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

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

Semiweekly newspaper from Carthage, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Newsletter of Congregation Beth Yeshurun in Houston, including news and events, upcoming services, member announcements, editorials, and other information of interest to congregants.

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

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

This report summarizes the work performed by the Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) under the U.S. Department of Energy Jointly Sponsored Research Program JV Task 92, which is a continuation of JV9. Successful studies performed in 1999 through the end of 2008 demonstrated the potential for using selective supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) and a solid-phase microextraction (SPME) method for measuring sediment pore water polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) to mimic the bioavailability of PAHs from manufactured gas plant and aluminum smelter soils and sediments both in freshwater and saltwater locations. The studies that the EERC has performed with the commercial partners have continued to generate increased interest in both the regulatory communities and in the industries that have historically produced or utilized coal tar products. Both ASTM International and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have accepted the pore water method developed at the EERC as standard methods. The studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of our techniques in predicting bioavailability of PAHs from ca. 250 impacted and background field sediments and soils. The field demonstrations from the final years of the project continued to build the foundation data for acceptance of our methods by the regulatory communities. The JV92 studies …

Methane from oil shale can potentially provide a significant contribution to natural gas industry, and it may be possible to increase and continue methane production by artificially enhancing methanogenic activity through the addition of various substrate and nutrient treatments. Western Research Institute in conjunction with Pick & Shovel Inc. and the U.S. Department of Energy conducted microcosm and scaled-up reactor studies to investigate the feasibility and optimization of biogenic methane production from oil shale. The microcosm study involving crushed oil shale showed the highest yield of methane was produced from oil shale pretreated with a basic solution and treated with nutrients. Incubation at 30 C, which is the estimated temperature in the subsurface where the oil shale originated, caused and increase in methane production. The methane production eventually decreased when pH of the system was above 9.00. In the scaled-up reactor study, pretreatment of the oil shale with a basic solution, nutrient enhancements, incubation at 30 C, and maintaining pH at circumneutral levels yielded the highest rate of biogenic methane production. From this study, the annual biogenic methane production rate was determined to be as high as 6042 cu. ft/ton oil shale.

Semi-weekly newspaper from Livingston, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with advertising.

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We present a new lock-free parallel algorithm for computing betweenness centralityof massive small-world networks. With minor changes to the data structures, ouralgorithm also achieves better spatial cache locality compared to previous approaches. Betweenness centrality is a key algorithm kernel in HPCS SSCA#2, a benchmark extensively used to evaluate the performance of emerging high-performance computing architectures for graph-theoretic computations. We design optimized implementations of betweenness centrality and the SSCA#2 benchmark for two hardware multithreaded systems: a Cray XMT system with the Threadstorm processor, and a single-socket Sun multicore server with the UltraSPARC T2 processor. For a small-world network of 134 million vertices and 1.073 billion edges, the 16-processor XMT system and the 8-core Sun Fire T5120 server achieve TEPS scores (an algorithmic performance count for the SSCA#2 benchmark) of 160 million and 90 million respectively, which corresponds to more than a 2X performance improvement over the previous parallel implementations. To better characterize the performance of these multithreaded systems, we correlate the SSCA#2 performance results with data from the memory-intensive STREAM and RandomAccess benchmarks. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of our implementation to analyze massive real-world datasets by computing approximate betweenness centrality for a large-scale IMDb movie-actor network.

The purpose of this report is to provide a concise but comprehensive overview of Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Climate Research Facility instrumentation status. The report is divided into the following five sections: (1) new instrumentation in the process of being acquired and deployed, (2) field campaigns, (3) existing instrumentation and progress on improvements or upgrades, (4) proposed future instrumentation, and (5) Small Business Innovation Research instrument development.

We compared the Arthrobacter chlorophenolicus proteome during growth on 4-chlorophenol, 4-nitrophenol or phenol at 5 C and 28 C; both for the wild type and a mutant strain with mass spectrometry based proteomics. A label free workflow employing spectral counting identified 3749 proteins across all growth conditions, representing over 70% of the predicted genome and 739 of these proteins form the core proteome. Statistically significant differences were found in the proteomes of cells grown under different conditions including differentiation of hundreds of unknown proteins. The 4-chlorophenol-degradation pathway was confirmed, but not that for phenol.

Cometabolic bioremediation is probably the most under appreciated bioremediation strategy currently available. Cometabolism strategies stimulate only indigenous microbes with the ability to degrade the contaminant and cosubstrate e.g. methane, propane, toluene and others. This highly targeted stimulation insures that only those microbes that can degrade the contaminant are targeted, thus reducing amendment costs, well and formation plugging, etc. Cometabolic bioremediation has been used on some of the most recalcitrant contaminants, e.g. PCE, TCE, MTBE, TNT, dioxane, atrazine, etc. Methanotrophs have been demonstrated to produce methane monooxygense, an oxidase that can degrade over 300 compounds. Cometabolic bioremediation also has the advantage of being able to degrade contaminants to trace concentrations, since the biodegrader is not dependent on the contaminant for carbon or energy. Increasingly we are finding that in order to protect human health and the environment that we must remediate to lower and lower concentrations, especially for compounds like endocrine disrupters, thus cometabolism may be the best and maybe the only possibility that we have to bioremediate some contaminants.

Graph-theoretic abstractions are extensively used to analyze massive data sets. Temporal data streams from socioeconomic interactions, social networking web sites, communication traffic, and scientific computing can be intuitively modeled as graphs. We present the first study of novel high-performance combinatorial techniques for analyzing large-scale information networks, encapsulating dynamic interaction data in the order of billions of entities. We present new data structures to represent dynamic interaction networks, and discuss algorithms for processing parallel insertions and deletions of edges in small-world networks. With these new approaches, we achieve an average performance rate of 25 million structural updates per second and a parallel speedup of nearly28 on a 64-way Sun UltraSPARC T2 multicore processor, for insertions and deletions to a small-world network of 33.5 million vertices and 268 million edges. We also design parallel implementations of fundamental dynamic graph kernels related to connectivity and centrality queries. Our implementations are freely distributed as part of the open-source SNAP (Small-world Network Analysis and Partitioning) complex network analysis framework.

The growing use of the controlled-source electromagnetic method (CSEM) and magnetotellurics (MT) for exploration applications has been driving the development of data acquisition technologies, and three-dimensional (3-D) modeling and imaging techniques. However, targeting increasingly complex geological environments also further enhances the problems inherent in large-scale inversion, such as non-uniqueness and resolution issues. In this paper, we report on two techniques to mitigate these problems. We use 3-D joint CSEM and MT inversion to improve the model resolution. To avoid the suppression of the resolution capacities of one data type, and thus to balance the use of inherent, and ideally complementary information content, different data reweighting schemes are proposed. Further, a hybrid model parameterization approach is presented, where traditional cell-based model parameters are used simultaneously within a parametric inversion. The idea is to limit the non-uniqueness problem, typical for 3-D imaging problems, in order to allow for a more focusing inversion. The methods are demonstrated using synthetic data generated from models with a strong practical relevance.

Weathering of rocks as a result of exposure to water and the atmosphere can cause significant changes in their chemistry and porosity. In low-porosity rocks, such as basalts, changes in porosity, resulting from chemical weathering, are likely to modify the rock's effective diffusivity and permeability, affecting the rate of solute transport and thus potentially the rate of overall weathering to the extent that transport is the rate limiting step. Changes in total porosity as a result of mineral dissolution and precipitation have typically been used to calculate effective diffusion coefficients through Archie's law for reactive transport simulations of chemical weathering, but this approach fails to account for unconnected porosity that does not contribute to transport. In this study, we combine synchrotron X-ray microcomputed tomography ({mu}CT) and laboratory and numerical diffusion experiments to examine changes in both total and effective porosity and effective diffusion coefficients across a weathering interface in a weathered basalt clast from Costa Rica. The {mu}CT data indicate that below a critical value of {approx}9%, the porosity is largely unconnected in the basalt clast. The {mu}CT data were further used to construct a numerical pore network model to determine upscaled, effective diffusivities as a function of total porosity …

This is a report on the comebiotic bioremediation which is the most under-appreciated strategy currently available.

Installations of grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) systems in the United States have increased dramatically in recent years, growing from less than 20 MW in 2000 to nearly 500 MW at the end of 2007, a compound average annual growth rate of 59%. Of particular note is the increasing contribution of 'non-residential' grid-connected PV systems--defined here as those systems installed on the customer (rather than utility) side of the meter at commercial, institutional, non-profit, or governmental properties--to the overall growth trend. Although there is some uncertainty in the numbers, non-residential PV capacity grew from less than half of aggregate annual capacity installations in 2000-2002 to nearly two-thirds in 2007. This relative growth trend is expected to have continued through 2008. This article, which is excerpted from a longer report, focuses specifically on just one subset of the non-residential PV market: systems hosted (and perhaps owned) by commercial, tax-paying entities. Tax-exempt entities (e.g., non-profits or municipalities) face unique issues and have different financing options at their disposal; readers interested in PV financing options for tax-exempt entities can find more information in the Bolinger report.

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

The Sutton-Taylor Feud of DeWitt, Gonzales, Karnes, and surrounding counties began shortly after the Civil War ended. The blood feud continued into the 1890s when the final court case was settled with a governmental pardon. Of all the Texas feuds, the one between the Sutton and Taylor forces lasted longer and covered more ground than any other. William E. Sutton was the only Sutton involved, but he had many friends to wage warfare against the large Taylor family. The causes are still shrouded in mystery and legend, as both sides argued they were just and right. In April 1868 Charles Taylor and James Sharp were shot down in Bastrop County, alleged horse thieves attempting to escape. During this period many men were killed “while attempting to escape.” The killing on Christmas Eve 1868 of Buck Taylor and Dick Chisholm was perhaps the final spark that turned hard feelings into fighting with bullets and knives. William Sutton was involved in both killings. “Who sheds a Taylor's blood, by a Taylor's hand must fall” became a fact of life in South Texas. Violent acts between the two groups now followed. The military reacted against the killing of two of their soldiers in …