A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Every year, disease and other conditions kill about 10 million children younger than 5 years, and more than 500,000 women die from pregnancy and childbirth-related causes. To help improve their health, Congress created the Child Survival and Health Programs Fund. The 2006 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act directed GAO to review the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) use of the fund for fiscal years 2004 and 2005. Committees of jurisdiction indicated their interest centered on the Child Survival and Maternal Health (CS/MH) account of the fund. GAO examined USAID's (1) allocations, obligations, and expenditures of CS/MH funds; (2) activities undertaken with those funds; (3) methods for disseminating CS/MH information; and (4) response to challenges to its CS/MH programs. GAO conducted surveys of 40 health officers, visited USAID missions in four countries, interviewed USAID officials, and reviewed data."

A senior recital presented at the UNT College of Music Stan Kenton Hall in partial fulfillment of the Bachelor of Music (BM) degree.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Airbus S.A.S. (Airbus), a European aircraft manufacturer, is introducing a new aircraft designated as the A380, which is expected to enter service in late 2007. The A380 will be the largest passenger aircraft in the world, with a wingspan of about 262 feet, a tail fin reaching 80 feet high, and a maximum takeoff weight of 1.2 million pounds. The A380 has a double deck and could seat up to 853 passengers. GAO was asked to examine the impact of the A380 on U.S. airports. In May 2006, GAO issued a report that estimated the costs of infrastructure changes at U.S. airports to accommodate the A380. This report discusses (1) the safety issues associated with introducing the A380 at U.S. airports, (2) the potential impact of A380 operations on the capacity of U.S. airports, and (3) how selected foreign airports are preparing to accommodate the A380. To address these issues, GAO reviewed studies on operational and safety issues related to the A380 and conducted site visits to the 18 U.S. airports and 11 Asian, Canadian, and European airports preparing to receive the A380. GAO provided the …

Various relations for the detonation energy and velocity as they relate to the inverse radius of the cylinder are explored. The detonation rate-inverse slope relation seen in reactive flow models can be used to derive the familiar Eyring equation. Generalized inverse radii can be shown to fit large quantities of cylinder and sphere results. A rough relation between detonation energy and detonation velocity is found from collected JWL values. Cylinder test data for ammonium nitrate mixes down to 6.35 mm radii are presented, and a size energy effect is shown to exist in the Cylinder test data. The relation that detonation energy is roughly proportional to the square of the detonation velocity is shown by data and calculation.

The Fort Bidwell Indian Reservation (FBIR) is rich in renewable energy resources. Development of its geothermal resources has the potential to profoundly affect the energy and economic future of the FBIC. Geothermal energy can contribute to making the reservation energy self-sufficient and, potentially, an energy exporter. The feasibility study assessed the feasibility of installing a geothermal district heating system to provide low-cost, efficient heating of existing and planned residences, community buildings and water, using an existing geothermal well, FB-3.

A spin-resolving photoelectron spectrometer, the"Spin Spectrometer," has been designed and built. It has been utilized at both the Advanced Light Source in Berkeley, CA, and the Advanced Photon Source in Argonne, IL. Technical details and an example of experimental results are presented here.

In this paper we describe our design, implementation, and first results of a prototype connected-phoneme-based speech recognition system on the Cell Broadband Engine{trademark} (Cell/B.E.). Automatic speech recognition decodes speech samples into plain text (other representations are possible) and must process samples at real-time rates. Fortunately, the computational tasks involved in this pipeline are highly data-parallel and can receive significant hardware acceleration from vector-streaming architectures such as the Cell/B.E. Identifying and exploiting these parallelism opportunities is challenging, but also critical to improving system performance. We observed, from our initial performance timings, that a single Cell/B.E. processor can recognize speech from thousands of simultaneous voice channels in real time--a channel density that is orders-of-magnitude greater than the capacity of existing software speech recognizers based on CPUs (central processing units). This result emphasizes the potential for Cell/B.E.-based speech recognition and will likely lead to the future development of production speech systems using Cell/B.E. clusters.

The authors present a series of benchmark measurements of the ionization balance of well characterized gold plasmas with and without external radiation fields at electron densities near 10{sup 21} cm{sup -3} and various electron temperatures spanning the range 0.8 to 2.4 keV. They have analyzed time- and space-resolved M-shell gold emission spectra using a sophisticated collisional-radiative model with hybrid level structure, finding average ion changes <Z> ranging from 42 to 50. At the lower temperatures, the spectra exhibit significant sensitivity to external radiation fields and include emission features from complex N-shell ions not previously studied at these densities. The measured spectra and inferred <Z> provide a stringent test for non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (non-LTE) models of complex high-Z ions.

This technical memorandum (TM) describes the technology requirements for three alternative energy technologies for which pilot and/or commercial projects on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) are likely to be proposed within the next five to seven years. For each of the alternative technologies--wind, wave, and ocean current--the TM first presents an overview. After each technology-specific overview, it describes the technology requirements for four development phases: site monitoring and testing, construction, operation, and decommissioning. For each phase, the report covers the following topics (where data are available): facility description, electricity generated, ocean area (surface and bottom) occupied, resource requirements, emissions and noise sources, hazardous materials stored or used, transportation requirements, and accident potential. Where appropriate, the TM distinguishes between pilot-scale (or demonstration-scale) facilities and commercial-scale facilities.

A series of self-assembled InN dots are grown by radio frequency (RF) plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) directly on nitrided sapphire. Initial nitridation of the sapphire substrates at 900 C results in the formation of a rough AlN surface layer, which acts as a very thin buffer layer and facilitates the nucleation of the InN dots according to the Stranski-Krastanow growth mode, with a wetting layer of {approx}0.9 nm. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) reveals that well-confined InN nanoislands with the greatest height/width at half-height ratio of 0.64 can be grown at 460 C. Lower substrate temperatures result in a reduced aspect ratio due to a lower diffusion rate of the In adatoms, whereas the thermal decomposition of InN truncates the growth at T>500 C. The densities of separated dots vary between 1.0 x 10{sup 10} cm{sup -2} and 2.5 x 10{sup 10} cm{sup -2} depending on the growth time. Optical response of the InN dots under laser excitation is studied with apertureless near-field scanning optical microscopy and photoluminescence spectroscopy, although no photoluminescence is observed from these samples. In view of the desirable implementation of InN nanostructures into photonic devices, the results indicate that nitrided sapphire is a suitable substrate for …

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Weekly magazine edition of the daily student newspaper from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Dallas, Texas that includes local, state, and national news and advertising of interest to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community.

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As Congress considers immigration reform and ways to address the unauthorized alien population, the issue of unauthorized employment is the focus of much discussion. This report discusses options for addressing unauthorized employment in the United States.

This report discusses the federal aid for K-12 education program authorized by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).

This report provides information on reported instances of North Korean provocations against South Korea, the United States, and Japan between June 1950 and 2007 and related actions. Reports of North Korean involvement in drug trafficking and "political and other extrajudicial killing" are outside the purview of this report.

The ability for Li-ion batteries to operate at low temperatures is extremely critical for the development of energy storage for electric and hybrid electric vehicle technologies. Currently, Li-ion cells have limited success in operating at temperature below –10 deg C. Electrolyte conductivity at low temperature is not the main cause of the poor performance of Li-ion cells. Rather the formation of a tight interfacial film between the electrolyte and the electrodes has often been an issue that resulted in a progressive capacity fading and limited discharge rate capability. The objective of our Phase I work is to develop novel electrolytes that can form low interfacial resistance solid electrolyte interface (SEI) films on carbon anodes and metal oxide cathodes. From the results of our Phase I work, we found that the interfacial impedance of Fluoro Ethylene Carbonate (FEC) electrolyte at the low temperature of –20degC is astonishingly low, compared to the baseline 1.2M LiPFEMC:EC:PC:DMC (10:20:10:60) electrolyte. We found that electrolyte formulations with fluorinated carbonate co-solvent have excellent film forming properties and better de-solvation characteristics to decrease the interfacial SEI film resistance and facilitate the Li-ion diffusion across the SEI film. The very overwhelming low interfacial impedance for FEC electrolytes will translate …

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

This is a final report on Doe No. DE- FG02. This includes the details of collisionless reconnection in an electron-positron plasma and also nonlinear evolution of the g-mode

Identifying light mesons which contain only up/down quarks (pions) from those containing a strange quark (kaons) over the typical meter length scales of a particle physics detector requires instrumentation capable of measuring flight times with a resolution on the order of 20ps. In the last few years a large number of inexpensive, multi-channel Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) chips have become available. These devices typically have timing resolution performance in the hundreds of ps regime. A technique is presented that is a monolithic version of ``time stretcher'' solution adopted for the Belle Time-Of-Flight system to address this gap between resolution need and intrinsic multi-hit TDC performance.

The Lower Brule Sioux Tribe is a federally recognized Indian tribe organized pursuant to the 1934 Wheeler-Howard Act (“Indian Reorganization Act”). The Lower Brule Sioux Indian Reservation lies along the west bank of Lake Francis Case and Lake Sharpe, which were created by the Fort Randall and Big Bend dams of the Missouri River pursuant to the Pick Sloan Act. The grid accessible at the Big Bend Dam facility operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is less than one mile of the wind farm contemplated by the Tribe in this response. The low-head hydroelectric turbines further being studied would be placed below the dam and would be turned by the water released from the dam itself. The riverbed at this place is within the exterior boundaries of the reservation. The low-head turbines in the tailrace would be evaluated to determine if enough renewable energy could be developed to pump water to a reservoir 500 feet above the river.

One of the important research questions in high energy density science (HEDS) is how intense laser and electron beams penetrate into and interact with matter. At high beam intensities the self-fields of the laser and particle beams can fully ionize matter so that beam -matter interactions become beam-plasma interactions. These interactions involve a disparity of length and time scales, and they involve interactions between particles, between particles and waves, and between waves and waves. In a plasma what happens in one region can significantly impact another because the particles are free to move and many types of waves can be excited. Therefore, simulating these interactions requires tools that include wave particle interactions and that include wave nonlinearities. One methodology for studying such interactions is particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. While PIC codes include most of the relevant physics they are also the most computer intensive. However, with the development of sophisticated software and the use of massively parallel computers, PIC codes can now be used to accurately study a wide range of problems in HEDS. The research in this project involved building, maintaining, and using the UCLA parallel computing infrastructure. This infrastructure includes the codes OSIRIS and UPIC which have been improved …