A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for assessing the safety of certain medical products after approval (a process called postmarket risk surveillance). To this end, the Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007 required that FDA establish a postmarket risk identification and analysis system based on electronic health data. In May 2008, FDA began its Sentinel initiative, intended to fulfill this requirement. Additionally, the Act established a requirement for GAO to review FDA's planned system. GAO's specific objectives were to (1) describe the current status of FDA's implementation of the Sentinel system and (2) identify the key privacy and security challenges associated with FDA's plans for the Sentinel system. To do so, GAO analyzed available system documentation; reviewed key privacy and security laws, guidance, standards, and practices; and obtained and analyzed the views of privacy and security experts."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This report formally transmits the briefing in response to section 2228(e) of title 10 of the United States Code. The statute requires the Comptroller General to provide an analysis of the Department of Defense's budget submission for corrosion prevention and control, as well as an analysis of the corrosion report accompanying defense budget materials, and provide the results to the congressional defense committees within 60 days after submission of the Department of Defense budget. On May 26, 2009, we provided the briefing to staff Congressional committees to satisfy the mandate and 60-day reporting requirement."

Other written product issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This document is a guide to GAO Protective Orders."

On March 15, 2006, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution replacing the Commission on Human Rights with a new Human Rights Council (the Council). The Council was designed to be an improvement over the Commission, which was widely criticized for the composition of its membership when perceived human rights abusers were elected as members. This report discusses the history of the Council, the previous participation of the Bush Administration, the current participation of the Obama Administration, and ongoing international and Congressional concerns of the credibility and effectiveness of the Council.

In October 2007, the United States and Mexico announced the Mérida Initiative, a three-year proposal for $1.4 billion in U.S. assistance to Mexico and Central America aimed at combating drug trafficking, gangs, and organized crime. This report provides an overview and discussion of the funding provided for Mérida, and presents several issues that Congress may consider as it oversees implementation of the Initiative.

This report discusses the current state of Bahrain, which has undergone substantial political reforms since the late 1990s, but which still suffers from tension between the Shiite majority and the Sunni-led government. This report focuses particularly on Bahrain's relationship with Iran and Bahrain's relationship with the United States.

This report focuses on the economic development impacts estimated from building and operating 7,800 MW of new wind power in Nebraska. This level of development is on the scale envisioned in the Department of Energy (DOE) report 20% Wind Energy by 2030. A practical first step to building 7,800 of wind is completing 1,000 MW. We also include the estimated economic impacts to Nebraska from building 1,000 MW of wind power. Our primary analysis indicates that the development and construction of approximately 7,800 MW of wind energy in Nebraska by 2030 will support 20,600 to 36,500 annual full-time equivalents (AFTE). In addition, operating the full 7,800 MW of wind energy could support roughly 2,000 to 4,000 full-time workers throughout the operating life of the wind facilities (LFTE). Nebraska's economy is estimated to see an average annual boost in economic activity ranging from $140 million to $260 million solely from construction and development related activities between 2011 and 2030. An additional boost of $250 - $442 million annually is estimated from operating 7,800 MW of wind capacity.

Contrary to popular perception, ECA faces significant threats from climate change, with a number of the most serious risks already in evidence. Vulnerability over the next ten to twenty years will be dominated by socio‐economic factors and legacy issues. Even countries and sectors that stand to benefit from climate change are poorly positioned to do so. The next decade offers a window of opportunity for ECA countries to make their development more resilient to climate change while reaping numerous co‐benefits.

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 an assisstant county or assisstant disctrict attorney may lawfully and ethically practice as a criminal defense attorney in federal court and in the state courts of a neighboring county (RQ-0754-GA)

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; Validity of a city charter provision that permits a majority of council members to call a special meeting (RQ-0763-GA)

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; Authority of justice of the peace and county court at law to cause the amendment of a death certificate concerning the cause of death (RQ-0764-GA)

This report serves as the final technical report and users manual for the 'Rigorous Screening Technology for Identifying Suitable CO2 Storage Sites II SBIR project. Advanced Resources International has developed a screening tool by which users can technically screen, assess the storage capacity and quantify the costs of CO2 storage in four types of CO2 storage reservoirs. These include CO2-enhanced oil recovery reservoirs, depleted oil and gas fields (non-enhanced oil recovery candidates), deep coal seems that are amenable to CO2-enhanced methane recovery, and saline reservoirs. The screening function assessed whether the reservoir could likely serve as a safe, long-term CO2 storage reservoir. The storage capacity assessment uses rigorous reservoir simulation models to determine the timing, ultimate storage capacity, and potential for enhanced hydrocarbon recovery. Finally, the economic assessment function determines both the field-level and pipeline (transportation) costs for CO2 sequestration in a given reservoir. The screening tool has been peer reviewed at an Electrical Power Research Institute (EPRI) technical meeting in March 2009. A number of useful observations and recommendations emerged from the Workshop on the costs of CO2 transport and storage that could be readily incorporated into a commercial version of the Screening Tool in a Phase III SBIR.

The present report resumes the research activities of the Plasma Spectroscopy/Diagnostics Group at Johns Hopkins University performed on the NSTX tokamak at PPPL during the period 1999-2009. During this period we have designed and implemented XUV based diagnostics for a large number of tasks: study of impurity content and particle transport, MHD activity, time-resolved electron temperature measeurements, ELM research, etc. Both line emission and continuum were used in the XUV range. New technics and novel methods have been devised within the framework of the present research. Graduate and post-graduate students have been involved at all times in addition to the senior research personnel. Several tens of papers have been published and lectures have been given based on the obtained results at conferences and various research institutions (lists of these activities were attached both in each proposal and in the annual reports submitted to our supervisors at OFES).

The objective for this work was to demonstrate the utility of mechanistic computer models designed to simulate actinide behavior for use in efficiently and effectively directing advanced laboratory R&D activities associated with developing advanced separations methods.

Sandia National Laboratories performed an assessment of the benefits of energy storage for the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative. This report documents the methodology and results of this study from a generation and production-side benefits perspective only. The KIUC energy storage study focused on the economic impact of using energy storage to shave the system peak, which reduces generator run time and consequently reduces fuel and operation and maintenance (O&M) costs. It was determined that a 16-MWh energy storage system would suit KIUC's needs, taking into account the size of the 13 individual generation units in the KIUC system and a system peak of 78 MW. The analysis shows that an energy storage system substantially reduces the run time of Units D1, D2, D3, and D5 - the four smallest and oldest diesel generators at the Port Allen generating plant. The availability of stored energy also evens the diurnal variability of the remaining generation units during the off- and on-peak periods. However, the net economic benefit is insufficient to justify a load-leveling type of energy storage system at this time. While the presence of storage helps reduce the run time of the smaller and older units, the economic dispatch changes and …

The Image Composition Engine for Tiles (IceT) is a high-performance sort-last parallel rendering library. In addition to providing accelerated rendering for a standard display, IceT provides the unique ability to generate images for tiled displays. The overall resolution of the display may be several times larger than any viewport that may be rendered by a single machine. This document is an overview of the user interface to IceT.

We have developed a framework for assessing the leakage risk of geologic carbon sequestration sites. This framework, known as the Certification Framework (CF), emphasizes wells and faults as the primary potential leakage conduits. Vulnerable resources are grouped into compartments, and impacts due to leakage are quantified by the leakage flux or concentrations that could potentially occur in compartments under various scenarios. The CF utilizes several model components to simulate leakage scenarios. One model component is a catalog of results of reservoir simulations that can be queried to estimate plume travel distances and times, rather than requiring CF users to run new reservoir simulations for each case. Other model components developed for the CF and described here include fault characterization using fault-population statistics; fault connection probability using fuzzy rules; well-flow modeling with a drift-flux model implemented in TOUGH2; and atmospheric dense-gas dispersion using a mesoscale weather prediction code.

The Value Engineering (VE) Methodology is an effective tool for business or project strategic planning. In conjunction with the “Balanced Scorecard Approach” (Drs. Robert Kaplan, PhD, and David Norton, PhD, from the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative/Palladium Group), function analysis can be used to develop strategy maps and scorecards. The FAST diagram provides an integrated approach to strategy map development by formulating a cause and effect relationship and establishing the “how” and “why” behind the strategy map. By utilizing the VE Job Plan, one is able to move from strategic thinking all the way through to execution of the strategy.

Three-dimensional (3D) geophysical imaging is now receiving considerable attention for electrical conductivity mapping of potential offshore oil and gas reservoirs. The imaging technology employs controlled source electromagnetic (CSEM) and magnetotelluric (MT) fields and treats geological media exhibiting transverse anisotropy. Moreover when combined with established seismic methods, direct imaging of reservoir fluids is possible. Because of the size of the 3D conductivity imaging problem, strategies are required exploiting computational parallelism and optimal meshing. The algorithm thus developed has been shown to scale to tens of thousands of processors. In one imaging experiment, 32,768 tasks/processors on the IBM Watson Research Blue Gene/L supercomputer were successfully utilized. Over a 24 hour period we were able to image a large scale field data set that previously required over four months of processing time on distributed clusters based on Intel or AMD processors utilizing 1024 tasks on an InfiniBand fabric. Electrical conductivity imaging using massively parallel computational resources produces results that cannot be obtained otherwise and are consistent with timeframes required for practical exploration problems.

We report a recent first-principles calculation of harmonic and anharmonic lattice dynamics of MgO. The 2nd order harmonic and 3rd order anharmonic interatomic interaction terms are computed explicitly, and their pressure dependences are discussed. The phonon mode Grueneisen parameters derived based on our calculated 3rd order lattice anharmonicity are in good agreement with those estimated using the finite difference method. The implications for lattice thermal conductivity at high pressure are discussed based on a simple kinetic transport theory.

Following the end of the Cold War, the United States identified 61.5 metric tons (MT) of plutonium and larger quantities of enriched uranium that are permanently excess to use in nuclear weapons programs. The Department of Energy (DOE) also began shutting down, stabilizing, and removing inventories from production facilities that were no longer needed to support weapons programs and non-weapons activities. The storage of 'Category I' nuclear materials at Rocky Flats, Sandia National Laboratories, and several smaller sites has been terminated to reduce costs and safeguards risks. De-inventory continues at the Hanford site and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Consolidation of inventories works in concert with the permanent disposition of excess inventories, including several tonnes of plutonium that have already been disposed to waste repositories and the preparation for transfers to the planned Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility (for the bulk of the excess plutonium) and alternative disposition methods for material that cannot be used readily in the MOX fuel cycle. This report describes status of plutonium consolidation and disposition activities and their impacts on continuing operations, particularly at the Savannah River Site.

These are presentations to be presented at the 31st International Cosmic Ray Conference, in Lodz, Poland during July 2009. It consists of the following presentations: (1) Measurement of the average depth of shower maximum and its fluctuations with the Pierre Auger Observatory; (2) Study of the nuclear mass composition of UHECR with the surface detectors of the Pierre Auger Observatory; (3) Comparison of data from the Pierre Auger Observatory with predictions from air shower simulations: testing models of hadronic interactions; (4) A Monte Carlo exploration of methods to determine the UHECR composition with the Pierre Auger Observatory; (5) The delay of the start-time measured with the Pierre Auger Observatory for inclined showers and a comparison of its variance with models; (6) UHE neutrino signatures in the surface detector of the Pierre Auger Observatory; and (7) The electromagnetic component of inclined air showers at the Pierre Auger Observatory.

The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change indicates there is strong evidence that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide far exceeds the natural range over the last 650,000 years, and this recent warming of the climate system is unequivocal, resulting in more frequent extreme precipitation events, earlier snowmelt runoff, increased winter flood likelihoods, increased and widespread melting of snow and ice, longer and more widespread droughts, and rising sea level. The effects of recent warming has been well documented and climate model projections indicate a range of hydrological impacts with likely to very likely probabilities (67 to 99 percent) of occurring with significant to severe consequences in response to a warmer lower atmosphere with an accelerating hydrologic cycle.

This paper documents the application of quality requirements to Component Test Capability (CTC) Project activities for each CTC alternative. Four alternatives are considered for quality program application: do nothing, vendor testing, existing testing facility modification, and Component Test Facility. It also describes the advantages and disadvantages of using the existing Next Generation Nuclear Plant Quality Program Plan with CTC modifications versus a stand-alone CTC Quality Program Plan.