A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Forest Service manages over 192 million acres of land, in part through vegetation management projects such as thinning trees. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires the Forest Service to prepare either an environmental assessment (EA) or an environmental impact statement (EIS) before approving a project that may significantly affect the environment. The agency generally does not need to prepare such environmental analyses, however, if the project involves categories of activities that it previously found to have no significant environmental effects--activities known as a categorical exclusion. As of 2003, the Forest Service had one categorical exclusion--activities to improve timber stands or wildlife habitat. It has since added four new exclusions, but little is known about their use. GAO was asked to determine, for calendar years 2003 through 2005, (1) how many vegetation management projects the Forest Service approved, including those approved using categorical exclusions; (2) which categorical exclusions the agency used in approving projects; and (3) if field offices are not using categorical exclusions, why. To answer these objectives, GAO surveyed Forest Service officials from all of the 155 national forests. In commenting on a …

We classify {Lambda}{sub QCD}/m{sub b} power corrections to nonleptonic B {yields} M{sub 1}M{sub 2} decays, where M{sub 1,2} are charmless non-isosinglet mesons. Using recent developments in soft-collinear effective theory, we prove that the leading contributions to annihilation amplitudes of order {alpha}{sub s}(m{sub b}) {Lambda}{sub QCD}/m{sub b} are real. The leading annihilation amplitudes depend on twist-2 and the twist-3 three parton distributions. A complex nonperturbative parameter from annihilation first appears at {Omega}[{alpha}{sub s}{sup 2}({radical}{Lambda}m{sub b}){Lambda}{sub QCD}/m{sub b}]. 'Chirally enhanced' contributions are also factorizable and real at lowest order. Thus, incalculable strong phases are suppressed in annihilation amplitudes, unless the {alpha}{sub s}({radical}{Lambda}m{sub b}) expansion breaks down. Modeling the distribution functions, we find that (11 {+-} 9)% and (15 {+-} 11)% of the absolute values of the measured {bar B}{sup 0} {yields} K{sup -}{pi}{sup +} and B{sup -} {yields} K{sup -}K{sup 0} penguin amplitudes come from annihilation. This is consistent with the expected size of power corrections.

In the highly technological aerospace world paper is still widely used to document space system integration and test (I&T) operations. E-Logbook is a new technology designed to substitute the most commonly used paper logbooks in space system I&T, such as the connector mate/demate logbook, the flight hardware and flight software component installation logbook, the material mix record logbook and the electronic ground support equipment validation logbook. It also includes new logbook concepts, such as the shift logbook, which optimizes management oversight and the shift hand-over process, and the configuration logbook, which instantly reports on the global I&T state of the space system before major test events or project reviews. The design of E-Logbook focuses not only on a reliable and efficient relational database, but also on an ergonomic human-computer interactive (HCI) system that can help reduce human error and improve I&T management and oversight overall. E-Logbook has been used for the I&T operation of the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) Large Area Telescope (LAT) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). More than 41,000 records have been created for the different I&T logbooks, with no data having been corrupted or critically lost. 94% of the operators and 100% of …

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

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

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Estimating carbon (C) balance in erosional and depositionallandscapes is complicated by the effects of soil redistribution on bothnet primary productivity (NPP) and decomposition. Recent studies arecontradictory as to whether soil erosion does or does not constitute a Csink. Here we clarify the conceptual basis for how erosion can constitutea C sink. Specifically, the criterion for an erosional C sink is thatdynamic replacement of eroded C, and reduced decomposition rates indepositional sites, must together more than compensate for erosionallosses. This criterion is in fact met in many erosional settings, andthus erosion and deposition can make a net positive contribution to Csequestration. We show that, in a cultivated Mississippi watershed and acoastal California watershed, the magnitude of the erosion-induced C sinkis likely to be on the order of 1 percent of NPP and 16 percent of erodedC. Although soil erosion has serious environmental impacts, the annualerosion-induced C sink offsets up to 10 percent of the global fossil fuelemissions of carbon dioxide for 2005.

We report on the status of our QCD thermodynamics project. It is performed on the QCDOC machine at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the APEnext machine at Bielefeld University. Using a 2 + 1 flavor formulation of QCD at almost realistic quark masses we calculated several thermodynamical quantities. In this proceeding we show the susceptibilities of the chiral condensate and the Polyakov loop, the static quark potential and the spatial string tension.

We report the generation of ultrabroadband pulses spanningthe 50-130 THz frequency range via phase-matched difference frequencymixing within the broad spectrum of sub-10 fs pulses in LiIO_3. Modelcalculations reproduce the octave-spanning spectra and predict few-cycleTHz pulse durations less than 20~;fs. The applicability of this scheme isdemonstrated with 9-fs pulses from a Ti:sapphire oscillator and with 7-fsamplified pulses from a hollow fiber compressor as pumpsources.

The decay constant f{sub D{sub s}} of the pseudoscalar strange charm meson D{sub s}{sup +} is an important benchmark test of the theoretical methods that quantitatively describe the nonperturbative low-energy regime of QCD, the theory of the strong interaction. A confirmation of the validity of these predictive methods, foremost lattice QCD, in the sector of heavy-light meson decay constants increases trust in the calculation of f{sub B}, which is an important number for the measurement of the CKM matrix element V{sub td} in B{sup 0}{bar B}{sup 0}-mixing events. From October 1999 through July 2004, the BABAR experiment, located at the PEP-II storage ring at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, collected 230.2 fb{sup -1} of data in e{sup +}e{sup -} collision at {radical}s = 10.58 GeV. In this thesis, these data are searched for e{sup +}e{sup -} {yields} c{bar c} events by identifying sets of charged and neutral pions and charged kaons, consistent with the decay of a charm meson, D{sup 0}, D{sup +}, D{sub s}{sup +}, or D*{sup +}. A sample of 510,000 charmed mesons with a momentum consistent with e{sup +}e{sup -} {yields} c{bar c} events is identified.

A technical safeguards challenge has remained for decades for the IAEA to identify possible diversion of nuclear fuel pins from Light Water Reactor (LWR) spent fuel assemblies. In fact, as modern nuclear power plants are pushed to higher power levels and longer fuel cycles, fuel failures (i.e., ''leakers'') as well as the corresponding fuel assembly repairs (i.e., ''reconstitutions'') are commonplace occurrences within the industry. Fuel vendors have performed hundreds of reconstitutions in the past two decades, thus, an evolved know-how and sophisticated tools exist to disassemble irradiated fuel assemblies and replace damaged pins with dummy stainless steel or other type rods. Various attempts have been made in the past two decades to develop a technology to identify a possible diversion of pin(s) and to determine whether some pins are missing or replaced with dummy or fresh fuel pins. However, to date, there are no safeguards instruments that can detect a possible pin diversion scenario to the requirements of the IAEA. The FORK detector system [1-2] can characterize spent fuel assemblies using operator declared data, but it is not sensitive enough to detect missing pins from spent fuel assemblies. Likewise, an emission computed tomography system [3] has been used to try …

We have performed a large set of high-resolution cosmological simulations using smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) to study the formation of the first luminous objects in the {Lambda}CDM cosmology. We follow the collapse of primordial gas clouds in eight early structures and document the scatter in the properties of the first star-forming clouds. Our first objects span formation redshifts from z {approx} 10 to z {approx} 50 and cover an order of magnitude in halo mass. We find that the physical properties of the central star-forming clouds are very similar in all of the simulated objects despite significant differences in formation redshift and environment. This suggests that the formation path of the first stars is largely independent of the collapse redshift; the physical properties of the clouds have little correlation with spin, mass, or assembly history of the host halo. The collapse of proto-stellar objects at higher redshifts progresses much more rapidly due to the higher densities, which accelerates the formation of molecular hydrogen, enhances initial cooling and shortens the dynamical timescales. The mass of the star-forming clouds cover a broad range, from a few hundred to a few thousand solar masses, and exhibit various morphologies: some have disk-like structures which …

Many dynamic systems involve a number of entities that are largely independent of each other but interact with each other via a subset of state variables. We present global/local dynamic models (GLDMs) to capture these kinds of systems. In a GLDM, the state of an entity is decomposed into a globally influenced state that depends on other entities, and a locally influenced state that depends only on the entity itself. We present an inference algorithm for GLDMs called global/local particle filtering, that introduces the principle of reasoning globally about global dynamics and locally about local dynamics. We have applied GLDMs to an asymmetric urban warfare environment, in which enemy units form teams to attack important targets, and the task is to detect such teams as they form. Experimental results for this application show that global/local particle filtering outperforms ordinary particle filtering and factored particle filtering.

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

Funeral program for Connie W. Riddick, born September 24, 1924 and died October 5, 2006. The funeral was held Tuesday, October 10, 2006 at East St. Paul United Methodist Church, officiated by Rev. Maurice Washington. Funeral arrangements were made through Sutton-Sutton Mortuary and she was buried in Southern Memorial Park in San Antonio, Texas.

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This report begins with an inventory of basic information: definitions and guides to histories of the growth of open access publishing and citation archives and descriptions of selected major open access activities. It moves on to summarize major points of difference between proponents and opponents of nongovernmental open access publishing and databases, and then highlights federal, including National Institutes of Health (NIH), open access activities and contentious issues surrounding these developments. The report also briefly describes open access developments in the United Kingdom (where a number of governmental and nongovernmental initiatives have occurred) and in the international arena. Finally, controversial issues which could receive attention in the 109th Congress are summarized.

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This report provides information about The 2003 Treaty on Extradition Between the United States and Great Britain where the treaty proved controversially before the senate would give its contest it insisted upon modifications, some quite unusual.

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This report contains two tables that show estimated Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) allocations to the states. Table 1 shows amounts proposed by the President, House of Representatives, and Senate for FY2007, while Table 2 shows estimated state allocations at other hypothetical increments.

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