This report summarizes legal and political events related to active sonar and marine mammals since 1994. The report discusses the deployment of active sonar by the U.S. Navy and its potential impacts on marine mammals has been an ongoing issue of intense debate; regulatory, legislative, and judicial activity; and international concern.

This report summarizes and discusses potential adjustments in civil monetary penalties. The report covers the history of both legislation and enforcement on this issue which is central to the deciding how to enforce civil monetary penalties. The report identifies three courses of action that include either maintaining the status quo, adjusting civil monetary penalty maximums through legislation, or implementing some of the recommendations in the General Accounting Office's (GAO) report.

This report discusses air pollutants (petroleum, natural gas, and coal), which account for about two-thirds of U.S. electricity generation. These gases include several pollutants that directly pose risks to human health and welfare. The report also discusses the utilities that are subject to an array of environmental regulations.

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

We show that a simple evolutionary algorithm can optimize a set of mesoscale atmospheric model parameters with respect to agreement between the mesoscale simulation and a limited set of synthetic observations. This is illustrated using the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS). A set of 23 RAMS parameters is optimized by minimizing a cost function based on the root mean square (rms) error between the RAMS simulation and synthetic data (observations derived from a separate RAMS simulation). We find that the optimization can be efficient with relatively modest computer resources, thus operational implementation is possible. The optimization efficiency, however, is found to depend strongly on the procedure used to perturb the 'child' parameters relative to their 'parents' within the evolutionary algorithm. In addition, the meteorological variables included in the rms error and their weighting are found to be an important factor with respect to finding the global optimum.

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

This report begins with a description of the bond insurance industry and its business model, including the relatively recent move into providing insurance for asset-backed securities.An Analysis of the current market difficulties follows along with the various possibilities of spillover effects.Finally, a number of broader policy questions are briefly discussed.

This report discusses the development in global warming as a global issue. Topics include issues that have arisen regarding the ETS and considerations for cap-and-trade.

Despite its ease of use, OpenMP has failed to gain widespread use on large scale systems, largely due to its failure to deliver sufficient performance. Our experience indicates that the cost of initiating OpenMP regions is simply too high for the desired OpenMP usage scenario of many applications. In this paper, we introduce CLOMP, a new benchmark to characterize this aspect of OpenMP implementations accurately. CLOMP complements the existing EPCC benchmark suite to provide simple, easy to understand measurements of OpenMP overheads in the context of application usage scenarios. Our results for several OpenMP implementations demonstrate that CLOMP identifies the amount of work required to compensate for the overheads observed with EPCC. Further, we show that CLOMP also captures limitations for OpenMP parallelization on NUMA systems.

This report examines the Consolidated Appropriations Act for 2008 and identifies four types of provisions that prevent or restrain federal rule making or regulatory activities.

Fiber optic grating sensors have been used to measure multi-dimensional strain, pressure, temperature, corrosion and moisture. This paper presents a method of using fiber grating sensors to measure the position and velocity of a very fast event associated with a blast wave. A chirped fiber grating of 50 mm length is placed in a highly energetic material. The action of the shock wave is to destroy the fiber grating as it propagates along it. By using a spectral filter such as a chirped fiber grating in combination with high speed detectors the position and velocity of the shock wave may be determined. A layout of a system used to experimentally verify this technique is described and results presented for two different highly energetic materials.

Experiments have been conducted using laser-driven cylindrical hohlraums whose walls are machined from Ta{sub 2}O{sub 5} foams of 100 mg/cc and 4 g/cc densities. Measurements of the radiation temperature demonstrate that the lower density walls produce higher radiation temperatures than the high density walls. This is the first experimental demonstration of the prediction that this would occur [M. D. Rosen and J. H. Hammer, Phys. Rev. E 72, 056403 (2005)]. For high density walls, the radiation front propagates subsonically, and part of the absorbed energy is wasted by the flow kinetic energy. For the lower wall density, the front velocity is supersonic and can devote almost all of the absorbed energy to heating the wall.

Recital presented at the UNT College of Music Recital Hall in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) degree.

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The Sustained Spheromak Physics Experiment (SSPX) [E.B. Hooper, et. al., Nuclear Fusion, Vol. 39, No. 7] explores the physics of efficient magnetic field buildup and energy confinement, both essential parts of advancing the spheromak concept. Extending the spheromak formation phase increases the efficiency of magnetic field generation with the maximum edge magnetic field for a given injector current (B/I) from 0.65 T/MA previously to 0.9 T/MA. We have achieved the highest electron temperatures (T{sub e}) recorded for a spheromak with T{sub e} > 500 eV, toroidal magnetic field {approx}1 T and toroidal current ({approx}1 MA) [R.D. Wood, D.N. Hill, H.S. McLean, E.B. Hooper, B.F. Hudson, J.M. Moller, 'Improved magnetic field generation efficiency and higher temperature spheromak plasmas', submitted to Physical Review Letters]. Extending the sustainment phase to > 8 ms extends the period of low magnetic fluctuations (< 1 %) by 50%. The NIMROD 3-D resistive MHD code [C.R. Sovinec, T.A. Gianakon, E.D. Held, S.E. Kruger and D.D. Schnack, The NIMROD Team, Phys. Plasmas 10, 1727 (2003)] reproduces the observed flux amplification {Psi}{sub pol}/{Psi}{sub gun}. Successive gun pulses are demonstrated to maintain the magnetic field in a quasi-steady state against resistive decay. Initial measurements of neutral particle flux in multi-pulse …

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

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In support of the National Security efforts of LLNL, this project addressed the existing imbalance between dispersion and chemical capabilities of LODI (Lagrangian Operational Dispersion Integrator--the NARAC operational dispersion model). We have demonstrated potentially large effects of atmospheric chemistry on the impact of chemical releases (e.g., industrial chemicals and nerve agents). Prior to our work, LODI could only handle chains of first-order losses (exponential decays) that were independent of time and space, limiting NARAC's capability to respond when reactive chemistry is important. We significantly upgraded the chemistry and aerosol capability of LODI to handle (1) arbitrary networks of chemical reactions, (2) mixing and reactions with ambient species, (3) evaporation and condensation of aerosols, and (4) heat liberated from chemical reactions and aerosol condensation (which can cause a cold and dense plume hugging the ground to rise into the atmosphere, then descend to the ground again as droplets). When this is made operational, it will significantly improve NARAC's ability to respond to terrorist attacks and industrial accidents that involve reactive chemistry, including many chemical agents and toxic industrial chemicals (TICS). As a dual-use, the resulting model also has the potential to be a state-of-the-art air-quality model. Chemical releases are the most …

Plutonium possesses the most complicated phase diagram in the periodic table, driven by the complexities of overlapping 5f electron orbitals. Despite the importance of the 5f electrons in defining the structure and physical properties, there is no experimental evidence that these electrons localize to form magnetic moments in pure Pu and the {sup +}{mu}SR measurements included here place an upper limit of <0.001{micro}{sub B} for the magnetic moment on Pu. Instead, a large temperature independent Pauli susceptibility indicates they form narrow conduction bands. Radiation damage from the {alpha}-particle decay of Pu creates numerous defects in the crystal structure which produce a significant temperature dependent magnetic susceptibility {chi}(T), in {alpha}-Pu, {delta}-Pu(4.3at%Ga), and Pu{sub 1-x}Am{sub x} alloys ({delta}-Pu phase). This effect can be removed by thermal annealing above room temperature. By contrast, below 35K the radiation damage is frozen in place permitting the evolution in {chi}(T) with increasing damage to be studied systematically. This leads to a two component model consisting of a Curie-Weiss term and a short-ranged interaction term consistent with disorder induced local moment models. Thus it is shown that self-damage creates localized magnetic moments in previously nonmagnetic plutonium. This effect is greatly magnified in some Pu{sub 1-x}Am{sub x} alloys …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO is required to annually audit the financial statements of the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) and FSLIC Resolution Fund (FRF), which are administered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). GAO is responsible for obtaining reasonable assurance about whether FDIC's financial statements for DIF and FRF are presented fairly in all material respects, in conformity with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, and whether FDIC maintained effective internal control over financial reporting and compliance with laws and regulations. Also, GAO is responsible for testing FDIC's compliance with selected laws and regulations. Created in 1933 to insure bank deposits and promote sound banking practices, FDIC plays an important role in maintaining public confidence in the nation's financial system. In 1989, legislation to reform the federal deposit insurance system created three funds to be administered by FDIC: the Bank Insurance Fund (BIF) and the Savings Association Insurance Fund (SAIF), which protect bank and savings deposits, and FRF, which was created to close out the business of the former Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation. In accordance with subsequent legislation passed in 2006, FDIC merged the BIF and SAIF into …

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Heterogeneous processes hold the key to understanding many problems in biology and atmospheric science. In particular, recent experiments have shown that heterogeneous chemistry at the surface of sea-salt aerosols plays a large role in important atmospheric processes with far reaching implications towards understanding of the fate and transport of aerosolized chemical weapons (i.e. organophosphates such as sarin and VX). Unfortunately, the precise mechanistic details of the simplest surface enhanced chemical reactions remain unknown. Understanding heterogeneous processes also has implications in the biological sciences. Traditionally, it is accepted that enzymes catalyze reactions by stabilizing the transition state, thereby lowering the free energy barrier. However, recent findings have shown that a multitude of phenomena likely contribute to the efficiency of enzymes, such as coupled protein motion, quantum mechanical tunneling, or strong electrostatic binding. The objective of this project was to develop and validate a single computational framework based on first principles simulations using tera-scale computational resources to answer fundamental scientific questions about heterogeneous chemical processes relevant to atmospheric chemistry and biological sciences.

The neutral complexes of two ligands based on the 1-oxo-2-hydroxy-isoquinoline (1,2-HOIQO) motif with group 13 metals (Al, Ga, In) show bright blue-violet luminescence in organic solvents. The corresponding transition can be attributed to ligand-centered singlet emission, characterized by a small Stokes shifts of only a few nm combined with lifetimes in the range between 1-3 ns. The fluorescence efficiency is high, with quantum yields of up to 37% in benzene solution. The crystal structure of one of the indium(III) complexes (trigonal space group R-3, a = b = 13.0384(15) {angstrom}, c = 32.870(8) {angstrom}, ? = {beta} = 90{sup o}, {gamma} = 120{sup o}, V = 4839.3(14) {angstrom}{sup 3}, Z = 6) shows a six-coordinate geometry around the indium center which is close to trigonal-prismatic, with a twist angle between the two trigonal faces of 20.7{sup o}. Time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT) calculations (Al and Ga: B3LYP/6-31G(d)); In: B3LYP/LANL2DZ of the fac and mer isomers with one of the two ligands indicate that there is no clear preference for either one of the isomeric forms of the metal complexes. In addition, the metal centers do not have a significant influence on the electronic structure, and as a consequence, on the …