A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "For the Spanish translation of the highlights page for this document, see GAO-06-1111. Ley para que ningun nino se quede atras: La ayuda del Departamento de Educacion puede contribuir a que los Estados midan mejor el progreso de los alumnos que no dominan bien el ingles. GAO-06-1111, Julio de 2006. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLBA) focused attention on the academic achievement of more than 5 million students with limited English proficiency. Obtaining valid test results for these students is challenging, given their language barriers. This report describes (1) the extent to which these students are meeting annual academic progress goals, (2) what states have done to ensure the validity of their academic assessments, (3) what states are doing to ensure the validity of their English language proficiency assessments, and (4) how the U.S. Department of Education (Education) is supporting states' efforts to meet NCLBA's assessment requirements for these students. To collect this information, we convened a group of experts and studied five states (California, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, and Texas). We also conducted a state survey and reviewed state and Education …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The U.S. rail transit system is a vital component of the nation's transportation infrastructure. Safety and security oversight of rail transit is the responsibility of state-designated oversight agencies following Federal Transit Administration (FTA) requirements. In this report, GAO addressed: (1) how the State Safety Oversight program is designed; (2) what is known about the program's impact; and (3) challenges facing the program. We also provide information about oversight of transit systems that cross state boundaries. To do our work we surveyed state oversight agencies and transit agencies covered by FTA's program."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 2006, the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program is expected to collect over $37 billion in taxes from employers to pay $34 billion in benefits to unemployed workers. Under state UI programs, employers' tax contributions are experience-rated--that is, they reflect the extent to which they laid off workers who then collected benefits. To examine the equity of this system, we met with officials from five states, reviewed prior studies, and examined state data to determine (1) how states ensure that employers pay UI taxes based on their experience with unemployment, and the aspects of state unemployment insurance systems that limit experience rating; (2) the extent to which employers pay unemployment insurance taxes commensurate with unemployment benefits paid to their former employees; and how this varies by industry; and (3) steps states could take to increase the degree of experience rating. We provided a draft of this report to the Department of Labor (Labor) for its review. Overall, Labor agreed with our findings."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This report responds to a legislative mandate to report on the effects of certain program changes on the actuarial soundness of the Survivor Benefit Plan (SBP) program, which is part of the Department of Defense's (DOD) Military Retirement Fund (Fund). The primary purpose of the SBP is to provide benefits to the surviving dependents of deceased members or retirees of the armed forces. In certain cases, individuals other than dependents can be designated recipients of survivor benefits. The Fund accumulates financing resources in order to fund, on an actuarially sound basis, the liabilities of the military retirement and SBP programs. The SBP was created by legislation enacted on September 21, 1972, and has been modified various times by subsequent legislation. The fiscal year 2006 National Defense Authorization Act requires that we report to Congress on (1) the effect of recent significant SBP program changes on the actuarial soundness of the program, (2) the effect of these significant SBP program changes by the various categories of participants and in total on (a) DOD normal cost payments for the program and (b) Department of the Treasury (Treasury) payments to amortize …

Photograph used for a newspaper owned by the Oklahoma Publishing Company. Caption: "David Brown Birthday Party"

Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

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

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Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

Image of a student seated at a desk-top arrangement featuring NEC systems that are attached to an EDAX machine. On one of the displays an Omniprobe software system is open. He is taking in data from something very small.

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The project employed new processes to make emulsion polymers from reduced levels of petroleum-derived chemical feedstocks. Most waterborne paints contain spherical, emulsion polymer particles that serve as the film-forming binder phase. Our goal was to make emulsion polymer particles containing 30 percent feedstock that would function as effectively as commercial emulsions made from higher level feedstock. The processes developed yielded particles maintained their film formation capability and binding capacity while preserving the structural integrity of the particles after film formation. Rohm and Haas Company (ROH) and Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) worked together to employ novel polymer binders (ROH) and new, non-volatile, biomass-derived coalescing agents (ADM). The University of Minnesota Department of Chemical Engineering and Material Science utilized its unique microscopy capabilities to characterize films made from the New Emulsion Polymers (NEP).

Inyo County has participated in oversight activities associated with the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository since 1987. The overall goal of these studies are the evaluation of far-field issues related to potential transport, by ground water, or radionuclides into Inyo County, including Death Valley, and the evaluation of a connection between the Lower Carbonate Aquifer (LCA) and the biosphere. Our oversight and completed Cooperative Agreement research, and a number of other investigators research indicate that there is groundwater flow between the alluvial and carbonate aquifers both at Yucca Mountain and in Inyo County. In addition to the potential of radionuclide transport through the LCA, Czarnecki (1997), with the US Geological Survey, research indicate potential radionuclide transport through the shallower Tertiary-age aquifer materials with ultimate discharge into the Franklin Lake Playa in Inyo County. The specific purpose of this Cooperative Agreement drilling program was to acquire geological, subsurface geology, and hydrologic data to: (1) establish the existence of inter-basin flow between the Amargosa Basin and Death Valley Basin; (2) characterize groundwater flow paths in the LCA through Southern Funeral Mountain Range, and (3) Evaluation the hydraulic connection between the Yucca Mountain repository and the major springs in Death Valley through the …

This summer I worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in a bioforensics collection and extraction research group under David Camp. The group is involved with researching efficiencies of various methods for collecting bioforensic evidence from crime scenes. The different methods under examination are a wipe, swab, HVAC filter and a vacuum. The vacuum is something that has particularly gone uncharacterized. My time was spent mostly on modeling and calculations work, but at the end of the summer I completed my internship with a few experiments to supplement my calculations. I had two major projects this summer. My first major project this summer involved fluid mechanics modeling of collection and extraction situations. This work examines different fluid dynamic models for the case of a micron spore attached to a fiber. The second project I was involved with was a statistical analysis of the different sampling techniques.

The primary objective of this project was to develop an energy efficient, environmentally friendly and low cost process (compared to the current process) for making tackifier dispersions that are used to make pressure-sensitive adhesives. These adhesives are employed in applications such as self-adhesive postage stamps and disposable diapers and are made by combining the tackifier dispersion with a natural or synthetic rubber latex. The current process for tackifier dispersion manufacture begins by melting a (plastic) resin and adding water to it in order to form a water-in-oil emulsion. This is then converted to an oil-in-water emulsion by phase inversion in the presence of continuous stirring. The resulting emulsion is the tackifier dispersion, but it is not concentrated and the remaining excess water has to be transported and removed. The main barrier that has to be overcome in the development of commercial quality tackifier dispersions is the inability to directly emulsify resin in water due to the very low viscosity of water as compared to the viscosity of the molten resin. In the present research, a number of solutions were proposed to overcome this barrier, and these included use of different mixer types to directly form the emulsion from the molten …

The optimum detector for a known signal in white Gaussian background noise is the matched filter, also known as a correlation detector [Van Trees, 1968]. Correlation detectors offer exquisite sensitivity (high probability of detection at a fixed false alarm rate), but require perfect knowledge of the signal. The sensitivity of correlation detectors is increased by the availability of multichannel data, something common in seismic applications due to the prevalence of three-component stations and arrays. When the signal is imperfectly known, an extension of the correlation detector, the subspace detector, may be able to capture much of the performance of a matched filter [Harris, 2006]. In order to apply a subspace detector, the signal to be detected must be known to lie in a signal subspace of dimension d {ge} 1, which is defined by a set of d linearly-independent basis waveforms. The basis is constructed to span the range of signals anticipated to be emitted by a source of interest. Correlation detectors operate by computing a running correlation coefficient between a template waveform (the signal to be detected) and the data from a window sliding continuously along a data stream. The template waveform and the continuous data stream may be …

Low-mass stars, {approx} 1-2 solar masses, near the Main Sequence are efficient at producing {sup 3}He, which they mix into the convective envelope on the giant branch and should distribute into the Galaxy by way of envelope loss. This process is so efficient that it is difficult to reconcile the low observed cosmic abundance of {sup 3}He with the predictions of both stellar and Big Bang nucleosynthesis. In this paper we find, by modeling a red giant with a fully three-dimensional hydrodynamic code and a full nucleosynthetic network, that mixing arises in the supposedly stable and radiative zone between the hydrogen-burning shell and the base of the convective envelope. This mixing is due to Rayleigh-Taylor instability within a zone just above the hydrogen-burning shell, where a nuclear reaction lowers the mean molecular weight slightly. Thus we are able to remove the threat that {sup 3}He production in low-mass stars poses to the Big Bang nucleosynthesis of {sup 3}He.

We investigate solidification in metal systems ranging in size from 64,000 to 524,288,000 atoms on the IBM BlueGene/L computer at LLNL. Using the newly developed ddcMD code, we achieve performance rates as high as 103 TFlops, with a performance of 101.7 TFlop sustained over a 7 hour run on 131,072 cpus. We demonstrate superb strong and weak scaling. Our calculations are significant as they represent the first atomic-scale model of metal solidification to proceed, without finite size effects, from spontaneous nucleation and growth of solid out of the liquid, through the coalescence phase, and into the onset of coarsening. Thus, our simulations represent the first step towards an atomistic model of nucleation and growth that can directly link atomistic to mesoscopic length scales.

CLMT2 is designed to simulate the land-surface andsubsurface hydrologic response to meteorological forcing. This modelcombines a state-of-the-art land-surface model, the NCAR Community LandModel version 3 (CLM3), with a variably saturated groundwater model, theTOUGH2, through an internal interface that includes flux and statevariables shared by the two submodels. Specifically, TOUGH2, in itssimulation, uses infiltration, evaporation, and root-uptake rates,calculated by CLM3, as source/sink terms; CLM3, in its simulation, usessaturation and capillary pressure profiles, calculated by TOUGH2, asstate variables. This new model, CLMT2, preserves the best aspects ofboth submodels: the state-of-the-art modeling capability of surfaceenergy and hydrologic processes from CLM3 (including snow, runoff,freezing/melting, evapotranspiration, radiation, and biophysiologicalprocesses) and the more realistic physical-process-based modelingcapability of subsurface hydrologic processes from TOUGH2 (includingheterogeneity, three-dimensional flow, seamless combining of unsaturatedand saturated zone, and water table). The preliminary simulation resultsshow that the coupled model greatly improved the predictions of the watertable, evapotranspiration, and surface temperature at a real watershed,as evaluated using 18 years of observed data. The new model is also readyto be coupled with an atmospheric simulation model, representing one ofthe first models that are capable to simulate hydraulic processes fromtop of the atmosphere to deep-ground.

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

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

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "U.S. goods are subject to substantial counterfeiting and piracy, creating health and safety hazards for consumers, damaging victimized companies, and threatening the U.S. economy. In 2004, the Bush administration launched the Strategy for Targeting Organized Piracy (STOP)--a multi-agency effort to better protect intellectual property (IP) by combating piracy and counterfeiting. This testimony, based on a prior GAO report as well as from observations from on-going work, describes (1) the range and effectiveness of multi-agency efforts on IP protection preceding STOP, (2) initial observations on the organization and efforts of STOP, and (3) initial observations on the efforts of U.S. agencies to prevent counterfeit and pirated goods from entering the United States, which relate to one of STOP's goals."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The tax gap--the difference between the tax amounts taxpayers pay voluntarily and on time and what they should pay under the law--has been a long-standing problem in spite of many efforts to reduce it. Most recently, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) estimated a gross tax gap for tax year 2001 of $345 billion and estimated it would recover $55 billion of this gap, resulting in a net tax gap of $290 billion. When some taxpayers fail to comply, the burden of funding the nation's commitments falls more heavily on compliant taxpayers. Reducing the tax gap would help improve the nation's fiscal stability. For example, each 1 percent reduction in the net tax gap would likely yield $3 billion annually. GAO was asked to discuss the tax gap and various approaches to reduce it. This testimony discusses to what extent the tax gap could be reduced through three approaches--simplifying or reforming the tax system, providing IRS with additional enforcement tools, and devoting additional resources to enforcement--as well as various factors that could guide decision-making when devising a strategy to reduce the tax gap. This statement is based on prior …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) establishes that federal agencies must provide the public with access to government information, thus enabling them to learn about government operations and decisions. To help ensure appropriate implementation, the act requires that agencies report annually to the Attorney General, providing specific information about their FOIA operations. In addition, a recent Executive Order directs agencies to develop plans to improve their FOIA operations, including, among other things, goals to reduce backlogs in FOIA requests. GAO has reported previously on the contents of these annual reports for 25 major agencies. For this hearing, GAO was asked to testify both on the annual reports for fiscal year 2005 and on the recently developed improvement plans for these 25 agencies. GAO based its testimony on its ongoing work on these topics. Upon completion of its ongoing review, GAO expects to make recommendations to improve agency implementation of the Executive Order, including efforts to reduce and eliminate backlog."