Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In November 2005, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the launch of Secure Border Initiative (SBI), a multiyear, multibillion-dollar program aimed at securing U.S. borders and reducing illegal immigration. Elements of SBI are carried out by several organizations within DHS. One component is the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's (CBP) SBI program office, which is responsible for developing a comprehensive border protection system using people; technology, known as SBInet; and tactical infrastructure (TI)--pedestrian and vehicle fencing; roads; and lighting. Initially, the focus of SBI is on the U.S. southwest border areas, between the ports of entry, that CBP has designated as most in need of enhanced border security because of serious vulnerabilities. In September 2006, CBP awarded a prime contract to the Boeing Company for 3 years, with three additional 1-year options. As the prime contractor, Boeing is responsible for acquiring, deploying, and sustaining selected SBInet technology and tactical infrastructure projects, and for providing supply chain management for selected tactical infrastructure projects. For fiscal years 2005 through 2008, Congress appropriated more than $2.7 billion for the SBI program. For fiscal year 2009, the President's budget includes a …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Technological advances have led to an increasing convergence of previously separate networks used to transmit voice and data communications. While the benefits of this convergence are enormous, such interconnectivity also poses significant challenges to our nation's ability to respond to major disruptions. Two operations centers--managed by the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) National Communications System and National Cyber Security Division--plan for and monitor disruptions on voice and data networks. In September 2007, a DHS expert task force made three recommendations toward establishing an integrated operations center that the department agreed to adopt. To determine the status of efforts to establish an integrated center, GAO reviewed documentation, interviewed relevant DHS and private sector officials, and reviewed laws and policies to identify DHS's responsibilities in addressing convergence."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Congress created individual retirement accounts (IRAs) with two goals: (1) to provide a retirement savings vehicle for workers without employer-sponsored retirement plans, and (2) to preserve individuals' savings in employer-sponsored retirement plans when they change jobs or retire. Questions remain about IRAs' effectiveness as a vehicle to facilitate new, or additional, retirement savings. GAO was asked to report on (1) the role of IRAs in retirement savings, (2) the prevalence of employer-sponsored and payroll-deduction IRAs and barriers discouraging employers from offering these IRAs, and (3) changes that are needed to improve IRA information and oversight. GAO reviewed published reports from government and financial industry sources and interviewed retirement and savings experts, small business representatives, IRA providers, and federal agency officials."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Indians lag behind other Americans on many key economic indicators, such as median household income. To improve such conditions, Congress in 1993 created Indian reservation depreciation (IRD), a tax expenditure offering accelerated depreciation for property invested on Indian reservations. GAO was asked to (1) describe which taxpayers claimed IRD, (2) analyze the effect of IRD on the economic development of reservations, and (3) describe the tax benefits offered by IRD. GAO used the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) Statistics of Income data to try to identify IRD users and measure IRD's effects; however, the data were unreliable for those purposes. GAO also calculated examples of potential IRD tax benefits for different property classes."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Congress enacted the Defense Production Act of 1950 (DPA) to ensure the availability of industrial resources to meet defense needs. Amendments to the Act allow its use for energy supply, emergency preparedness, and critical infrastructure protection and require agencies to report on foreign offsets, which are incentives to foreign governments to purchase U.S. goods and services. Only Titles I, III, and VII remain in effect. In the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, Congress directed GAO to review recent agency efforts to implement the DPA. This report (1) examines the extent to which agencies use DPA authorities and (2) assesses agencies' response to reporting requirements on the economic impact of foreign offsets. GAO's work is based on a review of policies and guidance for the use of DPA authorities, instances in which agencies have exercised the authorities, and the analysis used in required reports on foreign offsets."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 2004, in response to the Group of Eight (G8) Sea Island Summit, the United States established the Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI), a 5-year program to build peacekeeping capabilities worldwide, with a focus on Africa. Since 2005, the Department of State (State) has allocated $374 million and selected 52 countries to participate in the program. Congress mandated that GAO assess and report on the initiative. This report assesses (1) progress made in meeting GPOI goals, (2) whether State is consistently assessing the quality and effectiveness of the training, and (3) the extent to which countries meet program criteria and whether trainees are adequately screened for human rights abuses. GAO assessed State and Department of Defense (DOD) data and program documents, interviewed U.S. and host country officials, and conducted field work in eight countries."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Congress and the President need to have reliable, useful and timely financial and performance information to make sound decisions on the current and future direction of vital federal government programs and policies. Unfortunately, except for the 2007 Statement of Social Insurance, GAO was again unable to provide assurance on the reliability of the consolidated financial statements of the U.S. government (CFS) due primarily to certain material weaknesses in the federal government's internal control. GAO has reported that unless these weaknesses are adequately addressed, they will, among other things, (1) hamper the federal government's ability to reliably report a significant portion of its assets, liabilities, costs, and other related information; and (2) affect the federal government's ability to reliably measure the full cost as well as the financial and nonfinancial performance of certain programs and activities. This testimony presents the results of GAO's audit of the CFS for fiscal year 2007 and discusses the federal government's long-term fiscal outlook."

Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) researchers are investigating and developing a rotary microfilter for solid-liquid separation applications at the Savannah River Site (SRS). Because of the success of that work, the Hanford Site is evaluating the use of the rotary microfilter for its Supplemental Pretreatment process. The authors performed rotary filter testing with a full-scale, 25-disk unit with 0.5 {micro} filter media manufactured by Pall Corporation using a Hanford AN-105 simulant at solids loadings of 0.06, 0.29, and 1.29 wt%. The conclusions from this testing are: (1) The filter flux at 0.06 wt% solids reached a near constant value at an average of 0.26 gpm/ft{sup 2} (6.25 gpm total). (2) The filter flux at 0.29 wt% solids reached a near constant value at an average of 0.17 gpm/ft{sup 2} (4 gpm total). (3) The filter flux at 1.29 wt% solids reached a near constant value at an average of 0.10 gpm/ft{sup 2} (2.4 gpm total). (4) Because of differences in solids loadings, a direct comparison between crossflow filter flux and rotary filter flux is not possible. The data show the rotary filter produces a higher flux than the crossflow filter, but the improvement is not as large as seen in …

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To achieve super high luminosity, high current beams with very short bunch length are needed, which carry high intensity EM fields. For ILC, two bunch trains with bunch length of 300 {micro}m and bunch charge of 3.2nC are needed to collide at the IR to achieve the ILC luminosity goals. When the 300 {micro}m bunches pass through the IR chamber, wakefields will be excited, which will cause HOM power flowing through the IR chamber beam pipe to the final doublets due to the high frequency characteristic of the induced wakefields. Since superconducting technology is adopted for the final doublets of ILC BDS, whose operation stability might be affected by the HOM power produced at the IR chamber, quench might happen. In this paper, we did some analytical estimation and numerical simulation on the wakefield effects in ILC IR chamber.

Results of the collimation studies for the ILC positron source beam line are presented. The calculations of primary positron beam loss are done using the ELEGANT code. The secondary positron and electron beam loss, the synchrotron radiation along the beam line and the bremsstrahlung radiation in the collimators are simulated using the STRUCT code. The first part of the collimation system, located right after the positron source target (0.125 GeV), is used for protection of the RF Linac sections from heating and radiation. The second part of the system is used for final collimation before the beam injection into the Damping Ring at 5 GeV. The calculated power loss in the collimation region is within 100 W/m, with the loss in the collimators of 0.2-5 kW. The beam transfer efficiency from the target to the Damping Ring is 13.5%.

I present preliminary results of the measurement of the hadronic mass spectrum and its first three spectral moments in inclusive charmless semileptonic B-meson decays. The truncated hadronic mass moments are used for the first determination of the b-quark mass and the nonperturbative parameters {mu}{sub {pi}}{sup 2} and {rho}{sub D}{sup 3} in this B-meson decay channel. The study is based on 383 x 10{sup 6} B{bar B} decays collected with the BABAR experiment at the PEP-II e{sup +}e{sup -} storage rings, located at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The first, second central, and third central hadronic mass moment with a cut on the hadronic mass m{sub X}{sup 2} < 6.4GeV{sup 2} and the lepton momentum p* > 1 GeV are measured to be: M{sub 1} = (1.96 {+-} 0.34{sub stat} {+-} 0.53{sub syst}) GeV{sup 2}; U{sub 2} = (1.92 {+-} 0.59{sub stat} {+-} 0.87{sub syst}) GeV{sup 4}; and U{sub 3} = (1.79 {+-} 0.62{sub stat} {+-} 0.78{sub syst}) GeV{sup 6}; with correlation coefficients {rho}{sub 12} = 0.99, {rho}{sub 23} = 0.94, and {rho}{sub 13} = 0.88, respectively. Using Heavy Quark Effective Theory-based predictions in the kinetic scheme we extract: m{sub b} = (4.60 {+-} 0.13{sub stat} {+-} 0.19{sub syst} {+-} 0.10{sub …

Digital images captured with electron microscopes are corrupted by two fundamental effects: shot noise resulting from electron counting statistics and blur resulting from the nonzero width of the focused electron beam. The generic problem of computationally undoing these effects is called image reconstruction and for decades has proved to be one of the most challenging and important problems in imaging science. This proposal concerned the application of the Pixon method, the highest-performance image-reconstruction algorithm yet devised, to the enhancement of images obtained from the highest-resolution electron microscopes in the world, now in operation at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The authors report the first observation of e{sup +}e{sup -} {yields} {rho}{sup +}{rho}{sup -}, in a data sample of 379 fb{sup -1} collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II e{sup +}e{sup -} storage ring at center-of-mass energies near {radical}s = 10.58 GeV. The authors measure a cross section of {sigma}(e{sup +}e{sup -} {yields} {rho}{sup +}{rho}{sup -}) = 19.5 {+-} 1.6(stat) {+-} 3.2(syst) fb. Assuming production through single-photon annihilation, there are three independent helicity amplitudes. They measure the ratios of their squared moduli to be |F{sub 00}|{sup 2} : |F{sub 10}|{sup 2} : |F{sub 11}|{sup 2} = 0.51 {+-} 0.14(stat) {+-} 0.07(syst) : 0.10 {+-} 0.04(stat) {+-} 0.01(syst) : 0.04 {+-} 0.03(stat) {+-} 0.01(syst). The |F{sub 00}|{sup 2} result is inconsistent with the prediction of 1.0 made by QCD models with a significance of 3.1 standard deviations including systematic uncertainties.

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The complexities of bubble formation in liquids increase as the system size increases, and a photographic study is presented here to provide some insight into the dynamics of bubble formation for large systems. Air was injected at the bottom of a 28 feet tall by 30 inch diameter column. Different fluids were subjected to different air flow rates at different fluid depths. The fluids were water and non-Newtonian, Bingham plastic fluids, which have yield stresses requiring an applied force to initiate movement, or shearing, of the fluid. Tests showed that bubble formation was significantly different in the two types of fluids. In water, a field of bubbles was formed, which consisted of numerous, distributed, 1/4 to 3/8 inch diameter bubbles. In the Bingham fluid, large bubbles of 6 to 12 inches in diameter were formed, which depended on the air flow rate. This paper provides comprehensive photographic results related to bubble formation in these fluids.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Programs Design Authority is in the design stage of the Waste Solidification Building (WSB) for the treatment and solidification of the radioactive liquid waste streams generated by the Pit Disassembly and Conversion Facility (PDCF) and Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF). The waste streams will be mixed with a cementitious dry mix in a 55-gallon waste container. Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) has been performing the testing and evaluations to support technical decisions for the WSB. Engineering Modeling & Simulation Group was requested to evaluate the thermal performance of the 55-gallon drum containing hydration heat source associated with the current baseline cement waste form. A transient axi-symmetric heat transfer model for the drum partially filled with waste form cement has been developed and heat transfer calculations performed for the baseline design configurations. For this case, 65 percent of the drum volume was assumed to be filled with the waste form, which has transient hydration heat source, as one of the baseline conditions. A series of modeling calculations has been performed using a computational heat transfer approach. The baseline modeling results show that the time to reach the maximum temperature of the 65 percent filled drum is …

Cell morphology dictates response to a wide variety of stimuli, controlling cell metabolism, differentiation, proliferation, and death. Epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a developmental process in which epithelial cells acquire migratory characteristics, and in the process convert from a 'cuboidal' epithelial structure into an elongated mesenchymal shape. We had shown previously that matrix metalloproteinase-3 (MMP3) can stimulate EMT of cultured mouse mammary epithelial cells through a process that involves increased expression of Rac1b, a protein that stimulates alterations in cytoskeletal structure. We show here that cells treated with MMP-3 or induced to express Rac1b spread to cover a larger surface, and that this induction of cell spreading is a requirement of MMP-3/Rac1b-induced EMT. We find that limiting cell spreading, either by increasing cell density or by culturing cells on precisely defined micropatterned substrata, blocks expression of characteristic markers of EMT in cells treated with MMP-3. These effects are not caused by general disruptions in cell signaling pathways, as TGF-{beta}-induced EMT is not affected by similar limitations on cell spreading. Our data reveal a previously unanticipated cell shape-dependent mechanism that controls this key phenotypic alteration and provide insight into the distinct mechanisms activated by different EMT-inducing agents.

The normal mammary gland and invasive breast cancer are both complex 'organs' composed of multiple cell types as well as extracellular matrix (ECM) in three-dimensional (3D) space. Conventionally, both normal and malignant breast cells are studied in vitro as two-dimensional (2D) monolayers of epithelial cells, which results in the loss of structure and tissue function. Many laboratories are now investigating regulation of signaling function in normal mammary gland using 3D cultures. However, it is important also to assay malignant breast cells ex vivo in a physiologically relevant environment to more closely mimic tumor architecture, signal transduction regulation and tumor behavior in vivo. Here we present the potential of these 3D models for drug testing, target validation and guidance of patient selection for clinical trials. We argue also that in order to get full insight into the biology of the normal and malignant breast, and to create in vivo-like models for therapeutic approaches in humans, we need to continue to create more complex heterotypic models to approach the full context the cells encounter in the human body.

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Free weekly newspaper that includes business and classified advertising.

This report discusses the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). This report contains two tables that show estimated LIHEAP allocations to the states. Table 1 shows state allocations at various levels: (1) the amount appropriated for FY2006, (2) the amount appropriated for FY2007, (3) the amount appropriated in FY2008, and (4) estimated state allocations based on the amount requested by the President for FY2009. Table 2 shows estimated state allocations at other hypothetical appropriations increments.

This report discusses the agricultural export provisions in the 2008 Farm Bill. It discusses programs that deal with U.S. agricultural exports that are a major focus of Title III, the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 (P.L. 110-246, H.R. 6124).