A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Since 2001, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has been working to acquire the Electronic Records Archives (ERA) system, which is intended to address critical issues in the creation, management, and use of federal electronic records. As required by law, the agency submitted its fiscal year 2006 expenditure plan to the congressional appropriations committees, seeking the release of about $22 million for the development of the system. GAO's objectives in reviewing the expenditure plan were to (1) determine the extent to which the expenditure plan satisfied the legislative conditions specified in the appropriations act; (2) determine the extent to which NARA has implemented GAO's prior recommendations; and (3) provide any other observations about the expenditure plan and the ERA acquisition. We reviewed the expenditure plan and analyzed it against the legislative conditions and assessed NARA's progress in addressing prior recommendations."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Department of Defense's (DOD) estimates of its reinvestigation backlog, focusing on: (1) how DOD estimates the backlog; (2) the soundness of DOD's backlog estimates; and (3) DOD's plans to address the backlog problem."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) insures the pensions of more than 44 million workers in over 30,000 employer-sponsored defined benefit pension plans. In response to growing workloads, PBGC has come to rely heavily on contractors to conduct its work. GAO was asked to report on (1) the role that contracting plays in PBGC's efforts to accomplish its mission, (2) the steps PBGC has taken to improve its acquisition infrastructure and develop a strategic approach to guide its contracting activities, and (3) the steps PBGC has taken to improve its contract oversight processes to ensure accountability. To address these issues, we interviewed PBGC officials and selected contractors, reviewed data on PBGC's contracting activities; identified changes PBGC is making to contracting procedures; and identified strategies PBGC uses to monitor contracts."

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The proposed straw separation system developed in the research project harvests the large internode sections of the straw which has the greater potential as a feedstock for lignocellulosic ethanol production while leaving the chaff and nodes in the field. This strategy ensures sustainable agriculture by preventing the depletion of soil minerals, and it restores organic matter to the soil in amounts and particle sizes that accommodate farmers’ needs to keep tillage and fertilizer costs low. A ton of these nutrient-rich plant tissues contains as much as $10.55 worth of fertilizer (economic and energy benefits), in terms of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other nutrients provided to the soil when incorporated by tillage instead of being burned. Biomass conversion to fermentable sugars for the purpose of producing fuels, chemicals, and other industrial products is well understood. Most bioenergy strategies rely on low-cost fermentable sugars for sustainability and economic viability in the marketplace. Exploitation of the “whole crop”—specifically, wheat straw or other plant material currently regarded as residue or waste—is a practical approach for obtaining a reliable and low-cost source of sugars. However, industrial-scale production of sugars from wheat straw, while technically feasible, is plagued by obstacles related to capital costs, energy consumption, …

Department of Energy EPSCoR The University of Mississippi Award: DE-FG02-04ER46121 Resonant Ultrasound Spectroscopy Studies of Complex Transition Metal Oxides The central thrust of this DOE funded research program has been to apply resonant ultrasound spectroscopy (RUS), an elegant and efficient method for determining the elastic stiffness constants of a crystal, to the complex and poorly understood class of materials known as transition metal oxides (TMOs). Perhaps the most interesting and challenging feature of TMOs is their strongly correlated behavior in which spin, lattice, and charge degrees of freedom are strongly coupled. Elastic constants are a measure of the interatomic potentials in a crystal and are thus sensitive probes into the atomic environment. This sensitivity makes RUS an ideal tool to study the coupling of phase transition order parameters to lattice strains. The most significant result of the project has been the construction of a high temperature RUS apparatus capable of making elastic constant measurements at temperatures as high as 1000 degrees Celsius. We have designed and built novel acoustic transducers which can operate as high as 600 degrees Celsius based on lithium niobate piezoelectric elements. For measurement between 600 to 1000 C, a buffer rod system is used in which …

The amount of scientific data generated by simulations orcollected from large scale experiments have reached levels that cannot bestored in the researcher's workstation or even in his/her local computercenter. Such data are vital to large scientific collaborations dispersedover wide-area networks. In the past, the concept of a Gridinfrastructure [1]mainly emphasized the computational aspect ofsupporting large distributed computational tasks, and optimizing the useof the network by using bandwidth reservation techniques. In this paperwe discuss the concept of Storage Resource Managers (SRMs) as componentsthat complement this with the support for the storage management of largedistributed datasets. The access to data is becoming the main bottleneckin such "data intensive" applications because the data cannot bereplicated in all sites. SRMs can be used to dynamically optimize the useof storage resource to help unclog this bottleneck.

This report discusses various emergency activities undertaken by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) including disaster detection, preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery, as well as emergency response funding and an analysis of how this could be affected by legislation.

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This fact sheet tracks the current heads of government in Central and South America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. It provides the dates of the last and next elections for the head of government and the national independence date for each country.

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This report provides historical context and reviews some of the factors inspiring debate related to funding for rail freight.

Rev 1 of this report provides corrections and clarifications in response to reviewer comments arising during a project review meeting held June 7-8, 2007.

This report (Rev 1) incorporates corrections and clarifications regarding the interpretation of solutions in BNL (1995) per reviewer comments from a June 7-8, 2007 review meeting. The review comments affect Appendixes C and D of this report - the body of the report is unchanged.

The overall goal of the program is to advance the current state of crystalline silicon solar cell technology to make photovoltaics more competitive with conventional energy sources. This program emphasizes fundamental and applied research that results in low-cost, high-efficiency cells on commercial silicon substrates with strong involvement of the PV industry, and support a very strong photovoltaics education program in the US based on classroom education and hands-on training in the laboratory.

Bayesian networks (BN) are an excellent tool for modeling uncertainties in systems with several interdependent variables. A BN is a directed acyclic graph, and consists of a structure, or the set of directional links between variables that depend on other variables, and conditional probabilities (CP) for each variable. In this project, we apply BN's to understand uncertainties in NIF ignition experiments. One can represent various physical properties of National Ignition Facility (NIF) capsule implosions as variables in a BN. A dataset containing simulations of NIF capsule implosions was provided. The dataset was generated from a radiation hydrodynamics code, and it contained 120 simulations of 16 variables. Relevant knowledge about the physics of NIF capsule implosions and greedy search algorithms were used to search for hypothetical structures for a BN. Our preliminary results found 6 links between variables in the dataset. However, we thought there should have been more links between the dataset variables based on the physics of NIF capsule implosions. Important reasons for the paucity of links are the relatively small size of the dataset, and the sampling of the values for dataset variables. Another factor that might have caused the paucity of links is the fact that in …

This project was developed to conduct research to improve the efficacy of captive broodstock programs and advance hatchery reform throughout the Columbia River Basin. The project has three objectives: (1) maintain adaptive life history characteristics in Chinook salmon, (2) improve imprinting in juvenile sockeye salmon, and (3) match wild phenotypes in Chinook and sockeye salmon reared in hatcheries. A summary of the results are as follows: Objective 1: The ratio of jack to adult male Chinook salmon were varied in experimental breeding populations to test the hypothesis that reproductive success of the two male phenotypes would vary with their relative frequency in the population. Adult Chinook salmon males nearly always obtained primary access to nesting females and were first to enter the nest at the time of spawning. Jack male spawning occurred primarily by establishing satellite positions downstream of the courting pair, and 'sneaking' into the nest at the time of spawning. Male dominance hierarchies were fairly stable and strongly correlated with the order of nest entry at the time of spawning. Observed participation in spawning events and adult-to-fry reproductive success of jack and adult males was consistent with a negative frequency-dependent selection model. Overall, jack males sired an average …

The objective of this task is to identify potential waste streams that could be treated with the Small Column Ion Exchange (SCIX) and perform an initial assessment of the impact of doing so on the High-Level Waste (HLW) system. Design of the SCIX system has been performed as a backup technology for decontamination of High-Level Waste (HLW) at the Savannah River Site (SRS). The SCIX consists of three modules which can be placed in risers inside underground HLW storage tanks. The pump and filter module and the ion exchange module are used to filter and decontaminate the aqueous tank wastes for disposition in Saltstone. The ion exchange module contains Crystalline Silicotitanate (CST in its engineered granular form is referred to as IONSIV{reg_sign} IE-911), and is selective for removal of cesium ions. After the IE-911 is loaded with Cs-137, it is removed and the column is refilled with a fresh batch. The grinder module is used to size-reduce the cesium-loaded IE-911 to make it compatible with the sludge vitrification system in the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF). If installed at the SRS, this SCIX would need to operate within the current constraints of the larger HLW storage, retrieval, treatment, and disposal …

In this report we investigate order, stability, and phase transformations for a series of actinide-based alloys. The statics and kinetics of precipitation and ordering in this class of alloys are modeled with a scheme that couples fundamental information on the alloy energetics obtained from experimental and assessed thermo-chemical data to the CALPHAD approach commonly used in industry for designing alloys with engineering specificity with the help of the Thermo-Calc software application. The CALPHAD approach is applied to the study of the equilibrium thermodynamic properties of Pu-based alloys, Pu-X, where X=Al, Fe, Ga. The assessment of the equilibrium phase diagrams in the whole range of alloy composition has been performed with the PARROT module of the Thermo-Calc application software. Predictions are made on the low temperature and Pu-rich side of the phase diagrams of Pu-Ga and Pu-Al for which controversy has been noted in the past. The validity of the assessed thermo-chemical database will be discussed by comparing predicted heats of transformation for pure Pu with measured values from differential scanning calorimetry analysis. An overall picture for the stability properties of Pu-Ga and Pu-Al that reconciles the results of past studies carried out on these alloys is proposed. Results on phase …

In this paper we revisit the topological twisted sigma model with H-flux. We explicitly expand and then twist the worldsheet Lagrangian for bi-Hermitian geometry. we show that the resulting action consists of a BRST exact term and pullback terms, which only depend on one of the two generalized complex structures and the B-field. We then discuss the topological feature of the model.

The monocular passive ranging (MPR) problem in remote sensing consists of identifying the precise range of an airborne target (missile, plane, etc.) from its observed radiance. This inverse problem may be set as a global optimization problem (GOP) whereby the difference between the observed and model predicted radiances is minimized over the possible ranges and atmospheric conditions. Using additional information about the error function between the predicted and observed radiances of the target, we developed GMG, a new algorithm to find the Global Minimum with a Guarantee. The new algorithm transforms the original continuous GOP into a discrete search problem, thereby guaranteeing to find the position of the global minimum in a reasonably short time. The algorithm is first applied to the golf course problem, which serves as a litmus test for its performance in the presence of both complete and degraded additional information. GMG is further assessed on a set of standard benchmark functions and then applied to various realizations of the MPR problem.

Phase 1 of the Tank-Farm Vadose Zone Program (TFVZP) developed information on the nature and extent of vadose zone contamination in the tank farms through field studies, laboratory analyses and experiments, and historical data searches; assembled data and performed tank-farm risk analysis; and initiated interim corrective actions to lessen the impacts of tank leak contaminants. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory scientists and external collaborators at universities and U.S. Department of Energy user facilities sampled and analyzed contaminant plumes. These types of activities will continue during Phase 2 of the TFVZP to refine and expand scientific understanding of the subsurface beneath tank farms, especially of water movement, residual waste leaching, and contaminant transport.

Differences caused by BPM reading one bunch and multi-bunch average need to be well understood before the beam parameters, such as the synchrotron tune, betatron tune, and chromaticity, are extracted from those BPM data. It is easy to perform such a study using numerical simulation other than modifying the BPM electronics.