A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, increased security requirements and a significant number of active duty and reserve personnel sent overseas to support the war on terror left the Department of Defense (DOD) with fewer military personnel to rely on to protect domestic installations. To correct this shortage, Congress is temporarily allowing DOD to use contract security guards to fulfill roles previously performed by military employees. The U.S. Army has awarded contracts worth nearly $733 million to acquire contract guards at 57 Army installations, an investment far greater than those made by other DOD services so far. The requesters asked GAO to assess how the Army has been managing and overseeing its acquisition of security guard services, particularly with regard to the Army's (1) acquisition strategy, (2) employment screening, (3) training of contract guards, and (4) award fee process. This report also discusses DOD's mandated November 2005 report to Congress on the contract guard program."

This Geotechnical Analysis Report (GAR) presents and interprets the geotechnical data from the underground excavations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). The data, which are obtained as part of a regular monitoring program, are used to characterize conditions, to compare actual performance to the design assumptions, and to evaluate and forecast the performance of the underground excavations. GARs have been available to the public since 1983. During the Site and Preliminary Design Validation (SPDV) Program, the architect/engineer for the project produced these reports quarterly to document the geomechanical performance during and immediately after early excavations of the underground facility. Since the completion of the construction phase of the project in 1987, the management and operating contractor for the facility has prepared these reports annually. This report describes the performance and condition of selected areas from July 1, 2004, to June 30, 2005. It is divided into nine chapters. Chapter 1 provides background information on WIPP, its mission, and the purpose and scope of the Geomechanical Monitoring Program. Chapter 2 describes the local and regional geology of the WIPP site. Chapters 3 and 4 describe the geomechanical instrumentation in the shafts and shaft stations, present the data collected by that …

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This 7th quarterly Technical Progress Report for the Lignite Fuel Enhancement Project summarizes activities from January 1st through March 31st of 2006. It also summarizes the subsequent purchasing activity, dryer/process construction, and testing. The Design Team began conferencing again as construction completed and the testing program began. Primary focus this quarter was construction/installation completion. Phase 1 extension recommendation, and subsequent new project estimate, Forms 424 and 4600 were accepted by DOE headquarters. DOE will complete the application and amended contract. All major mechanical equipment was run, checked out, and tested this quarter. All water, air, and coal flow loops were run and tested. The system was run on January 30th, shut down to adjust equipment timing in the control system on the 31st, and run to 75 ton//hour on February 1st. It ran for seven to eight hours per day until March 20th when ''pairs'' testing ( 24 hour running) began. ''Pairs'' involves comparative testing of unit performance with seven ''wet'' pulverizers versus six ''wet'' and one ''dry''. During the interim, more operators were brought up to speed on system operation and control was shifted to the main Unit No.2 Control Room. The system is run now from the Unit …

This Geotechnical Analysis Report (GAR) presents and interprets geotechnical data from the underground excavations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). The data, which are obtained as part of a regular monitoring program, are used to characterize conditions, to compare actual performance to the design assumptions, and to evaluate and forecast the performance of the underground excavations. GARs have been available to the public since 1983. During the Site and Preliminary Design Validation (SPDV) Program, the architect/engineer for the project produced these reports quarterly to document the geomechanical performance during and immediately after early excavations of the underground facility. Since completion of the construction phase of the project in 1987, the management and operating contractor for the facility has prepared these reports annually. This report describes the performance and condition of selected areas from July 1, 2005, to June 30, 2006. It is divided into nine chapters. Chapter 1 provides background information on WIPP, its mission, and the purpose and scope of the geomechanical monitoring program. Chapter 2 describes the local and regional geology of the WIPP site. Chapters 3 and 4 describe the geomechanical instrumentation in the shafts and shaft stations, present the data collected by that instrumentation, and …

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This paper presents a review of racetrack coil magnet designs and technologies for high field magnets that can be used in LHC upgrade. The designs presented here allow both ''Wind & React'' and ''React & Wind'' technologies as they are based on flat racetrack coils with large bend radii. Test results of the BNL 10.3 T ''React & Wind'' common coil magnet are also presented. A possible use of High Temperature Superconductors (HTS) in future high field accelerator magnets is examined.

High current-density Nb{sub 3}Sn strands made by internal-tin routes are not stable against flux jumps at low fields. Since flux jumps release heat, they can initiate quenching if thermal conductivity to the liquid helium is poor. To make matters worse, tin is a potent contaminant of copper, and reaction of strands to maximize performance leads to the loss of thermal conductivity. We discuss how the root of a solution of this problem lies in optimizing two parameters, RRR and J{sub c}, instead of J{sub c} alone. An important workaround for magnet designers is controlling the balance between performance and stability by reducing the temperature or time of the final heat treatment step. This provides ample J{sub c} while also keeping RRR high. Under these conditions, the instability current density threshold J{sub s} is higher than J{sub c}. Additional factors are also available to improve the management of instabilities, including new strand designs with smaller subelements or divided subelements.

The overall objective of this project is the continued development, installation, and testing of continuous water sampling and analysis technologies for application to on-site monitoring of groundwater treatment systems and remediation sites. In a previous project, an on-line analytical system (OLAS) for multistream water sampling was installed at the Fort Ord Operable Unit 2 Groundwater Treatment System, with the objective of developing a simplified analytical method for detection of Compounds of Concern at that plant, and continuous sampling of up to twelve locations in the treatment system, from raw influent waters to treated effluent. Earlier implementations of the water sampling and processing system (Analytical Sampling and Analysis Platform, A A+RT, Milpitas, CA) depended on off-line integrators that produced paper plots of chromatograms, and sent summary tables to a host computer for archiving. We developed a basic LabVIEW (National Instruments, Inc., Austin, TX) based gas chromatography control and data acquisition system that was the foundation for further development and integration with the ASAP system. Advantages of this integration include electronic archiving of all raw chromatographic data, and a flexible programming environment to support development of improved ASAP operation and automated reporting. The initial goals of integrating the preexisting LabVIEW chromatography control …

Let me begin by thanking the Committee and the Assembly for inviting me to speak and present information on the topic of carbon capture and storage (sometimes called carbon sequestration or geosequestration). I am a research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) leading the Carbon Management Program. Our Laboratory is administered by the University of California for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. Lawrence Livermore is a multi-program laboratory with special responsibilities in national security and state-of-the-art experimental and computational capabilities that are also applied to meet other pressing national needs. In particular, LLNL pursues a broad portfolio of innovative research and development programs in energy and environmental sciences, including carbon capture and storage. It is an honor, and I believe the time is good to discuss this very promising technology pathway for greenhouse gas emissions reduction. Here I will describe the current state of knowledge and practice for carbon capture and storage, and highlight specific opportunities for benefit by deployment in California.

This report describes the progress made during the Early Career Principal Investigator (ECPI) project on Algorithmic Techniques for Large Data Sets. Research was carried out in the areas of dimension reduction, clustering and finding structure in data, aggregating information from different sources and designing efficient methods for similarity search for high dimensional data. A total of nine different research results were obtained and published in leading conferences and journals.

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This report surveys key aspects of Indonesia's domestic politics and strategic dynamics in addition to providing general background information on Indonesia.

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This report analyzes data from America's Health Insurance Plans(AHIP), the national association representing health insurers, on the number of enrollers in HSA-qualified HDHPs.

This report focuses on the legal debate related to global warming, and past and possible litigation. The court cases, decided and pending, address four principal issues, whether the EPA has the authority under the Clean Air Act (CAA) to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, from either stationary or mobile sources; whether state regulation of GHG emissions from motor vehicles (limited to California at the moment) preempted by federal law; can the common law of nuisance be used to force cutbacks in GHG emissions; and do the alleged global warming impacts of federal agency actions allow a National Environmental Policy Act challenge?

This report presents Major policy issues and Status of negotiations related to a Free Trade Area of the Americas.

Higher quantum efficiency in near-IR, narrower point spread function and higher readout speed than with conventional sensors have been receiving increased emphasis in the development of CCDs and silicon PIN-CMOS sensors for use in large optical telescopes. Some key aspects in the development of such devices are reviewed.

Mainstream CMOS is now a well-established detector readout technology. We review technology scaling trends and limits, the implementation of analog circuits in digital CMOS processes, and radiation resistance. Emphasis is placed on the growing importance of power dissipation in ultra-scaled technologies.

We present a survey of serendipitous extended X-ray sources and optical cluster candidates from the Chandra Multi-wavelength Project (ChaMP). Our main goal is to make an unbiased comparison of X-ray and optical cluster detection methods. In 130 archival Chandra pointings covering 13 square degrees, we use a wavelet decomposition technique to detect 55 extended sources, of which 6 are nearby single galaxies. Our X-ray cluster catalog reaches a typical flux limit of about {approx} 10{sup -14} erg s{sup -1} cm{sup -2}, with a median cluster core radius of 21''. For 56 of the 130 X-ray fields, we use the ChaMP's deep NOAO/4m MOSAIC g', r', and i' imaging to independently detect cluster candidates using a Voronoi tessellation and percolation (VTP) method. Red-sequence filtering decreases the galaxy fore/background contamination and provides photometric redshifts to z {approx} 0.7. From the overlapping 6.1 square degree X-ray/optical imaging, we find 115 optical clusters (of which 11% are in the X-ray catalog) and 28 X-ray clusters (of which 46% are in the optical VTP catalog). The median redshift of the 13 X-ray/optical clusters is 0.41, and their median X-ray luminosity (0.5-2 keV) is L{sub X} = (2.65 {+-} 0.19) x 10{sup 43} ergs s{sup -1}. …

We report the serendipitous discovery of two strong gravitational lens candidates (ACS J160919+6532 and ACS J160910+6532) in deep images obtained with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope, each less than 40'' from the previously known gravitational lens system CLASS B1608+656. The redshifts of both lens galaxies have been measured with Keck and Gemini: one is a member of a small galaxy group at z {approx} 0.63, which also includes the lensing galaxy in the B1608+656 system, and the second is a member of a foreground group at z {approx} 0.43. By measuring the effective radii and surface brightnesses of the two lens galaxies, we infer their velocity dispersions based on the passively evolving Fundamental Plane (FP) relation. Elliptical isothermal lens mass models are able to explain their image configurations within the lens hypothesis, with a velocity dispersion compatible with that estimated from the FP for a reasonable source-redshift range. Based on the large number of massive early-type galaxies in the field and the number-density of faint blue galaxies, the presence of two additional lens systems around CLASS B1608+656 is not unlikely in hindsight. Gravitational lens galaxies are predominantly early-type galaxies, which are clustered, and the lensed …