Each Congress, Senators meet to organize the chamber and select their party leaders. In addition to the majority and minority leaders and party whips are numerous entities created by the party to assist with the work of the party.

The whip system performs two primary functions: to take responsibility for the mobilization of party Members for key votes and to serve as a conduit for information between party leaders and party Members.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Title III of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLBA) designates federal funds to support the education of students with limited English proficiency and provides for formula-based grants to states. This report describes the data the Education Department used to distribute Title III funds and the implications of data measurement issues for the two allowable sources of data-- American Community Survey (ACS) and state assessment data--for allocating funds across states. In addition, the report describes changes in federal funding to support these students under NCLBA and how states and school districts used these funds as well as Education's Title III oversight and support to states. To address these objectives, GAO reviewed documentation on ACS and state data, interviewed federal and state officials, and collected data from 12 states, 11 districts, and 6 schools."

This report summarizes the critiques the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Supervision (OFHEO) made of accounting practices at Fannie Mae. The OFHEO's two main issues are under the domains of: amortization of discounts, premiums, fees involved in the purchase of home mortgages, and the other being accounting for financial derivatives contracts. The report emphasizes that these discrepancies created a false image of the company's earnings and in one case was the cause of the company's executives to receive bonuses.

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The conference report presents the formal legislative language on which the conference committee has agreed. The joint explanatory statement explains the various elements of the conferees agreement in relation to the positions that the House and Senate had committed to the conference committee.

This report examines the distribution of income in the United States, including factors that may help explain it, how it has changed over time, and how it compares with those of other countries.

Report detailing issues and legislative concerns regarding immigration during the 109th Congress, with a focus on security concerns.

The MPI deliverables for the Purple system were designed to ensure that applications which depend on MPI benefit from a robust, functionally complete, and high performance MPI. We specifically targeted three categories of MPI validation: robustness, functionally complete, and high performance. These three categories were intended to address the following needs: (1) Robustness - It doesn't matter how fast you arrive at an answer if the answer is wrong. Since any new flagship machine for the DOE complex will have pushed the envelope for scale, tests were designed to investigate behavior at scale. (2) Functionally complete - MPI functionality concerns usually deal more with coverage than concerns over correctness (no doubt a result of the maturity of the specification). We validated the desired interfaces are present and their operation proceeds as expected. (3) High performance - For a software stack to be considered 'high performance' it must efficiently deliver the capabilities of the underlying hardware and provide levels of performance in keeping with the leading machines of the time. LLNL established separate items for each of the three component areas of robustness, functionally complete, and high performance. Included in functionality was a demonstration of scaling to 8192 tasks, a demonstration …

Accurate simulations of atmospheric boundary layer flow are vital for predicting dispersion of contaminant releases, particularly in densely populated urban regions where first responders must react within minutes and the consequences of forecast errors are potentially disastrous. Current mesoscale models do not account for urban effects, and conversely urban scale models do not account for mesoscale weather features or atmospheric physics. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop and implement an immersed boundary method (IBM) along with a surface roughness parameterization into the mesoscale Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. IBM will be used in WRF to represent the complex boundary conditions imposed by urban landscapes, while still including forcing from regional weather patterns and atmospheric physics. This document details preliminary results of this research, including the details of three distinct implementations of the immersed boundary method. Results for the three methods are presented for the case of a rotation influenced neutral atmospheric boundary layer over flat terrain.

This Safety Basis Document (SBD) has been prepared for the B151 Complex at Site 200 to meet the current contractual requirements at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). B151 Complex consists of three separate complex and distinct buildings: B151, B152, and B154, represented within this document as facility segments. Based upon its chemical and radiological inventories, Segment B151 is classified as a Low Hazard facility segment. All other hazards associated with Segment B151 operations have been determined to be LSI. Based upon their inventories, Segment B152 and Segment B154 are each classified as LSI facility segments. However, for operational flexibility involving radiological materials, CMS chooses to classify each of these as Low Hazard facility segments. Changes in operations, maximum inventories, materials, or release potential that could result in larger consequences, or that could negatively impact the safety of the facility, will necessitate a re-evaluation of these facility classifications. This SBD is governed by the LLNL Non-Nuclear Work Smart Standards (WSSs) requirements including the ES&H Manual, Document 3.1, Non-Nuclear Safety Basis Program [LLNL, 2004a] and the DOE Explosives Safety Manual (ESM) [LLNL, 2004b]. This SBD demonstrates that the three segments of B151 Complex can be operated as Low Hazard facility segments without …

Protein arrays are ideal tools for the rapid analysis of whole proteomes as well as for the development of reliable and cheap biosensors. The objective of this proposal is to develop a new ligand assisted ligation method based in the naturally occurring protein trans-splicing process. This method has been used for the generation of spatially addressable arrays of multiple protein components by standard micro-lithographic techniques. Key to our approach is the use of the protein trans-splicing process. This naturally occurring process allows the development of a truly generic and highly efficient method for the covalent attachment of proteins through its C-terminus to any solid support. This technology has been used for the creation of protein chips containing several virulence factors from the human pathogen Y. pestis.

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This document reports the results of groundwater sampling in September-October 2005 and March 2006 at the grain storage facility formerly operated at Centralia, Kansas, by the Commodity Credit Corporation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (CCC/USDA). These activities were the first and second twice yearly sampling events of the two-year monitoring program approved by the CCC/USDA and Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) project managers. The initial monitoring network sampled in September and October 2005 consisted of six monitoring wells (MW1-MW6) installed in 2004, plus five groundwater piezometers (SB01, SB04, SB05, SB08, SB09) installed in 2002. The combined September-October 2005 sampling was the first monitoring event in the planned two-year program for Centralia. The groundwater samples collected in both September and October were analyzed for volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and samples collected in September were analyzed for dissolved hydrogen and additional groundwater parameters to aid in evaluating the potential for reductive dechlorination processes. After the monitoring in September-October 2005, Argonne recommended expansion of the initial monitoring network. Previous sampling (August 2004) had already suggested that this network of six monitoring wells and five piezometers was inadequate to delineate the extent of the carbon tetrachloride plume. With the approval of …

The reduction of the number of reactions in kinetic models for both the HMX beta-delta phase transition and thermal cookoff provides an attractive alternative to traditional multi-stage kinetic models due to reduced calibration effort requirements. In this study, we use the LLNL code ALE3D to provide calibrated kinetic parameters for a two-reaction bidirectional beta-delta HMX phase transition model based on Sandia Instrumented Thermal Ignition (SITI) and Scaled Thermal Explosion (STEX) temperature history curves, and a Prout-Tompkins cookoff model based on One-Dimensional Time to Explosion (ODTX) data. Results show that the two-reaction bidirectional beta-delta transition model presented here agrees as well with STEX and SITI temperature history curves as a reversible four-reaction Arrhenius model, yet requires an order of magnitude less computational effort. In addition, a single-reaction Prout-Tompkins model calibrated to ODTX data provides better agreement with ODTX data than a traditional multi-step Arrhenius model, and can contain up to 90% less chemistry-limited time steps for low-temperature ODTX simulations. Manual calibration methods for the Prout-Tompkins kinetics provide much better agreement with ODTX experimental data than parameters derived from Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) measurements at atmospheric pressure. The predicted surface temperature at explosion for STEX cookoff simulations is a weak function of …

We study quantum entanglements of baby universes which appear in non-perturbative corrections to the OSV formula for the entropy of extremal black holes in type IIA string theory compactified on the local Calabi-Yau manifold defined as a rank 2 vector bundle over an arbitrary genus G Riemann surface. This generalizes the result for G=1 in hep-th/0504221. Non-perturbative terms can be organized into a sum over contributions from baby universes, and the total wave-function is their coherent superposition in the third quantized Hilbert space. We find that half of the universes preserve one set of supercharges while the other half preserve a different set, making the total universe stable but non-BPS. The parent universe generates baby universes by brane/anti-brane pair creation, and baby universes are correlated by conservation of non-normalizable D-brane charges under the process. There are no other source of entanglement of baby universes, and all possible states are superposed with the equal weight.

Amphotericin B nanodisks (AMB-ND) are ternary complexes of AMB, phospholipid (PL) and apolipoprotein organized as discrete nanometer scale disk-shaped bilayers. In gel filtration chromatography experiments, empty ND lacking AMB elute as a single population of particles with a molecular weight in the range of 200 kDa. AMB-ND formulated at a 4:1 PL:AMB weight ratio, separated into two peaks. Peak 1 eluted at the position of control ND lacking AMB while the second peak, containing all of the AMB present in the original sample, eluted in the void volume. When ND prepared with increased AMB (1:1 phospholipid:AMB molar ratio) were subjected to gel filtration chromatography, an increased proportion of phospholipid and apolipoprotein were recovered in the void volume with the AMB. Prior to gel filtration the AMB-ND sample could be passed through a 0.22 {micro}m filter without loss of AMB while the voided material was lost. Native gel electrophoresis studies corroborated the gel permeation chromatography data. Far UV circular dichroism analyses revealed that apoA-I associated with AMB-ND denatures at a lower guanidine HCl concentration than apoA-I associated with ND lacking AMB. Atomic force microscopy revealed that AMB induces compression of the ND bilayer thickness consistent with bilayer interdigitation, a phenomenon that …