Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Since September 11, 2001, the high pace of military operations has placed significant stress on U.S. operating forces. In late 2003, the Department of Defense (DOD) reported that several studies had found that tens of thousands of military personnel were performing tasks that were not military essential and that these tasks could be performed more cost effectively by civilian or private-sector contract employees. To address this matter, DOD, in fiscal year 2004, began a multiyear initiative to convert military positions, including military health care positions, to federal civilian or contract positions. Within DOD, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, Personnel and Readiness (USD, P&R), has overall responsibility for issuing guidance on manpower management, which includes guidance related to determining the least costly mix of military, civilian, and contract personnel. Additionally, the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) (USD (C)) and the Director, Program Analysis and Evaluation (PA&E) play key roles in determining the costs of military, civilian, and contract personnel. For example, the USD(C) is responsible for developing the composite pay rates used in developing military and civilian personnel budgets and PA&E provides leadership in developing and …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The United States is at a critical juncture in addressing the demands on its transportation system, including highway infrastructure. State and local governments are looking for alternatives, including increased private sector participation. GAO was asked to review (1) the benefits, costs, and trade-offs of public-private partnerships; (2) how public officials have identified and acted to protect the public interest in these arrangements; and (3) the federal role in public-private partnerships and potential changes in this role. GAO reviewed federal legislation, interviewed federal, state, and other officials, and reviewed the experience of Australia, Canada, and Spain. GAO's work focused on highway-related public-private partnerships and did not review all forms of public-private partnerships."

A statement of record issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In November 2006, about 18,000 undervotes were reported in Sarasota County in the race for Florida's 13th Congressional District (Florida-13). After the election results were contested in the House of Representatives, the task force unanimously voted to seek GAO's assistance in determining whether the voting systems contributed to the large undervote in Sarasota County. In October 2007, GAO presented its findings on the review of the voting systems and concluded that while prior tests and reviews provided some assurance that the voting systems performed correctly, they were not enough to provide reasonable assurance that the voting systems in Sarasota County did not contribute to the undervote. GAO proposed that a firmware verification test, a ballot test, and a calibration test be conducted. The task force requested that GAO proceed with the proposed additional tests. GAO also verified whether source code escrowed by Florida could be rebuilt into the firmware used in Sarasota County. To conduct its work, GAO conducted tests on a sample of voting systems used in Sarasota County during the 2006 general election. GAO witnessed the rebuild of the firmware from the escrowed …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "At various stages throughout the current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has withdrawn equipment from its stored, or prepositioned, stock sets around the world, as well as from its afloat stocks, thus depleting a large portion of its prepositioned stocks. The Army prepositions equipment at diverse strategic locations in order to field combat-ready forces in days rather than the weeks it would take if equipment had to be moved from the United States to the location of the conflict. The Army Prepositioned Stocks (APS) program supports the National Military Strategy and is an important part of the Department of Defense's (DOD) overall strategic mobility framework. The APS program depends on prepositioned unit sets of equipment and sustainment stocks to enable troops to deploy rapidly and train with prepositioned equipment before beginning combat operations. As we testified in January 2007 and March 2006, however, sustained continuing operations have taken a toll on the condition and readiness of military equipment, and the Army faces a number of ongoing and long-term challenges that will affect both the timing and cost of equipment repair and replacement, particularly to its prepositioned …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has emerged as a leading injury among servicemembers serving in the Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) combat theaters. The widespread use of improvised explosive devices, such as roadside bombs, in these combat theaters increases the likelihood that servicemembers will be exposed to incidents that can cause a TBI. TBIs can vary from mild to severe, and in general, mild TBI can be difficult to identify. Because mild TBI can have lasting effects if not identified and treated, concerns have been raised about how the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) identifies and treats OEF/OIF veterans with a mild TBI. In this report GAO describes VA's (1) efforts to screen OEF/OIF veterans for mild TBI, (2) steps taken so that those OEF/OIF veterans at risk for mild TBI are evaluated and treated, and (3) challenges in screening and evaluating OEF/OIF veterans for mild TBI. GAO reviewed VA's policies, interviewed VA officials and TBI experts, and reviewed nine VA medical facilities' efforts to implement TBI screening and evaluation processes."

The Fast Ignition (FI) concept for Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) has the potential to provide a significant advance in the technical attractiveness of Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) reactors. FI differs from conventional 'central hot spot' (CHS) target ignition by using one driver (laser, heavy ion beam or Z-pinch) to create a dense fuel and a separate ultra-short, ultra-intense laser beam to ignite the dense core. FI targets can burn with {approx} 3X lower density fuel than CHS targets, resulting in (all other things being equal) lower required compression energy, relaxed drive symmetry, relaxed target smoothness tolerances, and, importantly, higher gain. The short, intense ignition pulse that drives this process interacts with extremely high energy density plasmas; the physics that controls this interaction is only now becoming accessible in the lab, and is still not well understood. The attraction of obtaining higher gains in smaller facilities has led to a worldwide explosion of effort in the studies of FI. In particular, two new US facilities to be completed in 2009/2010, OMEGA/OMEGA EP and NIF-ARC (as well as others overseas) will include FI investigations as part of their program. These new facilities will be able to approach FI conditions much more closely …

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A detailed chemical kinetic reaction mechanism has been developed for a group of four small alkyl ester fuels, consisting of methyl formate, methyl acetate, ethyl formate and ethyl acetate. This mechanism is validated by comparisons between computed results and recently measured intermediate species mole fractions in fuel-rich, low pressure, premixed laminar flames. The model development employs a principle of similarity of functional groups in constraining the H atom abstraction and unimolecular decomposition reactions in each of these fuels. As a result, the reaction mechanism and formalism for mechanism development are suitable for extension to larger oxygenated hydrocarbon fuels, together with an improved kinetic understanding of the structure and chemical kinetics of alkyl ester fuels that can be extended to biodiesel fuels. Variations in concentrations of intermediate species levels in these flames are traced to differences in the molecular structure of the fuel molecules.

The Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) is a U.S. Department of Energy research and development laboratory located at the Savannah River Site (SRS) near Aiken, South Carolina. SRNL has over 50 years of experience in developing and applying hydrogen technology, both through its national defense activities as well as through its recent activities with the DOE Hydrogen Programs. The hydrogen technical staff at SRNL comprises over 90 scientists, engineers and technologists, and it is believed to be the largest such staff in the U.S. SRNL has ongoing R&D initiatives in a variety of hydrogen storage areas, including metal hydrides, complex hydrides, chemical hydrides and carbon nanotubes. SRNL has over 25 years of experience in metal hydrides and solid-state hydrogen storage research, development and demonstration. As part of its defense mission at SRS, SRNL developed, designed, demonstrated and provides ongoing technical support for the largest hydrogen processing facility in the world based on the integrated use of metal hydrides for hydrogen storage, separation, and compression. The SRNL has been active in teaming with academic and industrial partners to advance hydrogen technology. A primary focus of SRNL's R&D has been hydrogen storage using metal and complex hydrides. SRNL and its Hydrogen Technology …

Optical Coherence Tomography is explored as a method to image laser-damage sites located on the surface of large aperture fused silica optics during post-processing via CO{sub 2} laser ablation. The signal analysis for image acquisition was adapted to meet the sensitivity requirements for this application. A long-working distance geometry was employed to allow imaging through the opposite surface of the 5-cm thick optic. The experimental results demonstrate the potential of OCT for remote monitoring of transparent material processing applications.

The methodological development and computational implementation of linear scaling quantum chemistry methods for the accurate calculation of electronic structure and properties of periodic systems (solids, surfaces, and polymers) and their application to chemical problems of DOE relevance.

Semantic graphs have become key components in analyzing complex systems such as the Internet, or biological and social networks. These types of graphs generally consist of sparsely connected clusters or 'communities' whose nodes are more densely connected to each other than to other nodes in the graph. The identification of these communities is invaluable in facilitating the visualization, understanding, and analysis of large graphs by producing subgraphs of related data whose interrelationships can be readily characterized. Unfortunately, the ability of LLNL to effectively analyze the terabytes of multisource data at its disposal has remained elusive, since existing decomposition algorithms become computationally prohibitive for graphs of this size. We have addressed this limitation by developing more efficient algorithms for discerning community structure that can effectively process massive graphs. Current algorithms for detecting community structure, such as the high quality algorithm developed by Girvan and Newman [1], are only capable of processing relatively small graphs. The cubic complexity of Girvan and Newman, for example, makes it impractical for graphs with more than approximately 10{sup 4} nodes. Our goal for this project was to develop methodologies and corresponding algorithms capable of effectively processing graphs with up to 10{sup 9} nodes. From a practical …

Optical properties of near-surface kidney tissue were monitored in order to assess response during reperfusion to long (20 minutes) versus prolonged (150 minutes) ischemia in an in vivo rat model. Specifically, autofluorescence images of the exposed surfaces of both the normal and the ischemic kidneys were acquired during both injury and reperfusion alternately under 355 nm and 266 nm excitations. The temporal profile of the emission of the injured kidney during the reperfusion phase under 355 nm excitation was normalized to that under 266 nm as a means to account for changes in tissue optical properties independent of ischemia as well as changes in the illumination/collection geometrical parameters in future clinical implementation of this technique using a hand-held probe. The scattered excitation light signal was also evaluated as a reference signal and found to be inadequate. Characteristic time constants were extracted using fit to a relaxation model and found to have larger mean values following 150 minutes of injury. The mean values were then compared with the outcome of a chronic survival study where the control kidney had been removed. Rat kidneys exhibiting longer time constants were much more likely to fail. This may lead to a method to assess …

In this LDRD, we examined in detail the pressure-induced bonding and local coordination changes leading to the molecular {yields} associated {yields} extended-solid transitions in carbon dioxide (CO{sub 2}). We studied the progressive delocalization of electrons from the C=O molecular double bond at high pressures and temperatures, and determined the phase stability and physical properties of a new extended-solid CO{sub 2} phase (VI). We find that the new CO{sub 2} phase VI is based on a network of six-fold coordinated (octahedral) CO{sub 6} structures similar to the ultra-hard SiO{sub 2} phase stishovite.

We describe the results of an effort, funded by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program, to model, using FLASH time-dependent adaptive-mesh hydrodynamic simulations, XSTAR photoionization calculations, HULLAC atomic data, and Monte Carlo radiation transport, the radiatively-driven photoionized wind and accretion flow of high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs). In this final report, we describe the purpose, approach, and technical accomplishments of this effort, including maps of the density, temperature, velocity, ionization parameter, and emissivity distributions of the X-ray emission lines of the well-studied HMXB Vela X-1.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Letter from Jean McCreery to the WASP membership concerning the future of the WASP organization. She states that the board has voted unanimously to dissolve the nonprofit organization and turn the matter over to the broader membership for a vote. She asks the members to return their ballots promptly so that the votes can be tallied before the next board meeting.

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

Weekly newspaper from Dallas, Texas that includes local, state, and national news and advertising of interest to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community.

Photograph of a "Poets 'n Jazz" event sponsored by The Black Academy of Arts and Letters in Dallas, Texas.

Photograph of a "Poets 'n Jazz" event sponsored by The Black Academy of Arts and Letters in Dallas, Texas.

Photograph of a "Poets 'n Jazz" event sponsored by The Black Academy of Arts and Letters in Dallas, Texas.

Photograph of a "Poets 'n Jazz" event sponsored by The Black Academy of Arts and Letters in Dallas, Texas.