A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Fiscal year 2005 marked the second year that executive agencies were required to report improper payment information under the Improper Payments Information Act of 2002 (IPIA). As a steward of taxpayer dollars, the federal government is accountable for how its agencies and grantees spend billions of taxpayer dollars and is responsible for safeguarding those funds against improper payments. GAO was asked to determine the progress agencies have made in their improper payment reporting and the total amount of improper payments recouped through recovery auditing. To accomplish this, GAO reviewed improper payment information reported by 35 agencies in their fiscal year 2005 performance and accountability or annual reports."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Companies, which are the basis of most commercial activities in market-based economies, may be used for illicit as well as legitimate purposes. Because companies can be used to hide activities such as money laundering, some states have been criticized for requiring too little information about companies when they are formed, especially concerning owners. This testimony draws on GAO's April 2006 report Company Formations: Minimal Ownership Information Is Collected and Available (GAO-06-376), which addressed (1) the information states and other parties collect on companies, (2) law enforcement concerns about the role of companies in illicit activities and the information available on owners, and (3) the implications of collecting more ownership information. GAO surveyed all 50 states and the District of Columbia, reviewed state laws, and interviewed a variety of industry, law enforcement, and other government officials."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Homeland Security Act of 2002 transferred responsibility for certain port inspections from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) to the newly created Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Specifically, the act transferred the responsibility for inspecting passengers, baggage, cargo, and mail entering the country in airplanes, ships, trucks, and railcars for prohibited agricultural materials that may serve as carriers of foreign pests and diseases. USDA estimates that these biological invaders cost the American economy tens of billions of dollars annually in lower crop values, eradication programs, and emergency payments to farmers. Beginning in March 2003, more than 1,800 agriculture specialists who had formerly reported to USDA became CBP employees, as CBP incorporated the protection of U.S. agriculture into its primary antiterrorism mission. In addition to protecting U.S. agriculture, CBP's mission is to detect and prevent terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the United States, interdict illegal drugs and other contraband, and apprehend individuals who are attempting to enter the United States illegally. Responding to congressional concerns that the transfer of agricultural inspections to CBP could shift …

LLNL turned in 5 Declaration Line Items (DLI's) in 2006. Of these, one was declared completed. We made some changes to streamline our process from 2005, used less money, time and fewer team members. This report is a description of what changes we made in 2006 and what we learned. Many of our core review team had changed from last year, including our Laboratory Director, the Facility safety and security representatives, our Division Leader, and the OPSEC Committee Chair. We were able to hand out an AP Manual to some of them, and briefed all newcomers to the AP process. We first went to the OPSEC Committee and explained what the Additional Protocol process would be for 2006 and solicited their help in locating declarable projects. We utilized the 'three questions' from the AP meeting last year. LLNL has no single place to locate all projects at the laboratory. We talked to Resource Managers and key Managers in the Energy and Environment Directorate and in the Nonproliferation Homeland and International Security Directorate to find applicable projects. We also talked to the Principal Investigators who had projects last year. We reviewed a list of CRADA's and LDRD projects given to us …

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Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

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

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Perhaps the most important aspect of contemporary condensed matter physics involves understanding strong Coulomb interactions between the large number of electrons in a solid. Electronic correlations lead to the emergence of new system properties, such as metal-insulator transitions, superconductivity, magneto-resistance, Bose-Einstein condensation, the formation of excitonic gases, or the integer and fractional Quantum Hall effects. The discovery of high-Tc superconductivity in particular was a watershed event, leading to dramatic experimental and theoretical advances in the field of correlated-electron systems. Such materials often exhibit competition between the charge, lattice, spin, and orbital degrees of freedom, whose cause-effect relationships are difficult to ascertain. Experimental insight into the properties of solids is traditionally obtained by time-averaged probes, which measure e.g., linear optical spectra, electrical conduction properties, or the occupied band structure in thermal equilibrium. Many novel physical properties arise from excitations out of the ground state into energetically higher states by thermal, optical, or electrical means. This leads to fundamental interactions between the system's constituents, such as electron-phonon and electron-electron interactions, which occur on ultrafast timescales. While these interactions underlie the physical properties of solids, they are often only indirectly inferred from time-averaged measurements. Time-resolved spectroscopy, consequently, is playing an ever increasing role …

We present results from a calculation of the transition temperature in QCD with two light (up, down) and one heavier (strange) quark mass as well as for QCD with three degenerate quark masses. Furthermore, we discuss first results from an ongoing calculation of the QCD equation of state with almost realistic light and strange quark masses.

We present extensive u{prime}g{prime}r{prime}i{prime} BV RIY JHK{sub s} photometry and optical spectroscopy of SN 2005hk. These data reveal that SN 2005hk was nearly identical in its observed properties to SN 2002cx, which has been called 'the most peculiar known type Ia supernova'. Both supernovae exhibited high ionization SN 1991T-like pre-maximum spectra, yet low peak luminosities like SN 1991bg. The spectra reveal that SN 2005hk, like SN 2002cx, exhibited expansion velocities that were roughly half those of typical type Ia supernovae. The R and I light curves of both supernovae were also peculiar in not displaying the secondary maximum observed for normal type Ia supernovae. Our Y JH photometry of SN 2005hk reveals the same peculiarity in the near-infrared. By combining our optical and near-infrared photometry of SN 2005hk with published ultraviolet light curves obtained with the Swift satellite, we are able to construct a bolometric light curve from {approx} 10 days before to {approx}60 days after B maximum. The shape and unusually low peak luminosity of this light curve, plus the low expansion velocities and absence of a secondary maximum at red and near-infrared wavelengths, are all in reasonable agreement with model calculations of a 3D deflagration which produces {approx} …

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This document details progress on the project ''Effective Conveyor Belt Inspection for Improved Mining Productivity'' during the period from May 15, 2006 to November 14, 2006. Progress during this period includes significant advances in development of a Smart Camera based prototype system for on-site mechanical splice detection, and continued deployment of both the mechanical splice detection system and the vulcanized splice detection system in area coal mines.

We introduce a generalized definition of parton distribution functions (PDFs) for a more consistent all-order treatment of power corrections. We present a new set of modified DGLAP evolution equations for nuclear PDFs, and show that the resummed {alpha}{sub s}A{sup 1/3}/Q{sup 2}-type of leading nuclear size enhanced power corrections significantly slow down the growth of gluon density at small-x. We discuss the relation between the calculated power corrections and the saturation phenomena.

This Phase IV Remedial Design/Remedial Action Work Plan addresses the remediation of areas with the potential for UXO at the Idaho National Laboratory. These areas include portions of the Naval Proving Ground, the Arco High-Altitude Bombing Range, and the Twin Buttes Bombing Range. Five areas within the Naval Proving Ground that are known to contain UXO include the Naval Ordnance Disposal Area, the Mass Detonation Area, the Experimental Field Station, The Rail Car Explosion Area, and the Land Mine Fuze Burn Area. The Phase IV remedial action will be concentrated in these five areas. For other areas, such as the Arco High-Altitude Bombing Range and the Twin Buttes Bombing Range, ordnance has largely consisted of sand-filled practice bombs that do not pose an explosion risk. Ordnance encountered in these areas will be addressed under the Phase I Operations and Maintenance Plan that allows for the recovery and disposal of ordnance that poses an imminent risk to human health or the environment.

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The authors report the current status of the systematic studies of the QCD thermodynamics by lattice QCD simulations with two flavors of improved Wilson quarks. They evaluate the critical temperature of two flavor QCD in the chiral limit at zero chemical potential and show the preliminary result. Also they discuss fluctuations at none-zero temperature and density by calculating the quark number and isospin susceptibilities and their derivatives with respect to chemical potential.

We study the origin and properties of the population of unbound stars in the kinematic samples of dwarf spheroidal galaxies. For this purpose we have run a high resolution N- body simulation of a two-component dwarf galaxy orbiting in a Milky Way potential. In agreement with the tidal stirring scenario of Mayer et al., the dwarf is placed on a highly eccentric orbit, its initial stellar component is in the form of an exponential disk and it has a NFW-like dark matter halo. After 10 Gyrs of evolution the dwarf produces a spheroidal stellar component and is strongly tidally stripped so that mass follows light and the stars are on almost isotropic orbits. From this final state, we create mock kinematic data sets for 200 stars by observing the dwarf in different directions.We find that when the dwarf is observed along the tidal tails the kinematic samples are strongly contaminated by unbound stars from the tails.We also study another source of possible contamination by adding stars from the Milky Way. We demonstrate that most of the unbound stars can be removed by the method of interloper rejection proposed by den Hartog & Katgert and recently tested on simulated dark matter …

Two decades ago Matsui and Satz suggested that Debye screening in the quark-gluon plasma would result in J/{psi} suppression in heavy ion collisions. Much has happened in the subsequent years, and the picture of quark-gluon plasma at present is rapidly evolving - what does it imply for the J/{psi} suppression? What are the recent RHIC and SPS results trying to tell us? What else has to be done? This talk is an attempt to address these questions.

This report summarizes technical progress during the program “Optical Fiber High Temperature Sensor Instrumentation for Energy Intensive Industries”, performed by the Center for Photonics Technology of the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. The objective of this program was to use technology recently invented at Virginia Tech to develop and demonstrate the application of self-calibrating optical fiber temperature and pressure sensors to several key energy-intensive industries where conventional, commercially available sensors exhibit greatly abbreviated lifetimes due primarily to environmental degradation. A number of significant technologies were developed under this program, including • a laser bonded silica high temperature fiber sensor with a high temperature capability up to 700°C and a frequency response up to 150 kHz, • the world’s smallest fiber Fabry-Perot high temperature pressure sensor (125 x 20 μm) with 700°C capability, • UV-induced intrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometric sensors for distributed measurement, • a single crystal sapphire fiber-based sensor with a temperature capability up to 1600°C. These technologies have been well demonstrated and laboratory tested. Our work plan included conducting major field tests of these technologies at EPRI, Corning, Pratt & Whitney, and Global Energy; field validation of the technology is critical to ensuring its usefulness …

Although significant progress has been achieved in understanding the genetic and biochemical bases of the spore germination process, the structural basis for breaking the dormant spore state remains poorly understood. We have used atomic force microscopy (AFM) to probe the high-resolution structural dynamics of single Bacillus atrophaeus spores germinating under native conditions. Here we show that AFM can reveal previously unrecognized germination-induced alterations in spore coat architecture and topology as well as the disassembly of outer spore coat rodlet structures. These results and previous studies in other microorganisms suggest that the spore coat rodlets are structurally similar to amyloid fibrils. AFM analysis of the nascent surface of the emerging germ cell revealed a porous network of peptidoglycan fibers. The results are consistent with a honeycomb model structure for synthetic peptidoglycan oligomers determined by nuclear magnetic resonance. AFM is a promising experimental tool for investigating the morphogenesis of spore germination and cell wall peptidoglycan structure.

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