A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Medicare claims are screened against enrollment information, using automated enrollment-related prepayment edits, in an effort to prevent improper payments to ineligible providers and suppliers—such as those that are no longer active in the Medicare program or are not properly licensed to provide the services for which they have submitted claims. Officials with the contractors we interviewed described the use of several types of prepayment edits to ensure that claims data are valid. For example, verification edits are intended to check the provider’s National Provider Identifier (NPI), which indicates whether the claim was submitted by an active provider or supplier. However, factors such as the frequency with which contractors have updated provider and supplier enrollment information and limitations of the data used may affect the timeliness and accuracy of data used to screen claims—in turn limiting the ability of the edits to prevent improper payments from occurring. For example, to update information maintained in the Provider Enrollment, Chain and Ownership System (PECOS)—CMS’s centralized database for Medicare enrollment information—the contractors have relied on a variety of data sources that vary in the frequency with which they are updated …

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

This report contains information and analysis intended to inform congressional debate over whether to address the unemployment and healthcare insurance, and if so, how, and to what extent.

Clouds of low energy electrons in the vacuum beam pipes of accelerators of positively charged particle beams present a serious limitation for operation of these machines at high currents. Because of the size of these accelerators, it is difficult to probe the low energy electron clouds over substantial lengths of the beam pipe. We have developed a novel technique to directly measure the electron cloud density via the phase shift induced in a TE wave that is independently excited and transmitted over a section of the accelerator. We infer the absolute phase shift with relatively high accuracy from the phase modulation of the transmission due to the modulation of the electron cloud density from a gap in the positively charged beam. We have used this technique for the first time to measure the average electron cloud density over a 50 m straight section in the positron ring of the PEP-II collider at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. We have also measured the variation of the density by using low field solenoid magnets to control the electrons.

We search for the Z{sub 1}(4050){sup +} and Z{sub 2}(4250){sup +} states, reported by the Belle Collaboration, decaying to {chi}{sub c1}{pi}{sup +} in the decays {bar B}{sup 0} {yields} {chi}{sub c1}K{sup -}{pi}{sup +} and B{sup +} {yields} {chi}{sub c1}K{sub S}{sup 0}{pi}{sup +} where {chi}{sub c1} {yields} J/{psi}{gamma}. The data were collected with the BABAR detector at the SLAC PEP-II asymmetric-energy e{sup +}e{sup -} collider operating at center-of-mass energy 10.58 GeV, and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 429 fb{sup -1}. In this analysis, we model the background-subtracted, efficiency-corrected {chi}{sub c1}{pi}{sup +} mass distribution using the K{pi} mass distribution and the corresponding normalized K{pi} Legendre polynomial moments, and then test the need for the inclusion of resonant structures in the description of the {chi}{sub c1}{pi}{sup +} mass distribution. No evidence is found for the Z{sub 1}(4050){sup +} and Z{sub 2}(4250){sup +} resonances, and 90% confidence level upper limits on the branching fractions are reported for the corresponding B-meson decay modes.

Detection and identification of gas species using tunable laser diode laser absorption spectroscopy has been performed using vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSEL). Two detection methods are compared: direct absorbance and wavelength modulation spectroscopy (WMS). In the first, the output of a DC-based laser is directly monitored to detect for any quench at the targeted specie wavelength. In the latter, the emission wavelength of the laser is modulated by applying a sinusoidal component on the drive current of frequency {omega}, and measuring the harmonics component (2{omega}) of the photo-detected current. This method shows a better sensitivity measured as signal to noise ratio, and is less susceptible to interference effects such as scattering or fouling. Gas detection was initially performed at room temperature and atmospheric conditions using VCSELs of emission wavelength 763 nm for oxygen and 1392 nm for water, scanning over a range of approximately 10 nm, sufficient to cover 5-10 gas specific absorption lines that enable identification and quantization of gas composition. The amplitude and frequency modulation parameters were optimized for each detected gas species, by performing two dimensional sweeps for both tuning current and either amplitude or frequency, respectively. We found that the highest detected signal is observed …

Using a sample of 122 million {Upsilon}(3S) decays collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II asymmetric energy collider at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, we measure the ratio R{sub {tau}{mu}} = BR({Upsilon}(1S) {yields} {tau}{sup +}{tau}{sup -})/BR({Upsilon}(1S) {yields} {mu}{sup +}{mu}{sup -}); the measurement is intended as a test of lepton universality and as a possible search for a light pseudoscalar Higgs boson in Next to Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM) scenarios. Such a boson could appear in a deviation of the ratio R{sub {tau}{mu}} from the Standard Model expectation, that is 1, except for small lepton mass corrections. The analysis exploits the decays {Upsilon}(3S) {yields} {Upsilon}(1S){pi}{sup +}{pi}{sup -}, {Upsilon}(1S) {yields} l{sup +}l{sup -}, where l = {mu},{tau}.

We report on the Dalitz plot analyses of B{sup -} {yields} D{sup +}{pi}{sup -}{pi}{sup -}, B{sup +} {yields} {pi}{sup +}{pi}{sup -}{pi}{sup +} and D{sub s}{sup +} {yields} {pi}{sup +}{pi}{sup -}{sup +}. The Dalitz plot method and the most recent BABAR results are discussed.

We apply the Matrix Element Method (MEM) to mass determination of squark pair production with direct decay to quarks and LSP at the LHC, showing that simultaneous mass determination of squarks and LSP is possible. We furthermore propose methods for inclusion of QCD radiation effects in the MEM. The goal of the LHC at CERN, scheduled to start this year, is to discover new physics through deviations from the Standard Model (SM) predictions. After discovery of deviations from the SM, the next step will be classification of the new physics. An important first goal in this process will be establishing a mass spectrum of the new particles. One of the most challenging scenarios is pair-production of new particles which decay to invisible massive particles, giving missing energy signals. Many methods have been proposed for mass determination in such scenarios (for a recent list of references, see e.g. [1]). In this proceeding, we report the first steps in applying the Matrix Element Method (MEM) in the context of supersymmetric scenarios giving missing energy signals. After a quick review of the MEM, we will focus on squark pair production, a process where other mass determination techniques have difficulties to simultaneously determine the …

The complexity of petascale and exascale machines makes it increasingly difficult to develop applications that can take advantage of them. Future systems are expected to feature billion-way parallelism, complex heterogeneous compute nodes and poor availability of memory (Peter Kogge, 2008). This new challenge for application development is motivating a significant amount of research and development on new programming models and runtime systems designed to simplify large-scale application development. Unfortunately, DoE has significant multi-decadal investment in a large family of mission-critical scientific applications. Scaling these applications to exascale machines will require a significant investment that will dwarf the costs of hardware procurement. A key reason for the difficulty in transitioning today's applications to exascale hardware is their reliance on explicit programming techniques, such as the Message Passing Interface (MPI) programming model to enable parallelism. MPI provides a portable and high performance message-passing system that enables scalable performance on a wide variety of platforms. However, it also forces developers to lock the details of parallelization together with application logic, making it very difficult to adapt the application to significant changes in the underlying system. Further, MPI's explicit interface makes it difficult to separate the application's synchronization and communication structure, reducing the amount …

After years of waiting, and after six Les Houches workshops, the era of LHC running is finally upon us, albeit at a lower initial center-of-mass energy than originally planned. Thus, there has been a great sense of anticipation from both the experimental and theoretical communities. The last two years, in particular, have seen great productivity in the area of multi-parton calculations at leading order (LO), next-to-leading order (NLO) and next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO), and this productivity is reflected in the proceedings of the NLM group. Both religions, Feynmanians and Unitarians, as well as agnostic experimenters, were well-represented in both the discussions at Les Houches, and in the contributions to the write-up. Next-to-leading order (NLO) is the first order at which the normalization, and in some cases the shape, of perturbative cross sections can be considered reliable. This can be especially true when probing extreme kinematic regions, as for example with boosted Higgs searches considered in several of the contributions to this writeup. A full understanding for both standard model and beyond the standard model physics at the LHC requires the development of fast, reliable programs for the calculation of multi-parton final states at NLO. There have been many advances in the …

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

None

This report provides an overview of the unlawful internet gambling enforcement act and its implementing regulations.

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

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

None

None

This report provides an overview of state security breach notification laws applicable to entities that collect, maintain, own, possess, or license personal information. It further discusses about Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA).

This report is on Ballast Water Management to Combat Invasive Species.

A new music concert performed at the UNT College of Music Voertman Hall.

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

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