This report discusses Broadband Internet Access and the Digital Divide: Federal Assistance Programs.

Despite their great importance in low-temperaturegeochemistry, self-diffusion coefficients of noble gas isotopes in liquidwater (D) have been measured only for the major isotopes of helium, neon,krypton and xenon. Data on the self-diffusion coefficients of minor noblegas isotopes are essentially non-existent and so typically are estimatedby a kinetic theory model in which D varies as the inverse square root ofthe isotopic mass (m): D proportional to m-0.5. To examine the validityof the kinetic theory model, we performed molecular dynamics (MD)simulations of the diffusion of noble gases in ambient liquid water withan accurate set of noble gas-water interaction potentials. Our simulationresults agree with available experimental data on the solvation structureand self-diffusion coefficients of the major noble gas isotopes in liquidwater and reveal for the first time that the isotopic mass-dependence ofall noble gas self-diffusion coefficients has the power-law form Dproportional to m-beta with 0<beta<0.2. Thus our results callinto serious question the widespread assumption that the square rootmodel can be applied to estimate the kinetic fractionation of noble gasisotopes caused by diffusion in ambient liquid water.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Three U.S. national strategies, developed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, directed U.S. law enforcement agencies (LEA) to focus on the prevention of terrorist attacks. The strategies called for LEAs to intensify their efforts to help foreign nations identify, disrupt, and prosecute terrorists. GAO was asked to assess (1) the guidance for LEAs to assist foreign nations to identify, disrupt, and prosecute terrorists and (2) the extent to which LEAs have implemented this guidance."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Supplementing our December 2006 report entitled Compacts of Free Association: Micronesia and the Marshall Islands Face Challenges in Planning for Sustainability, Measuring Progress, and Ensuring Accountability, this report provides information on the uses of economic assistance provided under the amended U.S. compacts with the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) from 2004 through 2006."

In 2002, General Electric and the US Department of Energy (DOE) entered into a cooperative agreement for the development of a commercialized 100 MVA generator using high temperature superconductors (HTS) in the field winding. The intent of the program was to: • Identify and develop technologies that would be needed for such a generator. • Develop conceptual designs for generators with ratings of 100 MVA and higher using HTS technology. • Perform proof of concept tests at the 1.5 MW level for GE’s proprietary warm iron rotor HTS generator concept. • Design, build, and test a prototype of a commercially viable 100 MVA generator that could be placed on the power grid. This report summarizes work performed during the program and is provided as one of the final program deliverables.

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Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "As of April 2007, about 26,000 service members had been injured as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), according to the Department of Defense (DOD). Those service members injured in the line of duty are eligible for military disability compensation. When they leave the military, they may also be eligible for compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). In fiscal year 2005 alone, the Army, Navy, and Air Force evaluated over 23,000 military disability retirement cases and, in fiscal year 2004, over $1 billion in permanent and temporary military disability retirement benefits were paid to over 90,000 service members. Through the VA disability compensation and pension claims programs, about $34.5 billion in VA cash disability benefits went to more than 3.5 million veterans and their survivors in fiscal year 2006. On April 23, 2007, we briefed the Commission on the results of our recent studies of DOD and VA disability systems. This report presents the information we provided during that briefing."

In this CRADA, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) assisted RIS Corporation of Knoxville, TN, in the development of graphical environment tools for the development and programming of high speed real-time algorithms to be implemented in a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The primary application was intended to be digital signal processing for gamma-ray spectroscopy, in particular for Gamma-Ray Energy Tracking Arrays such as the GRETINA project. Key components of this work included assembling an evaluation platform to verify designs on actual hardware, and creating various types of Simulink functional blocks for peak-shaping and constant-fraction discrimination.

This report is intended for Members and staff assisting grant seekers in districts and states and covers writing proposals for both government and private foundations grants. In preparation for writing a proposal, the report first discusses preliminary information gathering and preparation, developing ideas for the proposal, gathering community support, identifying funding resources, and seeking preliminary review of the proposal and support of relevant administrative officials. The second section of the report covers the actual writing of the proposal. The last section of the report provides a listing of free grants-writing websites.

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Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "On March 13, 2007, we issued our report on our audit of the Capitol Preservation Fund's (CPF) fiscal years 2005 and 2004 financial statements, including the results of our tests of related internal control and selected provisions of laws. In that report, we noted the need to improve certain CPF-related internal controls established by the Library of Congress (Library) in conjunction with financial management services it provides to the Capitol Preservation Commission (Commission). The purpose of this report is to discuss further those internal control deficiencies and to make four recommendations to the Library for improving its CPF-related internal controls and related procedures."

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Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Each year the federal government funds numerous affordable housing and community and economic development initiatives through an array of programs, such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) Section 108 Loan Guarantee (Section 108) program. Yet, the need for federal money to fund these initiatives has continued to grow, while the federal budget increasingly has been strained by other competing funding priorities. To help finance their initiatives and achieve program goals, recipients of funding under these federal programs often have combined or "leveraged" their funds with other federal, state, local, and private sector resources. While leveraging is generally recognized favorably by public and private sector officials, its use in federal programs has not been widely analyzed. This report responds, in part, to Congress's request that we examine leveraging as it relates to federal housing, community, and economic development programs. Specifically, this interim report (1) examines the perspectives of stakeholders--government and industry officials, academics, and others with knowledge of or experience with leveraging--on the use, implications, and measurement of leveraging in housing and community and economic development programs and (2) describes the type of data HUD collects …

We present and employ a new kinematical approach to ''dark energy'' studies. We construct models in terms of the dimensionless second and third derivatives of the scale factor a(t) with respect to cosmic time t, namely the present-day value of the deceleration parameter q{sub 0} and the cosmic jerk parameter, j(t). An elegant feature of this parameterization is that all {Lambda}CDM models have j(t)=1 (constant), which facilitates simple tests for departures from the {Lambda}CDM paradigm. Applying our model to redshift-independent distance measurements, from type Ia supernovae and X-ray cluster gas mass fraction measurements, we obtain clear statistical evidence for a late time transition from a decelerating to an accelerating phase. For a flat model with constant jerk, j(t)=j, we measure q{sub 0}=-0.81 {+-} 0.14 and j=2.16 +0.81 -0.75, results that are consistent with {Lambda}CDM at about the 1{sigma} confidence level. In comparison to dynamical analyses, the kinematical approach uses a different model set and employs a minimum of prior information, being independent of any particular gravity theory. The results obtained with this new approach therefore provide important additional information and we argue that both kinematical and dynamical techniques should be employed in future dark energy studies, where possible.

Nonstandard analysis is a relatively new area of mathematics in which infinitesimal numbers can be defined and manipulated rigorously like real numbers. This report presents a fairly comprehensive tutorial on nonstandard analysis for physicists and engineers with many examples applicable to generalized functions. To demonstrate the power of the subject, the problem of shock wave jump conditions is studied for a one-dimensional compressible gas. It is assumed that the shock thickness occurs on an infinitesimal interval and the jump functions in the thermodynamic and fluid dynamic parameters occur smoothly across this interval. To use conservations laws, smooth pre-distributions of the Dirac delta measure are applied whose supports are contained within the shock thickness. Furthermore, smooth pre-distributions of the Heaviside function are applied which vary from zero to one across the shock wave. It is shown that if the equations of motion are expressed in nonconservative form then the relationships between the jump functions for the flow parameters may be found unambiguously. The analysis yields the classical Rankine-Hugoniot jump conditions for an inviscid shock wave. Moreover, non-monotonic entropy jump conditions are obtained for both inviscid and viscous flows. The report shows that products of generalized functions may be defined consistently using …

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The proposed goals of this collaborative work were to systematically characterize the electronic structure and dynamics of 3-dimensional metal and semiconducting nanocrystals using scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/STS) and ballistic electron emission spectroscopy (BEES). This report describes progress in the spectroscopic work and in the development of methods for creating and characterizing gold nanocrystals. During the grant period, substantial effort also was devoted to the development of epitaxial graphene (EG), a very promising materials system with outstanding potential for nanometer-scale ballistic and coherent devices ("graphene" refers to one atomic layer of graphitic, sp2 -bonded carbon atoms [or more loosely, few layers]). Funding from this DOE grant was critical for the initial development of epitaxial graphene for nanoelectronics

CBP-Tech Note-345 (July 2005), devoted to a study of microbunching instability in FERMI@ELETTRA linac quotes '...the above analysis shows that the most of the gain in microbunching instability occurs after BC2, i.e. after transformation of the energy modulation to the spatial modulation that takes place in BC2. It is possible to avoid that if we use only BC1 for all our needs for bunch compression. There are also additional advantages for a mitigation of the microbunching instability related to that. First, we would need to increase R56 in BC1 (for given energy chirp in the electron beam). Second, a relative energy spread is significantly larger at BC1 than at BC2. Both these factors would contribute to instability suppression due to increased Landau damping effect.' One additional argument was however missed in that report. Instability smearing due to finite emittance is stronger in BC1 simply because the geometrical emittance is larger than in BC2. In spite of the considerations in favor of a lattice with one-stage compressor, it was thought at the time that the two bunch compressors configuration was still preferable as it appeared difficult to obtain a flat-flat distribution at the end of the linac with only one bunch …

This report discusses the “Secret,” or “closed,” sessions of the House and Senate that exclude the press and the public.

The diamond secondary emission enhanced photocathode (SEEP) provides an attractive alternative for simple photo cathodes in high average current electron injectors. It reduces the laser power required to drive the cathode, simultaneously isolating the cathode and the FW cavity from each other, thereby protecting them from contamination and increasing their life time. In this paper, we present the latest results on the secondary electron yield using pulsed thermionic and photo cathodes as primary electron sources, shaping the diamond using laser ablation and reactive ion etching as well as the theoretical underpinning of secondary electron generation and preliminary results of modeling.

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Recently, it was demonstrated that the quasiparticledynamics, the layer-dependent charge and potential, and the c-axisscreening coefficient could be extracted from measurements of thespectral function of few layer graphene films grown epitaxially on SiCusing angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). In this articlewe review these findings, and present detailed methodology for extractingsuch parameters from ARPES. We also present detailed arguments againstthe possibility of an energy gap at the Dirac crossing ED.

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Method of calculating deduction under section 403.302(d)(4), Government Code, of the total taxable value of school district property located in a tax increment reinvestment zone (RQ-0570-GA)

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.