Report that provides information on the levels of deficit reduction if the Budget Control Act's (BCA) automatic cuts are implemented as under current law and contrasts that with the alternative proposals offered by some Members of Congress and President Obama. It also discusses specific determinations made by the Office of Management and Budget regarding the exempt/non-exempt status of certain programs, as well as a discussion of information to be disclosed regarding the FY2013 BCA sequester impact.

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Through its policy and guidance, VHA has outlined processes that enable VAMCs to respond to reported adverse events that occur. VHA generally grants individual VAMCs discretion on choosing which process to use. Specifically, VAMCs conduct an initial review to determine how best to respond to an adverse event. According to VHA officials, if the circumstances that led to an adverse event are clear, based on a VAMC's initial review, VAMCs can take immediate corrective action. If the circumstances that led to an adverse event need to be examined further, VAMCs are given discretion to use one or more of the following four processes: (1) root cause analysis, (2) peer review, (3) clinical care review, and (4) administrative investigation board. Because VAMCs generally have discretion in which of these processes they use, different VAMCs that experience similar adverse events may not use the same processes to respond to them. Nonetheless, each process has certain purposes and limitations. For example, some of these processes may be used to examine a clinician's actions as they relate to an adverse event, while others may be used to examine whether a systems or …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The cost effectiveness of the alternative training approach depends on several cost elements that are currently unknown, such as the up-front costs to develop the new controller training curriculum for CTI schools and the duration of the new orientation session at the Academy. However, some direct cost savings to FAA are possible and may be realized under the alternative training approach. These savings include avoiding the cost of pay (salary and per diem) for Academy trainees and not incurring the cost of providing Academy courses for each assigned air traffic control specialization. However, any cost savings could be offset by a number of additional costs that FAA could incur related to the alternative training approach; because some of these costs are unknown at this time, it is unclear whether the alternative approach would be more cost effective. These additional costs would depend primarily on how FAA implements the new training. Also unknown are recurring costs for any additional evaluations FAA would have to undertake to check the accreditation status of CTI schools and to assess graduates' proficiency in the initial specialization coursework. The cost of the mandate's proposed …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 2005, the most recent year for which complete data were available, occupants of older manufactured homes paid over twice as much on average per square foot for energy---$1.75 per square foot as compared with $0.87---as was paid by occupants of detached homes. Annual energy expenditures for older manufactured homes--about 906 square feet on average--were about $1,369, compared with detached homes--about 2,919 square feet on average--were about $2,060. Energy expenditures--both per square foot and annually--varied significantly by region reflecting regional differences in the types and costs of fuels commonly used to heat and cool homes, income levels, and climate, among other things. In 2005, LIHEAP provided more assistance on a per square foot basis--about $0.33 per square foot--to occupants of older manufactured homes than to those of detached homes--about $0.20 per square foot. However, this assistance covers slightly less of the annual energy expenditures of occupants of older manufactured homes than occupants of detached homes--15 and 17 percent, respectively. Based on our analysis of EIA's RECS data, we estimate that about 3 percent of LIHEAP funds--about $57 million--spent in 2005 were used to assist occupants of older manufactured …

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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.

When is a dark matter halo 'relaxed'? In our efforts to understand the structure of the universe, dark matter simulations have provided essential grounds for theoretical predictions. These simulations provide a wealth of ways of parameterizing and measuring the features of astronomical objects. It is these measurements on which we base comparisons of our world and our attempts to re-create it. One of the essential questions dark matter simulations help address is how dark matter halos evolve. How does one characterize different states of that evolution? The focus of this project is identifying cluster relaxedness and how it relates to the internal structure of the halo. A dark matter simulation consists of an N-body simulation which takes an initial set of positions and velocities of the dark matter particles and evolves them under the influence of gravity [6]. Though scientists have so far not been able to detect dark matter particles, the information from these simulations is still valuable especially given the relationship between dark matter halos and galaxy clusters. Galaxies sit within dark matter halos and recent evidence points to filaments of dark matter forming the framework on which galaxy clusters grow [7]. A dark matter halo is a …

Topics covered include: Failure At High Confining Pressure; Fluid-assisted Slip, Earthquakes & Fracture; Reaction-driven Cracking; Fluid Transport, Deformation And Reaction; Localized Fluid Transport And Deformation; Earthquake Mechanisms; Subduction Zone Dynamics And Crustal Growth.

As the amount of electricity generated by renewable energy sources continues to increase, the current method of power transmission will not serve as an adequate method for transmitting power over very long distances. A new method for transmitting power is proposed using particle beams in a storage ring. Particle beams offer an incredibly energy efficient alternative to transmission lines in transmitting power over very long distances. A thorough investigation of the magnet lattice design for this storage ring is presented. The design demonstrates the ability to design a ring with stable orbits over a 381.733 km circumference. Double bend achromats and FODO cells are implemented to achieve appropriate {beta} functions and dispersion functions for 9-11 GeV electron beams.

This work is motivated by the growing demand for auxiliary heating on small and large machines worldwide. Numerous present and planned RF experiments (EBW, Lower Hybrid, ICRF, and ECH) are increasingly complex systems. The operational challenges are indicative of a need for components of real-time control that can be implemented with a moderate amount of effort in a time- and cost-effective fashion. Such a system will improve experimental efficiency, enhance experimental quality, and expedite technological advancements. The modular architecture of this control-suite serves multiple purposes. It facilitates construction on various scales from single to multiple controller systems. It enables expandability of control from basic to complex via the addition of modules with varying functionalities. It simplifies the control implementation process by reducing layers of software and electronic development. While conceived with fusion applications in mind, this suite has the potential to serve a broad range of scientific and industrial applications. During the Phase-I research effort we established the overall feasibility of this modular control-suite concept. We developed the fundamental modules needed to implement open-loop active-control and demonstrated their use on a microwave power deposition experiment.

Electron beam loss due to intra-beam scattering, the Touschek effect, in a storage ring depends on the electron beam polarization. The polarization of an electron beam can be determined from the difference in the Touschek lifetime compared with an unpolarized beam. In this paper, we report on a systematic experimental procedure recently developed at Duke FEL laboratory to study the radiative polarization of a stored electron beam. Using this technique, we have successfully observed the radiative polarization build-up of an electron beam in the Duke storage ring, and determined the equilibrium degree of polarization and the time constant of the polarization build-up process.

The redshift of a galaxy can be determined by one of two methods; photometric or spectroscopic. Photometric is a term for any redshift determination made using the magnitudes of light in different filters. Spectroscopic redshifts are determined by measuring the absorption spectra of the object then determining the difference in wavelength between the 'standard' absorption lines and the measured ones, making it the most accurate of the two methods. The data for this research was collected from SDSS DR8 and then separated into blended and non-blended galaxy sets; the definition of 'blended' is discussed in the Introduction section. The current SDSS photometric redshift determination method does not discriminate between blended and non-blended data when it determines the photometric redshift of a given galaxy. The focus of this research was to utilize machine learning techniques to determine if a considerably more accurate photometric redshift determination method could be found, for the case of the blended and non-blended data being treated separately. The results show a reduction of 0.00496 in the RMS error of photometric redshift determinations for blended galaxies and a more significant reduction of 0.00827 for non-blended galaxies, illustrated in Table 2.

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The Southern Regional Center for Lightweight Innovative Design (SRCLID) has developed an experimentally validated cradle-to-grave modeling and simulation effort to optimize automotive components in order to decrease weight and cost, yet increase performance and safety in crash scenarios. In summary, the three major objectives of this project are accomplished: To develop experimentally validated cradle-to-grave modeling and simulation tools to optimize automotive and truck components for lightweighting materials (aluminum, steel, and Mg alloys and polymer-based composites) with consideration of uncertainty to decrease weight and cost, yet increase the performance and safety in impact scenarios; To develop multiscale computational models that quantify microstructure-property relations by evaluating various length scales, from the atomic through component levels, for each step of the manufacturing process for vehicles; and To develop an integrated K-12 educational program to educate students on lightweighting designs and impact scenarios. In this final report, we divided the content into two parts: the first part contains the development of building blocks for the project, including materials and process models, process-structure-property (PSP) relationship, and experimental validation capabilities; the second part presents the demonstration task for Mg front-end work associated with USAMP projects.

This document represents a proposed outline for conducting a Before and After Study of the DART Green Line, a major extension of DART's light rail transit (LRT) system. Such studies track the costs and impacts of the extension of Red Line service into the North Central Corridor and analyze the accuracy of forecasts made during project planning. As the Green Line initially began as two separate planning corridors, the Northwest Corridor and the Southeast Corridor, this planned study replaced original planned studies of the two corridors.

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The scientific potential of femtosecond x-ray pulses at linac-driven free-electron lasers such as the Linac Coherent Light Source is tremendous. Time-resolved pump-probe experiments require a measure of the relative arrival time of each x-ray pulse with respect to the experimental pump laser. An optical timing system based on stabilized fiber links has been developed for the LCLS to provide this synchronization. Preliminary results show synchronization of the installed stabilized links at the sub-20-femtosecond level. We present details of the implementation at LCLS and potential for future development.

Thin film applications are of great interest to the semiconductor industry due to the important role they play in cutting edge technology such as thin film solar cells. X-Ray Reflectivity (XRR) characterizes thin films in a non-destructive and efficient manner yet complications exist in extracting these characteristics from raw XRR data. This study developed and tested two different algorithms to extract quantity of layers and thickness information on the nanometer scale from XRR data. It was concluded that an algorithm involving a local averaging technique revealed this information clearly in Fourier space.

The current method for measuring profiles of proton bunches in accelerators is severely lacking. One must dedicate a great deal of time and expensive equipment to achieve meaningful results. A new method to complete this task uses a rotating mask with slots of three different orientations to collect this data. By scanning over the beam in three different directions, a complete profile for each bunch is built in just seconds, compared to the hours necessary for the previous method. This design was successfully tested using synchrotron radiation emitted by SPEAR3. The profile of the beam was measured in each of the three desired directions. Due to scheduled beam maintenance, only one set of data was completed and more are necessary to solve any remaining issues. The data collected was processed and all of the RMS sizes along the major and minor axes, as well as the tilt of the beam ellipse were measured.

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The Linac Coherent Light Source produced its first x-ray laser beam on 10 April 2009. Today it is routinely producing x-ray pulses with energy >2 mJ across the operating range from 820-8,200 eV. The facility has begun operating for atomic/molecular/optical science experiments. Performance of the facility in its first user run (1 October - 21 December) and current machine development activities will be presented. Early results from the preparations for the start of the second user run is also reported.

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