The objectives of this project are to develop and test new techniques for creating extensive, conductive hydraulic fractures in unconventional tight gas reservoirs by statistically assessing the productivity achieved in hundreds of field treatments with a variety of current fracturing practices ranging from 'water fracs' to conventional gel fracture treatments; by laboratory measurements of the conductivity created with high rate proppant fracturing using an entirely new conductivity test - the 'dynamic fracture conductivity test'; and by developing design models to implement the optimal fracture treatments determined from the field assessment and the laboratory measurements. One of the tasks of this project is to create an 'advisor' or expert system for completion, production and stimulation of tight gas reservoirs. A central part of this study is an extensive survey of the productivity of hundreds of tight gas wells that have been hydraulically fractured. We have been doing an extensive literature search of the SPE eLibrary, DOE, Gas Technology Institute (GTI), Bureau of Economic Geology and IHS Energy, for publicly available technical reports about procedures of drilling, completion and production of the tight gas wells. We have downloaded numerous papers and read and summarized the information to build a database that will …

This report provides current statistical information, profiles the Afghanistan narcotics trade's participants, explores linkages between narcotics, insecurity, and corruption, and reviews U.S. and international policy responses since late 2001. The report also considers ongoing policy debates regarding the counternarcotics role of coalition military forces, poppy eradication, alternative livelihoods, and funding issues for Congress.

This report discusses a plan announced by EPA in January 2005, called the Air Compliance Agreement, that would produce air quality monitoring data on animal agriculture emissions from a small number of farms, while at the same time protecting all participants (including farms where no monitoring takes place) through a “safe harbor” from liability under certain provisions of federal environmental laws.

During 2006 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the Demand Response Research Center (DRRC) performed a technology evaluation for the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) Emerging Technologies Programs. This report summarizes the design, deployment, and results from the 2006 Automated Critical Peak Pricing Program (Auto-CPP). The program was designed to evaluate the feasibility of deploying automation systems that allow customers to participate in critical peak pricing (CPP) with a fully-automated response. The 2006 program was in operation during the entire six-month CPP period from May through October. The methodology for this field study included site recruitment, control strategy development, automation system deployment, and evaluation of sites' participation in actual CPP events through the summer of 2006. LBNL recruited sites in PG&E's territory in northern California through contacts from PG&E account managers, conferences, and industry meetings. Each site contact signed a memorandum of understanding with LBNL that outlined the activities needed to participate in the Auto-CPP program. Each facility worked with LBNL to select and implement control strategies for demand response and developed automation system designs based on existing Internet connectivity and building control systems. Once the automation systems were installed, LBNL conducted communications tests to ensure that the Demand …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In May 2006, the President called for comprehensive immigration reform that included strengthening control of the country's borders by, among other things, adding 6,000 new agents to the U.S. Border Patrol by the end of December 2008. This unprecedented 48 percent increase over 2 years raises concerns about the ability of the Border Patrol's basic training program to train these new agents. This testimony is based on a recent report for the ranking member of this subcommittee on the content, quality, and cost of the Border Patrol's basic training program for new agents and addresses (1) the extent to which the Border Patrol's basic training program exhibits the attributes of an effective training program and the changes to the program since September 11, 2001; (2) the cost to train a new agent and how this compares to the costs of other similar law enforcement basic training programs; and (3) any plans the Border Patrol has developed or considered to improve the efficiency of its basic training program. To address these issues, GAO reviewed relevant documents; observed classroom training and exercises at the Border Patrol Academy in Artesia, New …

This report mainly provides information about The rise in Cigarette Tax to Finance SCHIP. An original proposal would be mandated a 61 percent increase per pack.but, the resolution makes such a tax possible but not mandatory and does not set the level.

This report provides information about the Background and Issues for Congress on Conventional Warheads for Long-Range Ballistic Missiles.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "To meet urgent needs, the Department of Defense (DOD) can issue undefinitized contract actions (UCA), which authorize contractors to begin work before reaching a final agreement on contract terms. The contractor has little incentive to control costs during this period, creating a potential for wasted taxpayer dollars. Pursuant to the House of Representatives report on the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007, we assessed (1) the level of insight DOD has into its use of UCAs, (2) how and when DOD is using UCAs, (3) whether DOD is definitizing UCAs in a timely fashion, and (4) whether contracting officers are documenting the basis for negotiated profit or fee. GAO reviewed 77 randomly-selected contracts at seven locations and interviewed DOD officials."

In this paper we study the use of long distance interpolation methods with the low complexity coarsening algorithm PMIS. AMG performance and scalability is compared for classical as well as long distance interpolation methods on parallel computers. It is shown that the increased interpolation accuracy largely restores the scalability of AMG convergence factors for PMIS-coarsened grids, and in combination with complexity reducing methods, such as interpolation truncation, one obtains a class of parallel AMG methods that enjoy excellent scalability properties on large parallel computers.

In recent campaigns, the Photron Ultima SE fast framing camera has proven to be a powerful diagnostic when applied to imaging divertor phenomena on the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX). Active areas of NSTX divertor research addressed with the fast camera include identification of types of EDGE Localized Modes (ELMs)[1], dust migration, impurity behavior and a number of phenomena related to turbulence. To compare such edge and divertor phenomena in low and high aspect ratio plasmas, a multi-institutional collaboration was developed for fast visible imaging on NSTX and DIII-D. More specifically, the collaboration was proposed to compare the NSTX small type V ELM regime [2] and the residual ELMs observed during Type I ELM suppression with external magnetic perturbations on DIII-D[3]. As part of the collaboration effort, the Photron camera was installed recently on DIII-D with a tangential view similar to the view implemented on NSTX, enabling a direct comparison between the two machines. The rapid implementation was facilitated by utilization of the existing optics that coupled the visible spectral output from the divertor vacuum ultraviolet UVTV system, which has a view similar to the view developed for the divertor tangential TV camera [4]. A remote controlled filter wheel was …

Supicosecond x-ray pulses are routinely produced at ALS,BESSY and SLS with slicing technique and used in pump-probe experimentswith controlled delay between laser pump pulses and x-ray probe pulses.New development aiming for a production of a subpicosecond x-ray pulsesusing rf orbit deflection technique is under way at APS. Both techniqueswill be reviewed here.

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In April 2004, President Bush called for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to develop and implement a strategic plan to guide the nationwide implementation of health information technology (IT). The plan is to recommend methods to ensure the privacy of electronic health information. GAO was asked to summarize its January 2007 report. The report describes the steps HHS is taking to ensure privacy protection as part of its national health IT strategy and identifies challenges associated with protecting electronic health information exchanged within a nationwide health information network."

This report lists significant recent events in Iraq since the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Sources include, but are not limited to White House press releases, the U.S. Department of State, U.N. Secretary-General's statements, and major news stories.

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This report provides background information on Libya and U.S.-Libyan relations.

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We have performed experiments and modeling to evaluate a proposed merging beamlet approach for use in a compact high-brightness Heavy Ion Fusion injector. We used an RF plasma source to produce the initial beamlets. An extraction current density of 100 mA/cm{sup 2} was achieved, and the thermal temperature of the ions was below 1 eV. An array of converging beamlets was used to produce a beam with the envelope radius, convergence, and ellipticity matched to an electrostatic quadrupole channel. Experimental results were in good quantitative agreement with computer simulations and have demonstrated the feasibility of this concept. The size of a driver-scale injector system using this approach will be several times smaller than one designed using traditional single large-aperture beams. The success of this experiment has possible significant economical and technical impacts on the architecture of HIF drivers.

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We discuss spin phenomena in high-energy hadronic scattering, with a particular emphasis on the spin physics program now underway at the first polarized proton-proton collider, RHIC. Experiments at RHIC unravel the spin structure of the nucleon in new ways. Prime goals are to determine the contribution of gluon spins to the proton spin, to elucidate the flavor structure of quark and antiquark polarizations in the nucleon, and to help clarify the origin of transverse-spin phenomena in QCD. These lectures describe some aspects of this program and of the associated physics.

Designs have been carried out on non-high-vacuum, low-power versions of three- and four-mirror quasi-optical passive and active Ka-band pulse compressors, and prototypes built and tested based on these designs. The active element is a quasi-optical grating employing gas discharge tubes in the gratings. Power gains of about 3:1 were observed experimentally for the passive designs, and about 7:1 with the active designs. High-power, high-vacuum versions of the three-and four-mirror quasi-optical pulse compressors were built and tested at low power. These now await installation and testing using multi-MW power from the 34-GHz magnicon.

Individual nanoscale building blocks exhibit a wide range of size-dependent properties, since their size can be tuned over known characteristic length scales of bulk materials. In the last several years, the possibility of combining different materials in the form of two and three component nanoparticles (NPs) has been extensively explored. Also multi-component materials can be obtained via self-assembly of NPs from their binary colloidal mixtures. These new nanocrystal solids may possess tunable collective properties that originate from interactions between size and composition controlled building blocks. Exchange coupling between neighboring NPs of magnetically soft and hard materials enhances the magnetic energy product of the nanocomposite material. Randomly mixed solids of small and large semiconducting CdSe NPs revealed enhancement of photoluminescence intensity of large semiconductor particles accompanied by quenching of photoluminescence of the small particles because of long-range resonant transfer of electronic excitations from the more electronically confined small particles to higher excited states of the large particles. Recently, it was demonstrated that binary semiconducting composite materials can show strongly enhanced electronic properties with about 100-fold higher conductance as compared to the sum of individual conductances of single-component films. Creation of highly periodic superlattices is expected not just provide the control of …

Computational and experimental work directed at exploringthe electrochemical properties of tetrahedrally coordinated Mn in the +5oxidation state is presented. Specific capacities of nearly 700 mAh/g arepredicted for the redox processes of LixMnO4 complexes based on twotwo-phase reactions. One is topotactic extractionof Li from Li3MnO4 toform LiMnO4 and the second is topotactic insertion of Li into Li3MnO4 toform Li5MnO4. In experiments, it is found that the redox behavior ofLi3MnO4 is complicated by disproportionation of Mn5+ in solution to formMn4+ and Mn7+ and byother irreversible processes; although an initialcapacity of about 275 mAh/g in lithiumcells was achieved. Strategiesbased on structural considerations to improve the electrochemicalproperties of MnO4n- complexes are given.