Guidance issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This publication supersedes GAO-08-81G, Audit Manual: Volume 1, Exposure Draft, October 2007. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency (PCIE) maintain the GAO/PCIE Financial Audit Manual (FAM). The FAM provides guidance for performing financial statement audits of federal entities. The FAM is a key tool for enhancing accountability over taxpayer-provided resources."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "During the Cold War, the Department of Energy (DOE) produced nuclear materials for nuclear weapons at its Savannah River Site (SRS) by dissolving highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel from reactors in a facility known as H-Canyon. DOE planned to end H-Canyon operations in 2007 but now plans to continue H-Canyon operations until 2019 to process additional nuclear material. GAO was asked to (1) identify the types of nuclear materials DOE will process using H-Canyon and its associated costs of operation, (2) determine whether SRS's radioactive waste storage tanks and associated nuclear waste facilities are capable of handling the additional waste generated by H-Canyon, and (3) describe H-Canyon's compliance with safety and environmental requirements. To conduct its work, GAO reviewed DOE's plans to process nuclear material using H-Canyon and visited SRS to observe the canyon and associated radioactive waste treatment facilities."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Through the New Starts program, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) evaluates and recommends new fixed guideway transit projects for funding using the evaluation criteria identified in law. In August 2007, FTA issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), in part, to incorporate certain provisions within the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient, Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU) into the evaluation process. SAFETEA-LU requires GAO to annually review FTA's New Starts process. This report discusses (1) the information captured by New Starts project justification criteria, (2) challenges FTA faces as it works to improve the New Starts program, and (3) options for evaluating New Starts projects. To address these objectives, GAO reviewed statutes, FTA guidance and regulations governing the New Starts program, and interviewed experts, project sponsors, and Department of Transportation (DOT) officials."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 2007, following the implementation of new document requirements for travelers entering the United States from within the Western Hemisphere, the Department of State (State) received a record number of passport applications. In June 2009 further document requirements are scheduled to go into effect and will likely lead to another surge in passport demand. GAO examined (1) the extent to which State was prepared for the surge in passport demand and how its readiness affected passport operations, (2) State's actions to increase passport production capacity in response to the surge, and (3) State's readiness for near-term surges in demand and its strategy to improve passport operations. GAO interviewed officials from State and the Departments of the Treasury and Homeland Security, conducted site visits, and reviewed data on passport processing times and reports on passport operations."

Guidance issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This publication supersedes GAO-08-82G, Financial Audit Manual: Volume Two, Exposure Draft--October 2007. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency (PCIE) maintain the GAO/PCIE Financial Audit Manual (FAM). The FAM provides guidance for performing financial statement audits of federal entities. The FAM is a key tool for enhancing accountability over taxpayer-provided resources."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO previously reported that federal contractors abuse the tax system with little consequence. While performing those audits, GAO noted that much of the tax abuse involved contractors not remitting to the government payroll taxes that were withheld from salaries. As a result, GAO was asked to review the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) processes and procedures to prevent and collect unpaid payroll taxes. Specifically, GAO was asked to determine (1) the magnitude of unpaid federal payroll tax debt, (2) the factors affecting IRS's ability to enforce compliance or pursue collections, and (3) whether some businesses with unpaid payroll taxes are engaged in abusive or potentially criminal activities with regard to the federal tax system. To address these objectives GAO analyzed IRS's tax database, performed case study analyses of payroll tax offenders, and interviewed collection officials from IRS and several states."

The 2002 farm bill required retailers to provide country-of-origin labeling for fresh produce, red meats, peanuts, and seafood by September 30, 2004. Congress twice postponed implementation for all but seafood; country-of-origin labeling (COOL) now must be implemented by September 30, 2008. Some lawmakers have proposed new COOL requirements for other foods and food ingredients, as part of a proposed overhaul of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

The correspondence between theories in anti-de Sitter space and conformal field theories in physical space-time leads to an analytic, semiclassical model for strongly-coupled QCD which has scale invariance at short distances and color confinement at large distances. Light-front holography is a remarkable feature of AdS/CFT: it allows hadronic amplitudes in the AdS fifth dimension to be mapped to frame-independent light-front wavefunctions of hadrons in physical space-time, thus providing a relativistic description of hadrons at the amplitude level. Some novel features of QCD are discussed, including the consequences of confinement for quark and gluon condensates and the behavior of the QCD coupling in the infrared. We suggest that the spatial support of QCD condensates is restricted to the interior of hadrons, since they arise due to the interactions of confined quarks and gluons. Chiral symmetry is thus broken in a limited domain of size 1=m{sub {pi}} in analogy to the limited physical extent of superconductor phases. A new method for computing the hadronization of quark and gluon jets at the amplitude level, an event amplitude generator, is outlined.

For each sludge batch that is processed in the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF), the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) performs confirmation of the applicability of the digestion method to be used by the DWPF lab for elemental analysis of Sludge Receipt and Adjustment Tank (SRAT) receipt samples and SRAT product process control samples. DWPF SRAT samples are typically dissolved using a room temperature HF-HNO3 acid dissolution (i.e., DWPF Cold Chem Method, see Procedure SW4-15.201) and then analyzed by inductively coupled plasma - atomic emission spectroscopy (ICP-AES). This report contains the results and comparison of data generated from performing the Aqua Regia (AR), Sodium Peroxide/Hydroxide Fusion (PF) and DWPF Cold Chem (CC) method digestion of Sludge Batch 5 (SB5) SRAT Receipt and SB5 SRAT Product samples. The SB5 SRAT Receipt and SB5 SRAT Product samples were prepared in the SRNL Shielded Cells, and the SRAT Receipt material is representative of the sludge that constitutes the SB5 Batch composition. This is the sludge in Tank 51 that is to be transferred into Tank 40, which will contain the heel of Sludge Batch 4 (SB4), to form the SB5 Blend composition. The results for any one particular element should not be used …

The LBNL 88-Inch Cyclotron offers broad-spectrum neutrons for single event effects testing. We discuss results from this beamline for neutron soft upsets in Xilinx Virtex-4 and -5 field-programmable-gate-array (FPGA) devices.

This note summarizes the results of the 'Workshop on Polarization and Beam Energy Measurements at the ILC', held at DESY (Zeuthen) April 9-11 2008. The topics for the workshop included (1) physics requirements, (2) polarized sources and low energy polarimetry, (3) BDS polarimeters, (4) BDS energy spectrometers, and (5) physics-based measurements of beam polarization and beam energy from collider data. Discussions focused on the current ILC baseline program as described in the Reference Design Report (RDR), which includes physics runs at beam energies between 100 and 250 GeV, as well as calibration runs on the Z-pole. Electron polarization of P{sub e{sup -}} {approx}> 80% and positron polarization of P{sub e{sup +}} {approx}> 30% are part of the baseline configuration of the machine. Energy and polarization measurements for ILC options beyond the baseline, including Z-pole running and the 1 TeV energy upgrade, were also discussed.

Using 214 fb{sup -1} of data recorded by the BABAR detector at the PEPII electron-positron collider, they study the decay D{sub s}{sup +} {yields} K{sup +}K{sup -}e{sup +}{nu}{sub e}. Except for a small S-wave contribution, the events with K{sup +}K{sup -} masses in the range 1.01-1.03 GeV/c{sup 2} correspond to {phi} mesons. For D{sub s}{sup +} {yields} {phi}e{sup +}{nu}{sub e} decays, they measure the relative normalization of the Lorentz invariant form factors at q{sup 2} = 0, r{sub V} = V(0)/A{sub 1}(0) = 1.849 {+-} 0.060 {+-} 0.095, r{sub 2} = A{sub 2}(0)/A{sub 1}(0) = 0.763 {+-} 0.071 {+-} 0.065 and the pole mass of the axial-vector form factors m{sub A} = (2.28{sub -0.18}{sup +0.23} {+-} 0.18) GeV/c{sup 2}. Within the same K{sup +}K{sup -} mass range, they also measure the relative branching fractions {Beta}(D{sub s}{sup +} {yields} K{sup +}K{sup -}e{sup +}{nu}{sub e})/{Beta}(D{sub s}{sup +} {yields} K{sup +}K{sup -}{pi}{sup +}) - 0.558 {+-} 0.007 {+-} 0.016, from which they obtain the total branching fraction {Beta}(D{sub s}{sup +} {yields} {phi}e{sup +}{nu}{sub e}) = (2.61 {+-} 0.03 {+-} 0.08 {+-} 0.15) x 10{sup -2}. By comparing this value with the predicted decay rate, they extract A{sub 1}(0) = 0.607 {+-} 0.011 {+-} …

The goals of ATF2 are to test a novel compact final focus optics design with local chromaticity correction intended for use in future linear colliders. The newly designed extraction line and final focus system will be used to produce a 37nm vertical waist from an extracted beam from the ATF ring of {approx}30nm vertical normalized emittance, and to stabilize it at the IP-waist to the {approx}2nm level. Static and dynamic tolerances on all accelerator components are very tight; the achievement of the ATF2 goals is reliant on the application of multiple high-level beam dynamics control algorithms to align and tune the electron beam in the extraction line and final focus system. Much algorithmic development work has been done in Japan and by colleagues in collaborating nations in North America and Europe. We describe here development work towards realizing a 'flight simulator' environment for the shared development and implementation of beam dynamics code. This software exists as a 'middle-layer' between the lower-level control systems (EPICS and V-SYSTEM) and the multiple higher-level beam dynamics modeling tools in use by the three regions (SAD, Lucretia, PLACET, MAD...).

Representatives of facilities that routinely deliver protons for radiation effect testing are collaborating to establish a set of standard best practices for proton dosimetry. These best practices will be submitted to the ASTM International for adoption.

Using two identical 64-pixel Burle/Photonis MCP-PMTs to provide start and stop signals, they have achieved a timing resolution of {sigma}{sub Single{_}detector} {approx} 7.2 ps for N{sub pe} {approx} 50 photoelectrons (N{sub pe}) with a laser diode providing a 1 mm spot on the MCP window. The limiting resolution achieved was {sigma}{sub Single{_}detector} {approx} 5.0 ps for N{sub pe} {approx} 180, for which they estimate the MCP-PMT contribution of {sigma}{sub MCP-PMT} {approx} 4.5 ps. The electronics contribution is estimated as {sigma}{sub Electrons} = 3.42 ps. These results suggest that an ultra-high resolution TOF detector may become a reality at future experiments one day.

PEP-II and BaBar have just finished run 7, the last run of the SLAC B-factory. PEP-II was one of the few high-current e+e- colliding accelerators and holds the present world record for stored electrons and stored positrons. It has stored 2.07 A of electrons, nearly 3 times the design current of 0.75 A and it has stored 3.21 A of positrons, 1.5 times more than the design current of 2.14 A. High-current beams require careful design of several systems. The feedback systems that control instabilities, the RF system stability loops, and especially the vacuum systems have to handle the higher power demands. We present here some of the accomplishments of the PEP-II accelerator and some of the problems we encountered while running high-current beams.

The objective of the CERTS Microgrid Laboratory Test Bed project was to enhance the ease of integrating small energy sources into a microgrid. The project accomplished this objective by developing and demonstrating three advanced techniques, collectively referred to as the CERTS Microgrid concept, that significantly reduce the level of custom field engineering needed to operate microgrids consisting of small generating sources. The techniques comprising the CERTS Microgrid concept are: 1) a method for effecting automatic and seamless transitions between grid-connected and islanded modes of operation; 2) an approach to electrical protection within the microgrid that does not depend on high fault currents; and 3) a method for microgrid control that achieves voltage and frequency stability under islanded conditions without requiring high-speed communications. The techniques were demonstrated at a full-scale test bed built near Columbus, Ohio and operated by American Electric Power. The testing fully confirmed earlier research that had been conducted initially through analytical simulations, then through laboratory emulations, and finally through factory acceptance testing of individual microgrid components. The islanding and resychronization method met all Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 1547 and power quality requirements. The electrical protections system was able to distinguish between normal and faulted operation. …

An early, but at the time illuminating, piece of work on how to deal with a general, linearly coupled accelerator lattice is revisited. This work is based on the SLIM formalism developed in 1979-1981.

I discuss several novel phenomenological features of QCD which are observable in deep inelastic lepton-nucleon and lepton-nucleus scattering. Initial- and final-state interactions from gluon exchange, normally neglected in the parton model, have a profound effect on QCD hard-scattering reactions, leading to leading-twist single-spin asymmetries, the diffractive contribution to deep inelastic scattering, and the breakdown of the pQCD Lam-Tung relation in Drell-Yan reactions. Leading-twist diffractive processes in turn lead to nuclear shadowing and non-universal antishadowing--physics not incorporated in the light-front wavefunctions of the nucleus computed in isolation.

The authors present a study of hadronic transitions between {Upsilon}(mS) (m = 4,3,2) and {Upsilon}(nS) (n = 2,1) resonances based on 347.5 fb{sup -1} of data taken with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II storage rings.

Using a new extraction line currently under construction, the ATF2 experiment plans to test the novel compact final focus optics design with local chromaticity correction intended for use in future linear colliders. With a 1.3 GeV design beam of 30nm normalized vertical emittance extracted from the ATF damping ring, the primary goal is to achieve a vertical spot-size at the IP waist of 37nm. We discuss our planned strategy for tuning the ATF2 beam to meet the primary goal. Simulation studies have been performed to asses the effectiveness of the strategy, including 'static' (installation) errors and dynamical effects (ground-motion, mechanical vibration, ring extraction jitter etc.). We have simulated all steps in the tuning procedure, from initial orbit establishment to final IP spot-size tuning. Through a Monte Carlo study of 100's of simulation seeds we find we can achieve a spot-size within {approx}10% of the design optics value in at least 75% of cases. We also ran a simulation to study the long-term performance with the use of beam-based feedbacks.

We present an improved design for a Super-B interaction region. The new design attempts to minimize the bending of the two colliding beams which results from shared magnetic elements near the Interaction Point (IP). The total crossing angle at the IP is increased from 34 mrad to 50 mrad and the distance from the IP to the first quadrupole is increased. Although the two beams still travel through this shared magnet, these changes allow for a new magnetic field design with a septum which gives the magnet two magnetic centers. This greatly reduces the beam bending from this shared quadrupole and thereby reduces the radiative bhabha background for the detector as well as any beam emittance growth from the bending. We describe the new design for the interaction region.

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This report discusses the history, current posture, and outlook for federal energy tax policy. It also discusses current energy tax proposals and major energy tax provisions enacted in the 109th Congress.