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

On May 14, 2008, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced the listing of polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The listing itself was praised by some environmentalists, other parties, who opposed the listing itself, argued that the science supporting listing was weak, but felt that the regulations mitigated some of the economic impacts of the listing.

Development of a first generation prototype (P1) Marx-topology klystron modulator for the International Linear Collider is nearing completion at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. It is envisioned as a smaller, lower cost, and higher reliability alternative to the present, bouncer-topology, 'Baseline Conceptual Design'. The Marx presents several advantages over conventional klystron modulator designs. It is physically smaller; there is no pulse transformer (quite massive at ILC parameters) and the energy storage capacitor bank is quite small, owing to the active droop compensation. It is oil-free; voltage hold-off is achieved using air insulation. It is air cooled; the secondary air-water heat exchanger is physically isolated from the electronic components. The P1-Marx employs all solid state elements; IGBTs and diodes, to control the charge, discharge and isolation of the cells. A general overview of the modulator design and the program status are presented.

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

Many state regulatory commissions and policymakers want utilities to aggressively pursue energy efficiency as a strategy to mitigate demand and energy growth, diversify the resource mix, and provide an alternative to building new, costly generation. However, as the National Action Plan for Energy Efficiency (NAPEE 2007) points out, many utilities continue to shy away from aggressively expanding their energy efficiency efforts when their shareholder's fundamental financial interests are placed at risk by doing so. Thus, there is increased interest in developing effective ratemaking and policy approaches that address utility disincentives to pursue energy efficiency or lack of incentives for more aggressive energy efficiency efforts. New regulatory initiatives to promote increased utility energy efficiency efforts also affect the interests of consumers. Ratepayers and their advocates are concerned with issues of fairness, impacts on rates, and total consumer costs. From the perspective of energy efficiency advocates, the quid pro quo for utility shareholder incentives is the obligation to acquire all, or nearly all, achievable cost-effective energy efficiency. A key issue for state regulators and policymakers is how to maximize the cost-effective energy efficiency savings attained while achieving an equitable sharing of benefits, costs and risks among the various stakeholders. In this study, …

This report explains the different measures of the U.S. government debt, discusses the historical growth in the debt, identifies the current owners of the debt, presents comparisons with government debt in other countries, and examines the potential economic risks associated with a growing federal debt.

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

The incongruous"unexpected inapplicability of the [Crook's fluctuation theorem]" is due to an inexplicable, inappropriate use of inconsistent expressions. The girding is secure.

Generation of attosecond x-ray pulses is attracting much attention within the x-ray free-electron laser (FEL) user community. Several schemes using extremely short laser pulses to manipulate the electron bunches have been proposed. In this paper, we extend the attosecond two-color ESASE scheme proposed by Zholents et al. to the long optical cycle regime using a second detuned laser and a tapered undulator. Both lasers can be about ten-optical-cycles long, with the second laser frequency detuned from the first to optimize the contrast between the central and side current spikes. A tapered undulator mitigates the degradation effect of the longitudinal space charge (LSC) force in the undulator and suppresses the FEL gain of all side current peaks. Simulations using the LCLS parameters show a single attosecond x-ray spike of {approx} 110 attoseconds can be produced. The second laser can also be detuned to coherently control the number of the side x-ray spikes and the length of the radiation pulse.

Modern electron beams have demonstrated the brilliance needed to drive free electron lasers at x-ray wavelengths, with the principle improvements occurring since the invention of the photocathode gun. The state-of-the-art normalized emittance electron beams are now becoming limited by the thermal emittance of the cathode. In both DC and RF photocathode guns, details of the cathode emission physics strongly influence the quantum efficiency and the thermal emittance. Therefore improving cathode performance is essential to increasing the brightness of beams. It is especially important to understand the fundamentals of cathode quantum efficiency and thermal emittance. This paper investigates the relationship between the quantum efficiency and the thermal emittance of metal cathodes using the Fermi-Dirac model for the electron distribution. We derive the thermal emittance and its relationship to the quantum efficiency, and compare our results to those of others.

We describe a setup for the resonance frequency measurement of individual microcantilevers. The setup displays both high spatial selectivity and sensitivity to specimen vibrations by utilizing a tapered uncoated fiber tip. The high sensitivity to specimen vibrations is achieved by the combination of optical Fabry-Perot interferometry and narrow band RF detection. Wave fronts reflected on the specimen and on the fiber tip end face interfere, thus no reference plane on the specimen is needed, as demonstrated with the example of freestanding silicon nitride micro-cantilevers. The resulting system is integrated in a DB-235 dual beam FIB system, thereby allowing the measurement of micro-cantilever responses during observation in SEM mode. The FIB was used to modify the optical fiber tip. At this point of our RF system development, the microcantilevers used to characterize the detector were not modified in situ.

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Weekly student newspaper from Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, Texas that includes campus and local news along with advertising.

This report discusses selected campaign finance policy issues that may receive attention during the 111th congress. Questions about the health of the presidential public financing system were especially prominent during the 2008 election cycle.

This report provides analysis of the education tax credit program.

Weekly newspaper from Mannford, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

This report discusses tax policy in relation to capital gains. Proposals dealing with the taxation of capital gains have ranged from the outright elimination of capital gains taxation to the reduction of capital gains tax rates for certain classes of taxpayers to the elimination of the preferential tax treatment.

This report describes the FY2009 appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Administration requested a net appropriation of $38, 849 million in budget authority for FY2009.

Omega3P is a parallel eigenmode calculation code for accelerator cavities in frequency domain analysis using finite-element methods. In this report, we will present detailed finite-element formulations and resulting eigenvalue problems for lossless cavities, cavities with lossy materials, cavities with imperfectly conducting surfaces, and cavities with waveguide coupling. We will discuss the parallel algorithms for solving those eigenvalue problems and demonstrate modeling of accelerator cavities through different examples.

This report discusses the congressional activities that have included ratification of the UNFCCC (1992), enactment of implementing legislation and funding of research and development of climate change.

A new understanding of thermodynamics at the nanoscale resulted in a recently discovered first order phase transition that nanoparticles in a polymer film will all segregate to the supporting substrate. This is an unusual phase transition that was predicted using a modeling technique developed at Sandia National Laboratories and required the equivalent of many computational years on one computer. This project is a collaboration between Prof. Michael Mackay's group and Dr. Amalie Frischknecht (Sandia National Laboratories) where experimental observation and theoretical rationalization and prediction are brought together. Other discoveries were that this phase transition could be avoided by changing the nanoparticle properties yielding control of the assembly process at the nanoscale. In fact, the nanoparticles could be made to assemble to the supporting substrate, to the air interface or not assemble at all within a thin polymer film of order 100 nm in thickness. However, when the assembly process is present it is so robust that it is possible to make rough liquid films at the nanoscale due to nanoparticles assembling around three-dimensional objects. From this knowledge we are able to design and manufacture new coatings with particular emphasis on polymer-based solar cells. Careful control of the morphology at the …

Weekly newspaper from Yoakum, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) microscopy is an important tool for the investigation of the performance of EUV masks, for detecting the presence and the characteristics of defects, and for evaluating the effectiveness of defect repair techniques. Aerial image measurement bypasses the difficulties inherent to photoresist imaging and enables high data collection speed and flexibility. It provides reliable and quick feedback for the development of masks and lithography system modeling methods. We operate the SEMATECH Berkeley Actinic Inspection Tool (AIT), a EUV microscope installed at the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The AIT is equipped with several high-magnification Fresnel zoneplate lenses, with various numerical aperture values, that enable it image the reflective mask surface with various resolution and magnification settings. Although the AIT has undergone significant recent improvements in terms of imaging resolution and illumination uniformity, there is still room for improvement. In the AIT, an off-axis zoneplate lens collects the light coming from the sample and an image of the sample is projected onto an EUV-sensitive CCD camera. The simplicity of the optical system is particularly helpful considering that the AIT alignment has to be performed every time that a sample or a zoneplate is replaced. The alignment …

Weekly newspaper from The Colony, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.