Report that discusses the recent history of offsetting rescissions in paying for supplemental appropriations to the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Disaster Relief Fund (DRF).

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This report fulfills a request of the U.S. Army Engineer District, Portland, Oregon, to produce an interim report of estimates of route-specific fish passage proportions and survival rates for lower Columbia River dams in 2010 and 2011. The estimates are needed to update the Compass Model for the Columbia River Treaty and the new Biological Opinion before detail technical reports are published in late 2012. This report tabulates route-specific fish-passage proportions and survival rates for steelhead and Chinook salmon smolts passing through various sampled routes at John Day Dam, The Dalles Dam, and Bonneville Dam in 2010 and 2011. Results were compiled from analyses of data acquired in spring 2010 and 2011 studies that were specifically designed to estimate dam-passage and forebay-to-tailrace survival rates, travel time metrics, and spill passage efficiency, as stipulated by the 2008 Federal Columbia River Power System Biological Opinion and the Columbia Basin Fish Accords. The study designs allowed for estimation of route-specific fish passage proportions and survival rates as well as estimation of forebay-passage survival, all of which are summarized herein.

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A large centralized geothermal heat pump system was installed to provide ice making, space cooling, space heating, process water heating, and domestic hot water heating for an ice arena in Eagan Minnesota. This paper provides information related to the design and construction of the project. Additionally, operating conditions for 12 months after start-up are provided.

The research outlined below established theoretical proof-of-concept using ab initio calculations that {sup 3}He can be separated from {sup 4}He by taking advantage of weak van der Waals interactions with other higher molecular weight rare gases such as xenon. To the best of our knowledge, this is the only suggested method that exploits the physical differences of the isotopes using a chemical interaction.

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The design of power amplifiers in any semi-conductor process is not a trivia exercise and it is often encountered that the simulated solution is qualitatively different than the results obtained. Phenomena such as oscillation occurring either in-band or out of band and sometimes at subharmonic intervals, continuous spectrum noticed in some frequency bands, often referred to as chaos, and jumps and hysteresis effects can all be encountered and render a design useless. All of these problems might have been identified through a more rigorous approach to stability analysis. Designing for stability is probably the one area of amplifier design that receives the least amount of attention but incurs the most catastrophic of effects if it is not performed properly. Other parameters such as gain, power output, frequency response and even matching may suitable mitigation paths. But the lack of stability in an amplifier has no mitigating path. In addition to of loss of the design completely there are the increased production cycle costs, costs involved with investigating and resolving the problem and the costs involved with schedule slips or delays resulting from it. The Linville or Rollett stability criteria that many microwave engineers follow and rely exclusively on is not …

Comprehensive annual financial report of the San Jacinto River Authority discussing the finances and statistics for the activities of the agency during fiscal year 2011.

Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy project sheet summarizing general information about the Green Electricity Network Integration (GENI) program including critical needs, innovation and advantages, impacts, and contact information. This sheet discusses the development of software to improve the use of renewable energy sources as part of the "Improved Power System Operations Using Advanced Stochastic Optimization" project.

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Achieving efficient and correct synchronization of multiple threads is a difficult and error-prone task at small scale and, as we march towards extreme scale computing, will be even more challenging when the resulting application is supposed to utilize millions of cores efficiently. Transactional Memory (TM) is a promising technique to ease the burden on the programmer, but only recently has become available on commercial hardware in the new Blue Gene/Q system and hence the real benefit for realistic applications has not been studied, yet. This paper presents the first performance results of TM embedded into OpenMP on a prototype system of BG/Q and characterizes code properties that will likely lead to benefits when augmented with TM primitives. We first, study the influence of thread count, environment variables and memory layout on TM performance and identify code properties that will yield performance gains with TM. Second, we evaluate the combination of OpenMP with multiple synchronization primitives on top of MPI to determine suitable task to thread ratios per node. Finally, we condense our findings into a set of best practices. These are applied to a Monte Carlo Benchmark and a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method. In both cases an optimized TM version, …

A potential major constraint affecting U.S. agricultural policy choices is the set of commitments made as part of membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), with its various agreements governing agriculture and trade, including dispute settlement. This report provides a brief overview of the WTO commitments most relevant for U.S. domestic farm policy. A key question that policymakers ask of virtually every new farm proposal is, how will it affect U.S. commitments under the WTO?

This report focuses instead on the nature and measurement of retail food price inflation and its relationship to consumers.

This standard describes the LLNL Fire Protection Facility Survey Program. The purpose of this standard is to describe the type of facility surveys required to fulfill the requirements of DOE Order 420.1B, Facility Safety. Nothing in this standard is intended to prevent the development of a FHA using alternative approaches. Alternate approaches, including formatting, will be by exception only, and approved by the Fire Marshal/Fire Protection Engineering Subject Matter Expert in advance of their use.

Under the continuing DOE support, we have: o assembled the basic experiment setup and then continued expanding it to include diverse diagnostics and to accommodate gas jet targets in addition to metal foils; o conducted an extensive study of our novel laser, significantly enhanced laser beam diagnostics, and improved relevant laser parameters; o turned our experiments into a truly international endeavor with active collaboration of close to 20 researchers in US, UK, and Germany; o conducted the first ever experiments with proton and ion acceleration by lasers interacting with overcritical plasma of gas jets; o for the first time directly observed radiation pressure acceleration of protons, including quasi-monoenergetic spectra promising for future applications; o for the first time directly observed quasi-stable, bubble-like plasma structures that likely evolved from relativistic laser-plasma solitons (post-solitons). Thus, we have confirmed a strong potential of a picosecond TW CO2 laser as a research tool in laser-plasma science and as a promising vehicle for future applications of laser ion acceleration. This has led to apparent increase of the interest in mid-IR laser ion acceleration. In particular, another major research group began extensive proton acceleration experiments with their own CO2 laser at UCLA. As a result, the …

Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy project sheet summarizing general information about the Solar Agile Delivery of Electrical Power Technology (ADEPT) program including critical needs, innovation and advantages, impacts, and contact information. This sheet discusses the development of a new and more efficient silicon carbide based power switch for PV inverters as part of the "First In-Class Demonstration of a Completely New Type of SiC Bipolar Swtich for Utility-Scale Inverters" project.

Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy project sheet summarizing general information about the Green Electricity Network Integration (GENI) program including critical needs, innovation and advantages, impacts, and contact information. This sheet discusses a device that helps to control power flows in existing transmission lines as part of the "Distributed Power Flow Control using Smart Wires for Energy Routing" project.

Beginning July 1, 2012, Subsidized Stafford Loans will be available exclusively to undergraduate students. The federal government "subsidizes" these loans by relieving the borrower of the requirement to pay the interest that accrues while the borrower is in school and during other authorized periods. In the 112th Congress, proposals have been made to reduce the interest rate applicable to Subsidized Stafford Loans that will be made to undergraduate students during AY2012-2013 from 6.8% to 3.4%. Proposals include the Interest Rate Reduction Act and the Stop the Student Loan Interest Rate Hike Act of 2012. It is estimated that a reduction in the interest rate would benefit approximately 7.4 million students who are likely to borrow Subsidized Stafford Loans during the upcoming award year.

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Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy project sheet summarizing general information about the Solar Agile Delivery of Electrical Power Technology (ADEPT) program including critical needs, innovation and advantages, impacts, and contact information. This sheet discusses more ways to convert energy from photovoltaic solar systems as part of the "Scalable Submodule Power Conversion for Utility-Scale Photovoltaics" project.

Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy project sheet summarizing general information about a new program around the collection and useage of energy-use data (project title "Large-Scale Energy Reductions through Sensors, Feedback & Information Technology") including critical needs, innovation and advantages, impacts, and contact information. This sheet is the first open solicitation, announcing funding opportunities for involvement in the project.

The authors present improved measurements of the branching fractions and CP-asymmetries fin the B{sup 0} {yields} {pi}{sup +}{pi}{sup -}, B{sup 0} {yields} {pi}{sup 0}{pi}{sup 0}, and B{sup +} {yields} {rho}{sup +}{rho}{sup 0} decays, which impact the determination of {alpha}. The combined branching fractions of B {yields} K{sub 1}(1270){pi} and B {yields} K{sub 1}(1400){pi} decays are measured for the first time and allow a novel determination of {alpha} in the B{sup 0} {yields} {alpha}{sub 1}(1260){sup {+-}}{pi}{sup {-+}} decay channel. These measurements are performed using the final dataset collected by the BaBar detector at the PEP-II B-factory. The primary goal of the experiments based at the B factories is to test the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) picture of CP violation in the standard model of electroweak interactions. This can be achieved by measuring the angles and sides of the Unitarity Triangle in a redundant way.

In 2012, the 112th Congress is considering the President's annual funding request for the Peace Corps, efforts to reauthorize the Peace Corps, and related issues. Current issues include the extent to which there is available funding for Peace Corps expansion, whether the Peace Corps has the institutional capacity to expand, and whether volunteers are able to function in a safe and secure environment.