A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "A U.S. passport allows the owner to travel freely both in and out of the country. Although passport recipients typically travel internationally for business or leisure, some passport recipients are using their passports to commit nefarious illegal activities outside this country. Specifically, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has documented cases of U.S. passport holders engaging in sex acts with children in foreign countries. Federal statutes authorize the Secretary of State to deny issuance of a passport in certain circumstances, such as for a conviction for international drug trafficking or arrearages in child support. GAO was asked to (1) determine, to the extent possible, the number of passport recipients who are registered sex offenders and (2) develop case study examples of passport recipients who are registered sex offenders. To do so, GAO compared fiscal year 2008 passport data from the Department of State (State) to data in DOJ's National Sex Offender Registry (NSOR). GAO also interviewed State officials. GAO selected 30 sex offenders, primarily based on geography, and performed investigations. In response to a draft of this report, DOJ had no comments. State expressed concerns about the …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The United States and its international partners from over 40 nations have been engaged in efforts to secure, stabilize, and rebuild Afghanistan since 2001. In an effort to establish clear and specific U.S. strategic goals, the President of the United States, in March 2009, outlined the U.S. Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. This strategy emphasizes a strategic goal to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan and prevent their return. The strategy was followed by the completion, in August 2009, of a Civilian-Military Campaign Plan for Afghanistan. In December 2009, the President reaffirmed the U.S. strategic goal and underscored the importance of U.S. efforts to secure and stabilize Afghanistan to help ensure the safety of the United States and the American people. To assist the Congress in its oversight of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, this publication (1) identifes and describe key U.S. and international strategies and plans that collectively guide U.S. efforts in Afghanistan; (2) provides examples and information about key efforts to assist Afghanistan; and (3) identifies oversight issues that Congress may wish to consider in its work."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO has designated Medicare as a high-risk program since 1990, in part because the program's size and complexity make it vulnerable to fraud, waste, and abuse. Fraud represents intentional acts of deception with knowledge that the action or representation could result in an inappropriate gain, while abuse represents actions inconsistent with acceptable business or medical practices. Waste, which includes inaccurate payments for services, also occurs in the Medicare program. Fraud, waste, and abuse all can lead to improper payments, overpayments and underpayments that should not have been made or that were made in an incorrect amount. In 2009, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)--the agency that administers Medicare--estimated billions of dollars in improper payments in the Medicare program. This statement, will focus on challenges facing CMS and selected key strategies that are particularly important to helping prevent fraud, waste, and abuse, and ultimately to reducing improper payments, including challenges that CMS continues to face. It is based on nine GAO products issued from September 2005 through March 2010 using a variety of methodologies, including analysis of claims, review of relevant policies and procedures, stakeholder interviews, and …

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The HIV/AIDS Information Resources from the National Library of Medicine training is designed specifically for the UNCFSP HBCU Screening, Testing, Outreach, and Prevention (STOP) HIV/AIDS Program project members to provide valuable health information resources from the National Library of Medicine and other reliable sources to increase awareness of the wealth of treatment information and educational materials that are available on the Internet and to improve prevention and treatment education for their clients. These resources will also meet the needs of community-based organizations

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Over the course of the CesrTA program, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) has been instrumented with several retarding field analyzers (RFAs), which measure the local density and energy distribution of the electron cloud. These RFAs have been installed in drifts, dipoles, quadrupoles, and wigglers; and data have been taken in a variety of beam conditions and bunch configurations. This paper will provide an overview of these results, and give a preliminary evaluation of the efficacy of cloud mitigation techniques implemented in the instrumented vacuum chambers.

Grooved surfaces are effective to suppress the secondary electron emission, and can be a promising technique to mitigate the electron cloud effect in positron/proton storage rings. Aiming for the application in a dipole-type magnetic field, various shapes of triangular grooved surfaces have been studied at KEK. The grooves tested here have vertex angles of 20-30{sup o}, depths of 2.5-5.0 mm, and vertex roundness of 0.05-0.2 mm. In a laboratory, the secondary electron yields (SEY) of small test pieces were measured using an electron beam in a magnetic-free condition. The grooved surfaces clearly had low SEY compared to flat surfaces of the same materials. The grooves with sharper vertexes had smaller SEY. A test chamber installed in a wiggler magnet of the KEKB positron ring was used to investigate the efficacy of the grooved surface in a strong magnetic field. In the chamber, a remarkable reduction in the electron density around the beam orbit was observed compared to the case of a flat surface with TiN coating.

In order to mitigate the electron cloud instability in an intense positron ring, an electron clearing electrode with a very thin structure has been developed. The electrode was tested with a positron beam of the KEKB B-factory (KEKB). A drastic reduction in the electron density around the beam was demonstrated in a wiggler magnet with a dipole-type magnetic field of 0.78 T. The clearing electrode was then applied to a copper beam pipe with antechambers assuming an application of the electrode to a wiggler section in the Super KEKB. The beam pipe was installed at a magnetic-free region in the ring and tested with beam. No extra heating of the electrodes and feed-throughs were observed. A reduction in the electron density reasonable in a magnetic-free region was also obtained.

The objective of our research is to design a single-well injection-withdrawal test to evaluate residual phase trapping at potential CO{sub 2} geological storage sites. Given the significant depths targeted for CO{sub 2} storage and the resulting high costs associated with drilling to those depths, it is attractive to develop a single-well test that can provide data to assess reservoir properties and reduce uncertainties in the appraisal phase of site investigation. The main challenges in a single-well test design include (1) difficulty in quantifying the amount of CO{sub 2} that has dissolved into brine or migrated away from the borehole; (2) non-uniqueness and uncertainty in the estimate of the residual gas saturation (S{sub gr}) due to correlations among various parameters; and (3) the potential biased S{sub gr} estimate due to unaccounted heterogeneity of the geological medium. To address each of these challenges, we propose (1) to use a physical-based model to simulation test sequence and inverse modeling to analyze data information content and to quantify uncertainty; (2) to jointly use multiple data types generated from different kinds of tests to constrain the Sgr estimate; and (3) to reduce the sensitivity of the designed tests to geological heterogeneity by conducting the same …

This Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) began December 8, 2000 and ended September 30, 2009. The total funding provided by the Participant (General Motors Advanced Technology Vehicles [GM]) during the course of the CRADA totaled $1.2M enabling the Contractor (UT-Battelle, LLC [Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a.k.a. ORNL]) to contribute significantly to the joint project. The initial task was to work with GM on the feasibility of developing their conceptual approach of modifying major components of the existing traction inverter/drive to develop low cost, robust, accessory power. Two alternate methods for implementation were suggested by ORNL and both were proven successful through simulations and then extensive testing of prototypes designed and fabricated during the project. This validated the GM overall concept. Moreover, three joint U.S. patents were issued and subsequently licensed by GM. After successfully fulfilling the initial objective, the direction and duration of the CRADA was modified and GM provided funding for two additional tasks. The first new task was to provide the basic development for implementing a cascaded inverter technology into hybrid vehicles (including plug-in hybrid, fuel cell, and electric). The second new task was to continue the basic development for implementing inverter and converter topologies and new …

The purpose of this CRADA was to assist in technology transfer from Russia to the US and assist in development of the technology improvements and applications for use in the U.S. and worldwide. Over the period of this work, ORNL has facilitated design, development and demonstration of a low-pressure liquid extractor and development of initial design for high-pressure supercritical CO2 fluid extractor.

As part of the international Linear Collider (ILC) collaboration, we have compared the electron cloud (EC) effect for different Damping Ring (DR) designs respectively with 6.4 km and 3.2 km circumference and investigated the feasibility of the shorter damping ring with respect to the electron cloud build-up and related beam instabilities. The studies for a 3.2 km ring were carried out with beam parameters of the ILC Low Power option. A reduced damping ring circumference has been proposed for the new ILC baseline design SB2009 [1] and would allow considerable reduction of the number of components, wiggler magnets and costs. We discuss the impact of the proposed operation of the ILC at high repetition rate 10 Hz and address the necessary modifications for the DRs. We also briefly discuss the plans for future studies including the luminosity upgrade option with shorter bunch spacing, the evaluation of mitigation techniques and the integration of the CesrTA results into the Damping Ring design.

ECHO-7 is a proof-of-principle echo-enabled harmonic generation FEL experiment in the Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator (NLCTA) at SLAC. The experiment aims to generate coherent radiation at 318 nm and 227 nm, which are the 5th and 7th harmonic of the infrared seed laser. In this paper we present the preliminary results from the commissioning run of the completed experimental setup which started in April 2010.

This work studies the control of the magnetic and magnetotransport properties of La{sub 0.67}Sr{sub 0.33}MnO{sub 3} thin films through strain engineering. The strain state is characterized by the tetragonal distortion (c/a ratio), which can be varied continuously between a compressive strain of 1.005 to a tensile strain of 0.952 by changing the type of substrate, the growth rate, and the presence of an underlying La{sub 0.67}Sr{sub 0.33}FeO{sub 3} buffer layer. Increasing tensile tetragonal distortion of the La{sub 0.67}Sr{sub 0.33}MnO{sub 3} thin film decreases the saturation magnetization, changes the temperature dependence of the resistivity and magnetoresistance, and increases the resistivity by several orders of magnitude.

During the early 1950s, five production reactor facilities were built at the Savannah River Site. These facilities were built to produce materials to support the building of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile in response to the Cold War. R-Reactor and P-Reactor were the first two facilities completed in 1953 and 1954.

Based on the optimality principle (that the global energy expenditure rate is at its minimum for a given landscape under steady state conditions) and calculus of variations, we have derived a group of partial differential equations for describing steady-state optimal landscapes without explicitly distinguishing between hillslopes and channel networks. Other than building on the well-established Mining's equation, this work does not rely on any empirical relationships (such as those relating hydraulic parameters to local slopes). Using additional constraints, we also theoretically demonstrate that steady-state water depth is a power function of local slope, which is consistent with field data.

Modeling of laser-plasma wakefield accelerators in an optimal frame of reference is shown to produce orders of magnitude speed-up of calculations from first principles. Obtaining these speedups requires mitigation of a high-frequency instability that otherwise limits effectiveness in addition to solutions for handling data input and output in a relativistically boosted frame of reference. The observed high-frequency instability is mitigated using methods including an electromagnetic solver with tunable coefficients, its extension to accomodate Perfectly Matched Layers and Friedman's damping algorithms, as well as an efficient large bandwidth digital filter. It is shown that choosing the frame of the wake as the frame of reference allows for higher levels of filtering and damping than is possible in other frames for the same accuracy. Detailed testing also revealed serendipitously the existence of a singular time step at which the instability level is minimized, independently of numerical dispersion, thus indicating that the observed instability may not be due primarily to Numerical Cerenkov as has been conjectured. The techniques developed for Cerenkov mitigation prove nonetheless to be very efficient at controlling the instability. Using these techniques, agreement at the percentage level is demonstrated between simulations using different frames of reference, with speedups reaching two …

This report discusses the most recent developments after the coup in Kyrgyzstan and its aftermath.

This report compares the current federally supported medical screening and treatment program offered to various persons affected by the terrorist attack on New York City on September 11, 2001, with the federal program proposed to be established by Title I of H.R. 847, the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010, as amended and passed by the House of Representatives. The World Trade Center (WTC) Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program (MMTP) and the World Trade Center Health Program (WTCHP) are the specific programs compared in this report.

This report discusses Congressional issues regarding Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) systems, which are integral components of both national policymaking and military operations, including counterterrorism operations. ISR systems are costly and complicated, and the relationships among organizations responsible for designing and operating these systems are equally complicated.

This report is an overview of U.S. foreign assistance to the Middle East from FY2006 to FY2010, and of the FY2011 budget request. It includes a brief history of aid to the region, a review of foreign aid levels, a description of selected country programs, and an analysis of current foreign aid issues. It will be updated periodically to reflect recent developments.

This report discusses U.S. security assistance to Taiwan (calling itself Republic of China (ROC)), including policy issues for Congress and legislation.