A publication issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) is required to design and implement effective internal controls, including controls over its use of public funds ("funds controls") and controls over its payment processes ("payment controls"). As a steward of the public's resources, DOD is responsible and accountable for (1) using public funds efficiently and effectively and for the purposes and within the time frames and amounts prescribed by law, (2) making payments to the right parties in the correct amount within allowable time frames and recouping any improper payments, and (3) accurately recording and reporting on its transactions and use of public funds. GAO's testimony focuses on (1) challenges DOD faces in its funds control, and their effect on the reliability of DOD's financial information, especially the budgetary information in DOD's Statement of Budgetary Resources and (2) weaknesses in DOD's payment controls that put the department at risk of making improper payments. This statement is based on our prior work and reports issued by the department's Inspector General (DOD IG). The panel requested that GAO provide its perspective on the status of DOD's process for identifying and reporting on improper …

A publication issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Today's hearing is on the appointment and oversight of guardians. As people age, they often reach a point when they are no longer capable of handling their own finances or have difficulty making other decisions for themselves. To ensure that federal cash payments received by incapacitated adults are used in their best interest, the Social Security Administration (SSA), Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and other federal agencies assign a responsible third party or fiduciary to oversee these benefits. SSA and VA can designate spouses, other family members, friends, and organizations to serve as fiduciaries. Similarly, when state courts determine that adults are incapacitated, they have the authority to grant other persons or entities--guardians--the authority and responsibility to make financial and other decisions for them. Incapacitated adults are vulnerable to financial exploitation by fiduciaries and guardians, so these arrangements are not without risk. In 2010, we identified hundreds of allegations of abuse, neglect, and exploitation by guardians in 45 states and the District of Columbia between 1990 and 2010. At that time, we reviewed 20 of these cases and found that guardians had stolen or otherwise improperly obtained …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act) provided $70.3 billion for three education programs--the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund (SFSF); Title I, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (Title I); and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Part B. One goal of the Recovery Act was to save and create jobs, and SFSF also requires states to report information expected to increase transparency and advance educational reform. This report responds to two ongoing GAO mandates under the Recovery Act. It examines (1) how selected states and local recipients used the funds; (2) what plans the Department of Education (Education) and selected states have to assess the impact of the funds; (3) what approaches are being used to ensure accountability of the funds; and (4) how Education and states ensure the accuracy of recipient reported data. To conduct this review, GAO gathered information from 14 states and the District of Columbia, conducted a nationally representative survey of local educational agencies (LEA), interviewed Education officials, examined recipient reports, and reviewed relevant policy documents."

A publication issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is responsible for developing and acquiring new technologies to address homeland security needs. TSA's acquisition programs represent billions of dollars in life-cycle costs and support a wide range of aviation security missions and investments including technologies used to screen passengers, checked baggage, and air cargo, among others. GAO's testimony addresses three key challenges identified in past work: (1) developing technology program requirements, (2) overseeing and conducting testing of new technologies, and (3) incorporating information on costs and benefits in making technology acquisition decisions. This statement also addresses recent DHS efforts to strengthen its investment and acquisition processes. This statement is based on reports and testimonies GAO issued from October 2009 through September 2011 related to TSA's efforts to manage, test, and deploy various technology programs."

This report is prepared annually to provide Congress with official, unclassified, quantitative data on conventional arms transfers to developing nations by the United States and foreign countries for the preceding eight calendar years for use in its policy oversight functions. All agreement and delivery data in this report for the United States are government-to-government Foreign Military Sales (FMS) transactions. Similar data are provided on worldwide conventional arms transfers by all suppliers, but the principal focus is the level of arms transfers by major weapons suppliers to nations in the developing world.

This report discusses the current political state of Afghanistan, focusing particularly on the influence of the Taliban and other militant groups and on the leadership of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. This report also discusses the U.S.-Afghanistan relationship, in both the short and long term, and U.S. efforts under the Obama Administration to provide military, reconstructive, and stabilization aid.

This report discusses a rise in the unauthorized resident ("illegal") alien population from 1986 to 2010. It looks at reasons that illegal aliens stay resort to breaking the law and how illegal aliens affect the workforce in certain industries.

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This Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) provides the specific procedural steps for analyzing reconstructed CT images obtained under the IDD Standard Operating Procedures for data acquisition [1] and MicroCT image reconstruction [2], per the IDD Quality Assurance Plan for MicroCT Scanning [3]. Although intended to apply primarily to MicroCT data acquired in the HEAFCAT Facility at LLNL, these procedures may also be applied to data acquired at Tyndall from the YXLON cabinet and at TSL from the HEXCAT system. This SOP also provides the procedural steps for preparing the tables and graphs to be used in the reporting of analytical results. This SOP applies to production work - for R and D there are two other semi-automated methods as given in [4, 5].

A comprehensive simulator is being developed for underground coal gasification (UCG), with the capability to support site selection, design, hazard analyses, operations, and monitoring (Nitao et al., 2010). UCG is computationally challenging because it involves tightly-coupled multi-physical/chemical processes, with vastly different timescales. This new capability will predict cavity growth, product gas composition and rate, and the interaction with the host environment, accounting for site characteristics, injection gas composition and rate, and associated water-well extraction rates. Progress on the new simulator includes completion and system integration of a wall model, a rock spalling model, a cavity boundary tracking model, a one-dimensional cavity gas reactive transport model, a rudimentary rubble heat, mass, and reaction model, and coupling with a pre-existing hydrology simulator. An existing geomechanical simulator was enhanced to model cavity collapse and overburden subsidence. A commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code is being evaluated to model cavity gas flow and combustion in two and three dimensions. Although the simulator is midway in its development, it was applied to modeling the Hoe Creek III field test (Stephens, 1981) conducted in the 1970s, in order to evaluate and demonstrate the simulator's basic capabilities, gain experience, and guide future development. Furthermore, it is consistent …

Two formulations of EPDM elastomer, one substituting a UV stabilizer for the normal antioxidant in this polymer, and the other the normal formulation, were synthesized and samples of each were exposed to gamma irradiation in initially pure deuterium gas to compare their radiation stability. Stainless steel containers having rupture disks were designed for this task. After 130 MRad dose of cobalt-60 radiation in the SRNL Gamma Irradiation Facility, a significant amount of gas was created by radiolysis; however the composition indicated by mass spectroscopy indicated an unexpected increase in the total amount deuterium in both formulations. The irradiated samples retained their ductility in a bend test. No change of sample weight, dimensions, or density was observed. No change of the glass transition temperature as measured by dynamic mechanical analysis was observed, and most of the other dynamic mechanical properties remained unchanged. There appeared to be an increase in the storage modulus of the irradiated samples containing the UV stabilizer above the glass transition, which may indicate hardening of the material by radiation damage. Polymeric materials become damaged by exposure over time to ionizing radiation. Despite the limited lifetime, polymers have unique engineering material properties and polymers continue to be used …

This work presents a model for the photoemission of electrons from sodium chloride nanoparticles 50-500 nm in size, illuminated by vacuum ultraviolet light with energy ranging from 9.4-10.9 eV. The discrete dipole approximation is used to calculate the electromagnetic field inside the particles, from which the two-dimensional angular distribution of emitted electrons is simulated. The emission is found to favor the particle?s geometrically illuminated side, and this asymmetry is compared to previous measurements performed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. By modeling the nanoparticles as spheres, the Berkeley group is able to semi-quantitatively account for the observed asymmetry. Here however, the particles are modeled as cubes, which is closer to their actual shape, and the interaction of an emitted electron with the particle surface is also considered. The end result shows that the emission asymmetry for these low-energy electrons is more sensitive to the particle-surface interaction than to the specific particle shape, i.e., a sphere or cube.

A new solvent system is being evaluated for use in the Modular Caustic-Side Solvent Extraction Unit (MCU) and in the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF). The new system replaces the current dilute nitric acid strip solution with 0.01 M boric acid. This literature study is performed to determine if there is a potential for boric acid to crystallize in the lines with emphasis on the transfer lines to the Defense Waste Processing Facility. This report focuses on the aqueous phase chemistry of boric acid under conditions relevant to MCU and SWPF. Operating and transfer conditions examined for the purpose of this review include temperatures between 13 C (McLeskey, 2008) and 45 C (Fondeur, 2007) and concentrations from 0 to 3M in nitric acid as well as exposure of small amounts of entrained boric acid in the organic phase to the sodium hydroxide caustic wash stream. Experiments were also conducted to observe any chemical reactions and off-gas generation that could occur when 0.01 M boric acid solution mixes with 3 M nitric acid solution and vice versa. Based on the low concentration (0.01M) of boric acid in the MCU/SWPF strip acid and the moderate operating temperatures (13 C to 45 C), …

The Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) is developing crystalline ceramic waste forms to incorporate CS/LN/TM high Mo waste streams consisting of perovskite, hollandite, pyrochlore, zirconolite, and powellite phase assemblages. Simple raw materials, including Al{sub 2}O{sub 3}, CaO, and TiO{sub 2} were combined with simulated waste components to produce multiphase crystalline ceramics. Fiscal Year 2011 (FY11) activities included (i) expanding the compositional range by varying waste loading and fabrication of compositions rich in TiO{sub 2}, (ii) exploring the processing parameters of ceramics produced by the melt and crystallize process, (iii) synthesis and characterization of select individual phases of powellite and hollandite that are the target hosts for radionuclides of Mo, Cs, and Rb, and (iv) evaluating the durability and radiation stability of single and multi-phase ceramic waste forms. Two fabrication methods, including melting and crystallizing, and pressing and sintering, were used with the intent of studying phase evolution under various sintering conditions. An analysis of the XRD and SEM/EDS results indicates that the targeted crystalline phases of the FY11 compositions consisting of pyrochlore, perovskite, hollandite, zirconolite, and powellite were formed by both press and sinter and melt and crystallize processing methods. An evaluation of crystalline phase formation versus melt processing conditions …

In 2008 Governor Schwarzenegger of California issued an executive order requiring that 33 percent of all electricity in the state in the year 2020 should come from renewable resources such as wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and small hydroelectric facilities. This 33% renewable portfolio standard (RPS) was further codified and signed into law by Governor Brown in 2011. To assess the market impacts of such a requirement, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) initiated a study to quantify the cost, risk, and timing of achieving a 33% RPS by 2020. The California Independent System Operator (CAISO) was contracted to manage this study. The production simulation model used in this study was developed using the PLEXOS software package, which allows energy planners to optimize long-term system planning decisions under a wide variety of system constraints. In this note we describe our observations on varying the optimality tolerance in the CAISO 33% RPS model. In particular, we observe that changing the optimality tolerance from .05% to .5% leads to solutions over 5 times faster, on average, producing very similar solutions with a negligible difference in overall distance from optimality.

This Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) provides the specific procedural steps for analyzing reconstructed CT images obtained under the IDD Standard Operating Procedures for data acquisition [1] and MicroCT image reconstruction [2], per the IDD Quality Assurance Plan for MicroCT Scanning [3]. Although intended to apply primarily to MicroCT data acquired in the HEAFCAT Facility at LLNL, these procedures may also be applied to data acquired at Tyndall from the YXLON cabinet and at TSL from the HEXCAT system. This SOP also provides the procedural steps for preparing the tables and graphs to be used in the reporting of analytical results. This SOP applies to R and D work - for production applications, use [4].

Recent work has shown that GaN{sub 1-x}As{sub x} can be grown across the entire composition range by low temperature molecular beam epitaxy with intermediate compositions being amorphous, but control of the electrical properties through doping is critical for functionalizing this material. Here we report the bipolar doping of GaN{sub 1-x}As{sub x} with high As content to conductivities above 4 S/cm at room temperature using Mg or Te. The carrier type was confirmed by thermopower measurements. Doping requires an increase in Ga flux during growth resulting in a mixed phase material of polycrystalline GaAs:N embedded in amorphous GaN{sub 1-x}As{sub x}.

This report analyzes the current unrest in Syria and the U.S. response to the Syrian government's crackdown against demonstrators. It also provides background information on U.S. sanctions against the Asad regime and its supporters.

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A presentation that overviews existing modeling frameworks to analyze water system sensitivity to climate change and other stress factors.

Annual financial report of the Twelfth Court of Appeals documenting income, expenditures, and other relevant financial information for fiscal year 2011.