Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Since the fall of 2010, State has sanctioned 13 foreign firms under the ISA—2 for investments in Iran’s energy sector and 11 for supplying refined petroleum products."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Navy relied on its 2009 Radar/Hull Study as the basis to select DDG 51 over DDG 1000 to carry the Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) as its preferred future surface combatant—a decision that may result in a procurement of up to 43 destroyers and cost up to $80 billion over the next several decades. The Radar/Hull Study may not provide a sufficient analytical basis for a decision of this magnitude. Specifically, the Radar/Hull Study:"

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "USCP generally has enhanced retirement benefits, a higher minimum starting salary, and a wider variety of protective duties than other federal police forces in the DC metro area that GAO reviewed, but has similar employment requirements. Even though USCP, Park Police, Supreme Court Police, and Secret Service Uniformed Division are federal police forces, they provide enhanced retirement benefits similar to those offered by federal law enforcement agencies that have additional investigative duties. These enhanced benefits allow their officers to retire early and accrue retirement pensions faster than other federal police forces. USCP and these three forces also offered among the highest minimum entry-level salaries—ranging from $52,020 to $55,653—than the other six forces GAO reviewed, which had minimum entry-level salaries ranging from $38,609 to $52,018. USCP reported routinely having a wider variety of duties than most other forces. These duties ranged from routinely protecting members of Congress to protecting buildings. USCP and most of the forces generally have similar employment requirements, such as being in good physical condition."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The average cost to count each housing unit rose from $70 in 2000 to $97 in 2010 (in constant 2010 dollars). While the U.S. Census Bureau (Bureau) made changes to its budget structure from 2000 to 2010, they did not document the changes that would facilitate comparisons over time and cannot identify specific drivers of this cost growth. According to GAO’s Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide, an agency can strengthen its ability to control costs by using available cost data to make comparisons over time and identify and quantify trends. The Bureau faces the fundamental challenge of striking a balance between how best to control costs without compromising accuracy. However, the Bureau’s inability to identify specific actionable factors affecting past growth will make it difficult for the Bureau to focus its efforts to control costs for the 2020 Census."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Since first receiving an appropriation in 2009 in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, ARPA-E has awarded $521.7 million to universities, public and private companies, and national laboratories to fund 181 projects that attempt to make transformational—rather than incremental––advances to a variety of energy technologies, including high-energy batteries and renewable fuels. ARPA-E borrows from the model of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an agency created within the Department of Defense (DOD) in 1958 to direct and perform advanced research and development projects. Award winners must meet cost share requirements, through either in-kind contributions or outside funding sources."

This project addressed the need for economical technology for the conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to fuels, specifically the conversion of pretreated hardwood to ethanol. The technology developed is a set of strains of the bacterium Thermoanaerobacterium saccharolyticum and an associated fermentation process for pretreated hardwood. Tools for genetic engineering and analysis of the organism were developed, including a markerless mutation method, a complete genome sequence and a set of gene expression profiles that show the activity of its genes under a variety of conditions relevant to lignocellulose conversion. Improved strains were generated by selection and genetic engineering to be able to produce higher amounts of ethanol (up to 70 g/L) and to be able to better tolerate inhibitory compounds from pretreated hardwood. Analysis of these strains has generated useful insight into the genetic basis for desired properties of biofuel producing organisms. Fermentation conditions were tested and optimized to achieve ethanol production targets established in the original project proposal. The approach proposed was to add cellulase enzymes to the fermentation, a method called Simultaneous Saccharification and Fermentation (SSF). We had reason to think SSF would be an efficient approach because the optimal temperature and pH for the enzymes and bacterium are …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Iran’s involvement in illicit nuclear activities, support for terrorism, and abuse of human rights has led the United States, as well as other nations, to impose sanctions in an attempt to curb these activities. According to the Department of State (State), the sanctions are intended to, among other things, target sectors of the Iranian economy that are relevant to Iran’s proliferation activities and block the transfer of weapons and technology related to Iran’s missile and nuclear programs. One of the measures enacted by the United States, intended to limit resources available for proliferation and support for terrorism, imposes sanctions on firms that sell refined petroleum products to Iran."

This report reviews the BPCIA within the context of intellectual property and innovation issues.

Newsletter of the Texas House of Representative House Research Organization, addressing law reform in Texas and the activities of the agency.

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This report provides an overview of the federal criminal law on internet gambling. It includes the citations to sate and federal gambling laws and the text of the statutes.

The view of the Administration and others is that Iraqi factions, with U.S. and other help, will be able to work through the severe political disputes and ongoing violence, and will also be willing and able to resist increased Iranian influence in Iraq. The Administration states that U.S. training will continue using programs for Iraq similar to those with other countries in which there is no U.S. troop presence, and about 15,000 U.S. personnel, including contractors, remain in Iraq under State Department authority to exert U.S. influence. Continuing the security relationship in the absence of U.S. troops in Iraq, and developing the civilian bilateral relationship, was the focus of the U.S. visit of Prime Minister Maliki on December 12, 2011.

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This report provides an overview of the America Invents Act. It begins by offering a brief overview of the patent system. The specific components of this legislation are then identified and reviewed in greater detail.

Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) personnel visited the United Nuclear Corporation (UNC) Naval Products site on three separate occasions during the months of October and November 2011. The purpose of these visits was to conduct confirmatory surveys of soils associated with the Argyle Street sewer line that was being removed. Soil samples were collected from six different, judgmentally determined locations in the Argyle Street sewer trench. In addition to the six soil samples collected by ORISE, four replicate soil samples were collected by Cabrera Services, Inc. (CSI) for analysis by the ORISE laboratory. Replicate samples S0010 and S0011 were final status survey (FSS) bias samples; S0012 was an FSS systematic sample; and S0015 was a waste characterization sample. Six soil samples were also collected for background determination. Uranium-235 and uranium-238 concentrations were determined via gamma spectroscopy; the spectra were also reviewed for other identifiable photopeaks. Radionuclide concentrations for these soil samples are provided. In addition to the replicate samples and the samples collected by ORISE, CSI submitted three soil samples for inter-laboratory comparison analyses. One sample was from the background reference area, one was from waste characterization efforts (material inside the sewer line), and one was a …

The project period was devoted to several developments in the technical capabilities of the BIGSTIC large-dimension configuration-interaction shell-model code, written in Fortran 90. The specific computational goals for the project period were: (1) store Lanczos vectors on core in RAM to minimize I/O; (2) rewrite reorthogonalization with Lanczos vectors stored in core, consult with personnel at LLNL, LBL, ORNL, Iowa State University to maximize performance; (3) restrict creation of N-body jumps to those needed by an individual node; and (4) distribute 3-body interaction over many cores. Significant progress was made towards these goals, especially (1) and (2), although in the process they discovered intermediate tasks that had to be accomplished first. The achievements were as follows - I put into place structures and algorithms to facility fragmenting very large-dimension Lanczos intermediate vectors. Only by fragmenting the vectors can we carry out (1) and (2). In addition, I reorganized the action of the Hamiltonian matrix and created a new division of operations for MPI. Based upon earlier work, I made plans of a revised algorithm for distribution of work with MPI, with a particular eye towards breaking up the Lanczos vectors. I introduce a new derived type (opbundles) which collects the …

This report looks at the growing popularity of locally produced foods, and how that popularity and regional/local food systems are affected by the reauthorization of the 2008 farm bill.

This project was a numerical study of the behavior of surface plasmons in nano-systems, focusing on the interaction between plasmons, light, and nano-scale structures such as nano-scale metallic wires and quantum wires/dots. The primary results of the project included: a) the demonstration of the use of surface plasmons to modify the spatial coherence of a light wave, b) the demonstration of a feasible plasmonic superresolved readout system, and c) the demonstration of a “Plasmonic Zeno effect”, in which the attenuation of a light wave in metal is suppressed by breaking up the metal into a collection of structured layers. The integration of quantum wire/dot effects with the plasmonic simulations proved to be harder than expected, in large part due to the lack of accurate and simple quantum dot models.