A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

On February 24, 2011, the Department of Defense (DOD) announced the Boeing Company as the winner of a competition to build 179 new KC-46A aerial refueling tankers for the Air Force. This report discusses the KC-46A acquisition program, which is a subject of intense interest because of the dollar value of the contract and the number of jobs it would create, among other things. This report also discusses several oversight issues that could arise for Congress, including if the contract award followed the DOD's announced competition strategy and metrics. This report also discusses this contract in respect to the FY2011 defense authorization bill and the FY2011 DOD appropriations bill.

This report discusses the current economic and political state of the island nation of Singapore, focusing in particularly on its economic success and its relationship with the United States.

Daily publication of the U.S. Office of the Federal Register contains rules and regulations, proposed legislation and rule changes, and other notices, including "Presidential proclamations and Executive Orders, Federal agency documents having general applicability and legal effect, documents required to be published by act of Congress, and other Federal agency documents of public interest" (p. ii). Table of Contents starts on page iii.

This report explains government activities funded under the military construction appropriation, examines trends in military construction funding over the past few years, and outlines military construction issues extant in each of the major regions of U.S. military activity.

This report discusses a number of implementation issues surrounding an economic inflation target. These include what rate of inflation to target, what inflation measure to use, whether to set a point target or range, and what penalties to impose if a target is missed.

This report discusses the recent revolution in Libya, from its 2011 uprising to the end of the Qadhafi era. It specifically looks at Libya's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) disarmament, political reform and human rights, and energy as it relates to the Libyan economy.

This report discusses key budgetary issues for FY2011 involving the Energy and Water Development appropriations bill, which provides funding for civil works projects of the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Reclamation, the Department of Energy, and a number of independent agencies.

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 2004, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) began work on its Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) initiative to improve the safety of commercial motor vehicles, such as trucks and buses. FMCSA, whose primary mission is to reduce commercial motor vehicle-related crashes, fatalities and injuries, has made progress on CSA but needs to complete both implementation throughout all states and a Carrier Safety Fitness Determination rulemaking before CSA is fully implemented. CSA represents a different, more data-driven approach to motor carrier safety. Under CSA, which introduces a new system for identifying and responding to carrier safety risks, FMCSA intends to increase the number of carriers it evaluates and reduce crashes involving commercial vehicles. In light of delays in implementing CSA, Congress is concerned about FMCSA's ability to implement the program and directed GAO to monitor the program's implementation and review FMCSA's capacity to meet milestones within its planned cost estimates. As part of this work, Congress asked us to provide detailed information on the resources FMCSA has devoted and plans to devote to implementing CSA. This report provides information on (1) the amount of actual and proposed funding …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "To help expand health insurance coverage among the 50 million uninsured Americans, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as amended (PPACA) mandates that individuals, subject to certain exceptions, obtain health insurance coverage or pay a financial penalty beginning in 2014--the "individual mandate". At the same time, PPACA generally requires insurers to accept all applicants, regardless of health status, and prohibits insurers from excluding coverage based on any preexisting conditions. An individual mandate such as PPACA requires has been the subject of continued debate. Many health care policy experts have stressed the importance of a mandate in expanding health care coverage and keeping premiums affordable. For example, experts have noted that such a federal requirement may be necessary to prompt many individuals, such as younger, healthier individuals, to obtain coverage they otherwise would forego--particularly once they are guaranteed access to that coverage later when they may need it. They suggest that bringing these younger, healthier individuals into the insurance market is necessary to avoid adverse selection, whereby disproportionately less healthy individuals who need health care services enroll in coverage, leading to higher premiums that further discourage healthy individuals …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The number of oil and gas wells on leased federal land has increased dramatically. To help manage the environmental impacts of these wells, the Department of the Interior's (Interior) Bureau of Land Management (BLM) requires oil and gas operators to reclaim disturbed land in a manner it prescribes. To help ensure operators reclaim leased land, BLM requires them to provide a bond before beginning drilling operations. BLM refers to oil and gas wells and leased land that will require reclamation as potential liabilities because BLM may have to pay for reclamation if the operators fail to do so. GAO was asked to determine (1) BLM's policies for managing potential federal oil and gas well liability, (2) the extent to which BLM has implemented these policies, and (3) the challenges, if any, BLM faces in managing potential oil and gas well liability. GAO analyzed agency data on bonding and wells and interviewed BLM officials. We surveyed all 48 BLM field offices with an oil and gas program, and received 33 responses covering these offices."

This report reviews how the program works and provides an analysis of recent program funding, recipients, and the role being played by the program in the distribution of federal student aid.

This report discuses the 2010 expansion of reporting requirements listed in IRC (Internal Revenue Code) 6041. The controversy in these expansions lies in the burden the expansion imposes on small businesses. The report also describes the pieces of legislation that have amended IRC 6041, and the implications of that legislation along with the consequences of IRC 6041.

The era of petascale computing brought machines with hundreds of thousands of processors. The next generation of exascale supercomputers will make available clusters with millions of processors. In those machines, mean time between failures will range from a few minutes to few tens of minutes, making the crash of a processor the common case, instead of a rarity. Parallel applications running on those large machines will need to simultaneously survive crashes and maintain high productivity. To achieve that, fault tolerance techniques will have to go beyond checkpoint/restart, which requires all processors to roll back in case of a failure. Incorporating some form of message logging will provide a framework where only a subset of processors are rolled back after a crash. In this paper, we discuss why a simple causal message logging protocol seems a promising alternative to provide fault tolerance in large supercomputers. As opposed to pessimistic message logging, it has low latency overhead, especially in collective communication operations. Besides, it saves messages when more than one thread is running per processor. Finally, we demonstrate that a simple causal message logging protocol has a faster recovery and a low performance penalty when compared to checkpoint/restart. Running NAS Parallel Benchmarks …

In this report, we provide an overview of scientific/technical literature on information visualization and VA. Topics discussed include an update and overview of the extensive literature search conducted for this study, the nature and purpose of the field, major research thrusts, and scientific foundations. We review methodologies for evaluating and measuring the impact of VA technologies as well as taxonomies that have been proposed for various purposes to support the VA community. A cognitive science perspective underlies each of these discussions.

The northern Tien Shan of Central Asia is an area of active mid-continent deformation. Although far from a plate boundary, this region has experienced 5 earthquakes larger than magnitude 7 in the past century and includes one event that may as be as large as Mw 8.0. Previous studies based on GPS measurements indicate on the order of 23 mm/yr of shortening across the entire Tien Shan and up to 15 mm/year in the northern Tien Shan (Figure 1). The seismic moment release rate appears comparable with the geodetic measured slip, at least to first order, suggesting that geodetic rates can be considered a proxy for accumulation rates of stress for seismic hazard estimation. Interferometric synthetic aperture radar may provide a means to make detailed spatial measurements and hence in identifying block boundaries and assisting in seismic hazard. Therefore, we hoped to define block boundaries by direct measurement and by identifying and resolving earthquake slip. Due to political instability in Kyrgzystan, the existing seismic network has not performed as well as required to precisely determine earthquake hypocenters in remote areas and hence InSAR is highly useful. In this paper we present the result of three earthquake studies and show that …

Since the spring of 2009, billions of federal dollars have been allocated to state and local governments as grants for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects and programs. The scale of this American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) funding, focused on 'shovel-ready' projects to create and retain jobs, is unprecedented. Thousands of newly funded players - cities, counties, states, and tribes - and thousands of programs and projects are entering the existing landscape of energy efficiency programs for the first time or expanding their reach. The nation's experience base with energy efficiency is growing enormously, fed by federal dollars and driven by broader objectives than saving energy alone. State and local officials made countless choices in developing portfolios of ARRA-funded energy efficiency programs and deciding how their programs would relate to existing efficiency programs funded by utility customers. Those choices are worth examining as bellwethers of a future world where there may be multiple program administrators and funding sources in many states. What are the opportunities and challenges of this new environment? What short- and long-term impacts will this large, infusion of funds have on utility customer-funded programs; for example, on infrastructure for delivering energy efficiency services or on customer …

The scope of the Apps WG covers three areas of interest: Physics and Engineering Models (PEM), multi-physics Integrated Codes (IC), and Verification and Validation (V&V). Each places different demands on the exascale environment. The exascale challenge will be to provide environments that optimize all three. PEM serve as a test bed for both model development and 'best practices' for IC code development, as well as their use as standalone codes to improve scientific understanding. Rapidly achieving reasonable performance for a small team is the key to maintaining PEM innovation. Thus, the environment must provide the ability to develop portable code at a higher level of abstraction, which can then be tuned, as needed. PEM concentrate their computational footprint in one or a few kernels that must perform efficiently. Their comparative simplicity permits extreme optimization, so the environment must provide the ability to exercise significant control over the lower software and hardware levels. IC serve as the underlying software tools employed for most ASC problems of interest. Often coupling dozens of physics models into very large, very complex applications, ICs are usually the product of hundreds of staff-years of development, with lifetimes measured in decades. Thus, emphasis is placed on portability, …

The purpose of this study was to find compositions that increase waste loading of high-alumina wastes beyond what is currently acceptable while avoiding crystallization of nepheline (NaAlSiO4) on slow cooling. Nepheline crystallization has been shown to have a large impact on the chemical durability of high-level waste glasses. It was hypothesized that there would be some composition regions where high-alumina would not result in nepheline crystal production, compositions not currently allowed by the nepheline discriminator. Optical basicity (OB) and the nepheline discriminator (ND) are two ways of describing a given complex glass composition. This report presents the theoretical and experimental basis for these models. They are being studied together in a quadrant system as metrics to explore nepheline crystallization and chemical durability as a function of waste glass composition. These metrics were calculated for glasses with existing data and also for theoretical glasses to explore nepheline formation in Quadrant IV (passes OB metric but fails ND metric), where glasses are presumed to have good chemical durability. Several of these compositions were chosen, and glasses were made to fill poorly represented regions in Quadrant IV. To evaluate nepheline formation and chemical durability of these glasses, quantitative X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis and …

We have conducted electronic-structure calculations for Am metal under pressure to investigate the behavior of the 5f-electron states. Density-functional theory (DFT) does not reproduce the experimental photoemission spectra for the ground-state phase where the 5f electrons are localized, but the theory is expected to be correct when 5f delocalization occurs under pressure. The DFT prediction is that peak structures of the 5f valence band will merge closer to the Fermi level during compression indicating presence of itinerant 5f electrons. Existence of such 5f bands is argued to be a prerequisite for the phase transitions, particularly to the primitive orthorhombic AmIV phase, but does not agree with modern dynamical-mean-field theory (DMFT) results. Our DFT model further suggests insignificant changes of the 5f valence under pressure in agreement with recent resonant x-ray emission spectroscopy, but in contradiction to the DMFT predictions. The influence of pressure on the 5f valency in the actinides is discussed and is shown to depend in a non-trivial fashion on 5f band position and occupation relative to the spd valence bands.

YAHSGS LLC and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) established a CRADA in an attempt to develop a predictive system using a pre-existing ORNL computational neural network and wavelets format. This was in the interest of addressing national needs for toxicity prediction system to help overcome the significant drain of resources (money and time) being directed toward developing chemical agents for commerce. The research project has been supported through an STTR mechanism and funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences beginning Phase I in 2004 (CRADA No. ORNL-04-0688) and extending Phase II through 2007 (ORNL NFE-06-00020). To attempt the research objectives and aims outlined under this CRADA, state-of-the-art computational neural network and wavelet methods were used in an effort to design a predictive toxicity system that used two independent areas on which to base the system’s predictions. These two areas were quantitative structure-activity relationships and gene-expression data obtained from microarrays. A third area, using the new Massively Parallel Signature Sequencing (MPSS) technology to assess gene expression, also was attempted but had to be dropped because the company holding the rights to this promising MPSS technology went out of business. A research-scale predictive toxicity database system called Multi-Intelligent System for …

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