A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is caused by an extremely stressful event, can develop after military combat and exposure to the threat of death or serious injury. Mental health experts estimate that the intensity of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan could cause more than 15 percent of servicemembers returning from these conflicts to develop PTSD. Symptoms of PTSD can be debilitating and include insomnia; intense anxiety; and difficulty coping with work, social, and family relationships. Left untreated, PTSD can lead to substance abuse, severe depression, and suicide. Symptoms may appear within months of the traumatic event or be delayed for years. While there is no cure for PTSD, experts believe early identification and treatment of PTSD symptoms may lessen their severity and improve the overall quality of life for individuals with this disorder. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is a world leader in PTSD treatment and offers PTSD services to eligible veterans. To inform new veterans about the health care services it offers, VA has increased outreach efforts to servicemembers returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Outreach efforts, coupled with expanded access to VA …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "According to the 2003 American Housing Survey sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), nearly one-third of elderly households--those whose head was age 62 or older--were experiencing housing affordability problems. Further, a congressional commission reported in 2002 that investment in affordable housing is decreasing, although the elderly population is expected to increase. A number of federal housing programs provide assistance, including rent subsidies, mortgage insurance, and loans and grants for the purchase or repair of homes, to low-income renters and homeowners. These programs are administered primarily by HUD or the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). GAO was asked to determine the extent to which federal housing programs provide benefits to elderly households, summarize information on the programs' effectiveness in assisting the elderly and supportive services, and determine how HUD and USDA avoid overlap and duplication in their programs."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA) created a prescription drug benefit for beneficiaries, called Medicare part D, beginning in January 2006. The MMA included incentives for sponsors of employment-based retiree health plans to offer prescription drug benefits to Medicare-eligible retirees, such as a federal subsidy when sponsors provide benefits meeting certain MMA requirements. Plan sponsors cannot receive a subsidy for retired Medicare beneficiaries who enroll in part D. In response to an MMA mandate, GAO determined (1) the trends in employment-based retiree health coverage prior to the MMA and (2) which MMA prescription drug options plan sponsors said they would pursue and the effect these options might have on retiree health benefits. GAO identified trends using data from federal and private sector surveys of employers' health benefit plans and financial statements of 50 randomly selected Fortune 500 employers. Where data for Medicare-eligible retirees were not available, GAO reported data for all retirees, including Medicare-eligible retirees. To obtain plan sponsors' views about options they were likely to pursue, GAO reviewed the 50 employers' financial reports and interviewed benefit consultants; private and public …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Federal banking regulators reported that commercial banks held about $1.6 trillion in syndicated loans in 2003. Loan commitments--a promise to make a set amount of credit available in the future--represented $1 trillion (about 64 percent) of these loans. Issues have been raised whether commercial banks systematically underprice loan commitments and whether generally accepted accounting principles provide meaningful disclosure of the economics of these commitments. This report discusses (1) differences between the pricing of loan commitments and loans, and assesses data that are available about the trading of loan commitments; (2) the extent to which credit default swaps are used to reduce the credit risk from loan commitments, and what credit default swap prices indicate about the prices of loan commitments; and (3) differences between commercial and investment banks' accounting treatment of loan commitments, and the strengths and weaknesses of fair value accounting."

Email from Caro Bosca to Eleanor Brown discussing room reservations for the board meeting in Washington, D.C. She also provides Brown with a list of the email addresses for the current board of directors and committee chairs.

Yucca Mountain licensing will require estimation of ground motions from probabilistic seismic hazard analyses (PSHA) with annual probabilities of exceedance on the order of 10{sup -6} to 10{sup -7} per year or smaller, which correspond to much longer earthquake return periods than most previous PSHA studies. These long return periods for the Yucca Mountain PSHA result in estimates of ground motion that are extremely high ({approx} 10 g) and that are believed to be physically unrealizable. However, there is at present no generally accepted method to bound ground motions either by showing that the physical properties of materials cannot maintain such extreme motions, or the energy release by the source for such large motions is physically impossible. The purpose of this feasibility study is to examine recorded ground motion and rock property data from nuclear explosions to determine its usefulness for studying the ground motion from extreme earthquakes. The premise is that nuclear explosions are an extreme energy density source, and that the recorded ground motion will provide useful information about the limits of ground motion from extreme earthquakes. The data were categorized by the source and rock properties, and evaluated as to what extent non-linearity in the material has …

In November 2003 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a policy regarding a type of wastewater treatment practice called blending. Some cities use blending to manage peak flows of water and waste into wastewater treatment plants during and after storms as a way to prevent conditions that otherwise result in raw sewage backups into homes and other buildings or overflows into nearby waters. This report provides background on blending, why and how it is practiced, EPA’s proposed policy, associated issues, and congressional interest in the topic.

A Service Class Description (SCD) is an effective meta-data based approach for discovering Deep Web sources whose data exhibit some regular patterns. However, it is tedious and error prone to create an SCD description manually. Moreover, a manually created SCD is not adaptive to the frequent changes of Web sources. It requires its creator to identify all the possible input and output types of a service a priori. In many domains, it is impossible to exhaustively list all the possible input and output data types of a source in advance. In this paper, we describe machine learning approaches for automatic generation of the data types of an SCD. We propose two different approaches for learning data types of a class of Web sources. The Brute-Force Learner is able to generate data types that can achieve high recall, but with low precision. The Clustering-based Learner generates data types that have a high precision rate, but with a lower recall rate. We demonstrate the feasibility of these two learning-based solutions for automatic generation of data types for citation Web sources and presented a quantitative evaluation of these two solutions.

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This report provides historical background on wildfires, and describes concerns about the wildland-urban interface and about forest and rangeland health.

In this project we developed a suite of progressive visualization algorithms and a data-streaming infrastructure that enable interactive exploration of scientific datasets of unprecedented size. The methodology aims to globally optimize the data flow in a pipeline of processing modules. Each module reads a multi-resolution representation of the input while producing a multi-resolution representation of the output. The use of multi-resolution representations provides the necessary flexibility to trade speed for accuracy in the visualization process. Maximum coherency and minimum delay in the data-flow is achieved by extensive use of progressive algorithms that continuously map local geometric updates of the input stream into immediate updates of the output stream. We implemented a prototype software infrastructure that demonstrated the flexibility and scalability of this approach by allowing large data visualization on single desktop computers, on PC clusters, and on heterogeneous computing resources distributed over a wide area network. When processing terabytes of scientific data, we have achieved an effective increase in visualization performance of several orders of magnitude in two major settings: (i) interactive visualization on desktop workstations of large datasets that cannot be stored locally; (ii) real-time monitoring of a large scientific simulation with negligible impact on the computing resources available. …

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The warped spacetime near black holes is one of the most exotic observable environments in the Universe. X-ray spectra from active galaxies obtained with the current generation of X-ray observatories reveal line emission that is modified by both special relativistic and general relativistic effects. The interpretation is that we are witnessing X-ray irradiated matter orbiting in an accretion disk around a supermassive black hole, as it prepares to cross the event horizon. This interpretation, however, is based upon highly schematized models of accretion disk structure. This report describes a project to design a detailed computer model of accretion disk atmospheres, with the goal of elucidating the high radiation density environments associated with mass flows in the curved spacetime near gravitationally collapsed objects. We have evolved the capability to generate realistic theoretical X-ray line spectra of accretion disks, thereby providing the means for a workable exploration of the behavior of matter in the strong-field limit of gravitation.

The research under this grant has focused on three-dimensional numerical simulations, as well as on computational linear stability analysis. In the following, our main results for each of those areas will be described separately. In addition, copies of reprints are attached with this report.

Student newspaper of Harper Independent School District in Harper, Texas that includes school news and information along with advertising.

A new temperature-profile method was recently developed for analyzing perturbed flow conditions in superheated porous media. The method uses high-resolution temperature data to estimate the magnitude of the heat-driven liquid and gas fluxes that form as a result of boiling, condensation, and recirculation of pore water. In this paper, we evaluate the applicability of this new method to the more complex flow behavior in fractured formations with porous rock matrix. In such formations, with their intrinsic heterogeneity, the porous but low-permeable matrix provides most of the mass and heat storage capacity, and dominates conductive heat transfer, Fractures, on the other hand, offer highly effective conduits for gas and liquid flow, thereby generating significant convective heat transfer. After establishing the accuracy of the temperature-profile method for fractured porous formations, we apply the method in analyzing the perturbed flow conditions in a large-scale underground heater test conducted in unsaturated fractured porous tuff. The flux estimates for this test indicate a significant reflux of water near the heat source, on the order of a few hundred millimeter per year-much larger than the ambient percolation flux of only a few millimeter per year.

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In recent years it has been recognized that the application of passive safety systems (i.e., those whose operation takes advantage of natural forces such as convection and gravity), can contribute to simplification and potentially to improved economics of new nuclear power plant designs. In 1991 the IAEA Conference on ''The Safety of Nuclear Power: Strategy for the Future'' noted that for new plants the use of passive safety features is a desirable method of achieving simplification and increasing the reliability of the performance of essential safety functions, and should be used wherever appropriate''.

Interesting plasmas in the laboratory and space are magnetized. General gyrokinetic theory is about a symmetry, gyro-symmetry, in the Vlasov-Maxwell system for magnetized plasmas. The most general gyrokinetic theory can be geometrically formulated. First, the coordinate-free, geometric Vlasov-Maxwell equations are developed in the 7-D phase space, which is defined as a fiber bundle over the space-time. The Poincar{copyright}-Cartan-Einstein 1-form pullbacked onto the 7-D phase space determines particles' worldlines in the phase space, and realizes the momentum integrals in kinetic theory as fiber integrals. The infinite small generator of the gyro-symmetry is then asymptotically constructed as the base for the gyrophase coordinate of the gyrocenter coordinate system. This is accomplished by applying the Lie coordinate perturbation method to the Poincar{copyright}-Cartan-Einstein 1-form, which also generates the most relaxed condition under which the gyro-symmetry still exists. General gyrokinetic Vlasov-Maxwell equations are then developed as the Vlasov-Maxwell equations in the gyrocenter coordinate system, rather than a set of new equations. Since the general gyrokinetic system-developed is geometrically the same as the Vlasov-Maxwell equations, all the coordinate independent properties of the Vlasov-Maxwell equations, such as energy conservation, momentum conservation, and Liouville volume conservation, are automatically carried over to the general gyrokinetic system. The pullback transformation …

In the currently envisioned configurations for heavy ion fusion, it is necessary to longitudinally compress the beam bunches by a large factor after the acceleration phase. Because the space-charge force increases as the beam is compressed, the beam size in the transverse direction will increase in a periodic quadrupole lattice. If an active control of the beam size is desired, a larger focusing force is needed to confine the beam in the transverse direction, and a non-periodic quadrupole lattice along the beam path is necessary. In this paper, we describe the design of such a focusing lattice using the transverse envelope equations. A drift compression and final focus lattice should focus the entire beam pulse onto the same focal spot on the target. This is difficult with a fixed lattice, because different slices of the beam may have different perveance and emittance. Four time-dependent magnets are introduced in the upstream of drift compression to focus the entire pulse onto the sam e focal spot. Drift compression and final focusing schemes are developed for a typical heavy ion fusion driver and for the Integrated Beam Experiment (IBX) being designed by the Heavy Ion Fusion Virtual National Laboratory.

During the 2001-2003 grant period, Institute for Fusion Studies (IFS) scientist made notable progress in a number of research areas. This report summarizes the work that has been accomplished in the following areas: (1) Magnetohydrodynamics; (2) Burning plasma and energetic particle physics; (3) Turbulent transport; (4) Computational physics; (5) Fundamental Theory; (6) Innovative confinement concepts; and (7) Plasma applications.

The compilation of Metal Waste Form (MWF) immersion test data in this document is part of the effort initiated to qualify the stainless steel-15% zirconium (SS-15Zr) alloy for repository disposal. The SS-15Zr alloy was developed as part of the waste stream from the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) electrometallurgical process for spent nuclear fuel. There were four areas of significant relevance concerning MWF performance in a long-term repository setting addressed in the test model. The areas encompassed the study of the effects of (1) the solution aggressiveness [simulated by concentrated J13 solution (CJ13)], (2) high-chloride content of the solution [simulated by 10,000 ppm chloride solution (10KCl)], (3) solution pH [simulated by acidified J13 solution (AJ13)], and (4) the state of the metal surface--polished vs. oxidized on the releases. The simulated J-13 solution was intended to replicate the groundwater in the J-13 well at the Yucca Mountain geologic repository. A fifth area of interest was to determine if the releases were limited by iron saturation of the solution. The data obtained from the entire study will be compared with the data from the High Level Waste Glass (HLWG) form previously qualified for repository disposal. Even though the MWF samples used in these …

The possibility of an asymmetric ponderomotive barrier in a nonuniform dc magnetic field by high-frequency radiation near the cyclotron resonance for selected plasma species was contemplated in Physics of Plasmas 11 (November 2004) 5046-5064. Here we show that a similar one-way barrier, which reflects particles incident from one side while transmitting those incident from the opposite side, can be produced also in a uniform magnetic field, entirely due to inhomogeneity of high-frequency drive.

The 500-700 m thick Yucca Mountain unsaturated zone (UZ) is under extensive investigation as a subsurface repository for the permanent disposal of high-level nuclear wastes. The site characterization has been mostly carried out for analyzing unsaturated flow and radionuclide transport under ambient, isothermal conditions. However, significant research effort has also been devoted to understand the nature of flow and transport processes under non-isothermal conditions. In particular, substantial repository heating from radioactive waste decay has motivated investigations of the coupled thermo-hydrologic (TH) behavior of the UZ under repository heating and its potential impact on repository performance. Significant progress has been made in quantitative coupled TH studies in the last decade. Despite the significant advances made so far in modeling and understanding TH processes, the previous studies have been in general limited to modeling in 1-D and 2-D (instead of the full 3-D representation), and/or small spatial and temporal scale analysis. In addition to these limited modeling exercises, multidimensional modeling has been carried out for large-scale (at the scale of the entire mountain) TH analyses. However, these previous large, mountain-scale TH models utilized the effective continuum model (ECM), rather than the more rigorous dual-continuum model (DKM). This is primarily due to numerical …