A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Federal and state trade promotion activities are intended to help U.S. firms compete successfully in foreign markets. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SME)--firms with fewer than 500 employees--represent a key segment of exporting firms. GAO was asked to determine (1) the relationship between the Department of Commerce's (Commerce) U.S. Commercial Service (CS) and states' trade offices' export promotion programs, (2) CS's methodology and practices for determining costs and establishing user fees for export promotion services, and (3) how CS's user fees affect SMEs' use of its programs. GAO conducted a survey of states' trade offices and reviewed data such as export promotion budgets and fees, program information, government standards, and user fee studies. GAO met with officials from Commerce, the State International Development Organizations, six states' trade offices, and others."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) overarching mission is to protect human health and the environment by implementing and enforcing environmental laws intended to improve the quality of the nation's air and water and to protect its land. EPA's policies and programs affect virtually all segments of the economy, society, and government. As such, it operates in a highly complex and controversial regulatory arena. In recent years, GAO has identified several key challenges EPA faces and corrective actions that would enable the agency to more effectively accomplish its mission. GAO was asked to identify challenges at EPA that hinder its ability to implement its programs effectively, based on prior GAO work. These challenges include (1) improving agencywide management, (2) transforming EPA's processes for assessing and controlling toxic chemicals, (3) improving implementation of the Clean Air Act, (4) reducing pollution in the nation's waters, (5) speeding the pace of cleanup at Superfund and other hazardous waste sites, and (6) addressing emerging climate change issues."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) management of the 287(g) program. Recent reports indicate that the total population of unauthorized aliens residing in the United States is about 12 million. Some of these aliens have committed one or more crimes, although the exact number of aliens that have committed crimes is unknown. Some crimes are serious and pose a threat to the security and safety of communities. ICE does not have the agents or the detention space that would be required to address all criminal activity committed by unauthorized aliens. Thus, state and local law enforcement officers play a critical role in protecting our homeland because, during the course of their daily duties, they may encounter foreign-national criminals and immigration violators who pose a threat to national security or public safety. On September 30, 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act was enacted and added section 287(g) to the Immigration and Nationality Act. This section authorizes the federal government to enter into agreements with state and local law enforcement agencies, and to train selected state and local …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Energy (DOE) manages over 100 construction projects with estimated costs over $90 billion and 97 nuclear waste cleanup projects with estimated costs over $230 billion. DOE has about 14,000 employees to oversee the work of more than 93,000 contractor employees. Due to DOE's history of inadequate oversight and management of contractors, GAO continues to include DOE contract and project management on its list of government programs at high risk for fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. This testimony discusses (1) recent GAO work on contract and project management within two of DOE's largest program offices--the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the Office of Environmental Management (EM), (2) preliminary results of ongoing GAO work on project management at NNSA's Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) project at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and (3) actions needed by NNSA and EM to improve contract and project management. GAO's reports over the past 3 years have contained nearly 60 recommendations collectively calling for DOE to ensure that project management requirements are consistently followed, to improve oversight of contractors, and to strengthen accountability. While DOE has generally …

This report provides analysis of the education tax credit program.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) commitment to assuring the health and safety of its workers includes the conduct of epidemiologic surveillance activities that provide an early warning system for health problems among workers. The Illness and Injury Surveillance Program monitors illnesses and health conditions that result in an absence of workdays, occupational injuries and illnesses, and disabilities and deaths among current workers.

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.

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.

The conclusions of this presentation are: (1) Fuel cells operating on bio-gas offer a pathway to renewable electricity generation; (2) With federal incentives of $3,500/kW or 30% of the project costs, reasonable payback periods of less than five years can be achieved; (3) Tri-generation of electricity, heat, and hydrogen offers an alternative route to solving the H{sub 2} infrastructure problem facing fuel cell vehicle deployment; and (4) DOE will be promoting bio-gas fuel cells in the future under its Market Transformation Programs.

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.

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.

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, …

For more than fifteen years before the International Technology Recommendation Panel (ITRP) decision in August, 2004, there were intensive R&D activities and broad international collaboration among the groups at SLAC, KEK, FNAL, LLNL and other labs for the room temperature X-Band accelerator structures. The goal was to provide an optimized design of the main linac structure for the NLC (Next Linear Collider) or GLC (Global Linear Collider). There have been two major challenges in developing X-band accelerator structures for the linear colliders. The first is to demonstrate stable, long-term operation at the high gradient (65 MV/m) that is required to optimize the machine cost. The second is to strongly suppress the beam induced long-range wakefields, which is required to achieve high luminosity. More than thirty X-band accelerator structures with various RF parameters, cavity shapes and coupler types have been fabricated and tested since 1989. A summary of the main achievements and experiences are presented in this talk including the structure design, manufacturing techniques, high power performance, and other structure related issues. Also, the new progress in collaborating with the CLIC, high gradient structures and X-Band structure applications for RF deflectors and others are briefly introduced.

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

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 …

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 …

We propose a scheme that combines the echo-enabled harmonic generation technique with the bunch compression and allows to generate harmonic numbers of a few hundred in a microbunched beam through up-conversion of the frequency of an ultraviolet seed laser. Sending this beam through a short undulator results in an isolated sub-100 attoseconds pulse of x-ray radiation. Using a representative realistic set of parameters, we show that 1 nm x-ray pulse with peak power exceeding 100 MW and duration as short as 34 attoseconds (FWHM) can be generated from a 200 nm ultraviolet seed laser.

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.

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Other written product issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This document is an E-supplement to GAO-09-144. It presents information from a GAO survey of states' trade offices throughout the United States on the nature of states' export promotion services and their partnerships with the Commercial Service (CS) of the U.S. Department of Commerce. We surveyed these offices to obtain information including (1) the types of export promotion services these states' trade offices provide and the user fees charged, (2) the number of state trade office staff providing these services, (3) whether small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) can use state grant programs or direct payments to defray the cost of CS's export promotion programs and services, (4) the importance of CS services to the operations of states' trade offices, and (5) the effect of CS user fees on SMEs' participation in CS export promotion programs. We surveyed all 50 states' trade offices and received responses from 45 of them. For a further discussion of our scope and methodology, see Export Promotion: Commerce Needs Better Information to Evaluate Its Fee-Based Programs and Customers. (GAO-09-144). We administered the survey from May 2008 to October 2008 in accordance with …

This report discusses the social security benefits and the spousal benefits of individuals who are not financially dependent on their spouses because they receive benefits based on their own work records.

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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.