS Project: The University of Florida is developing a windowless high-temperature chemical reactor that converts concentrated solar thermal energy to syngas, which can be used to produce gasoline. The overarching project goal is lowering the cost of the solar thermochemical production of syngas for clean and synthetic hydrocarbon fuels like petroleum. The team will develop processes that rely on water and recycled CO2 as the sole feed-stock, and concentrated solar radiation as the sole energy source, to power the reactor to produce fuel efficiently. Successful large-scale deployment of this solar thermochemical fuel production could substantially improve our national and economic security by replacing imported oil with domestically produced solar fuels.

Battery testing procedures are important for understanding battery performance, including degradation over the life of the battery. Standards are important to provide clear rules and uniformity to an industry. The work described in this report addresses the need for standard battery testing procedures that reflect real-world applications of energy storage systems to provide regulation services to grid operators. This work was motivated by the need to develop Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) testing procedures, or V2G drive cycles. Likewise, the stationary energy storage community is equally interested in standardized testing protocols that reflect real-world grid applications for providing regulation services. As the first of several steps toward standardizing battery testing cycles, this work focused on a statistical analysis of frequency regulation signals from the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnect with the goal to identify patterns in the regulation signal that would be representative of the entire signal as a typical regulation data set. Results from an extensive time-series analysis are discussed, and the results are explained from both the statistical and the battery-testing perspectives. The results then are interpreted in the context of defining a small set of V2G drive cycles for standardization, offering some recommendations for the next steps toward standardizing testing protocols.

We provide an analytic formula for the (rescaled) one-loop scalar hexagon integral {tilde {Phi}}{sub 6} with all external legs massless, in terms of classical polylogarithms. We show that this integral is closely connected to two integrals appearing in one- and two-loop amplitudes in planar N = 4 super-Yang-Mills theory, {Omega}{sup (1)} and {Omega}{sup (2)}. The derivative of {Omega}{sup (2)} with respect to one of the conformal invariants yields {tilde {Phi}}{sub 6}, while another first-order differential operator applied to {tilde {Phi}}{sub 6} yields {Omega}{sup (1)}. We also introduce some kinematic variables that rationalize the arguments of the polylogarithms, making it easy to verify the latter differential equation. We also give a further example of a six-dimensional integral relevant for amplitudes in N = 4 super-Yang-Mills.