A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Acquiring new systems on budget and on schedule is critically important in transitioning to the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). However, air traffic control modernization has been on GAO's high-risk list since 1995, in part due to acquisitions exceeding budget and schedule targets. The Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Air Traffic Organization (ATO) has responsibility for managing air traffic control acquisitions. GAO was asked to examine (1) ATO's goals, performance measures, and reporting for systems acquisitions; (2) the validity of ATO's performance measures; and (3) the implications of using ATO's performance measures to assess progress in transitioning to NextGen. To address these issues, GAO compared ATO's measures with attributes of successful performance measures, interviewed agency officials, and sought perspectives of aviation experts."

This final report summarizes the work conducted under our three year DOE GTL grant ($459,402). The work involved a number of areas, including standardization, the Systems Biology Workbench, Visual Editors, collaboration with other groups and the development of new theory and algorithms. Our work has played a key part in helping to further develop SBML, the de facto standard for System Biology Model exchange and SBGN, the developing standard for visual representation for biochemical models. Our work has also made significant contributions to developing SBW, the systems biology workbench which is now very widely used in the community (roughly 30 downloads per day for the last three years, which equates to about 30,000 downloads in total). We have also used the DOE funding to collaborate extensively with nine different groups around the world. Finally we have developed new methods to reduce model size which are now used by all the major simulation packages, including Matlab. All in all, we consider the last three years to be highly productive and influential in the systems biology community. The project resulted in 16 peer review publications.

This report examines whether such as extension would violate the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech.

This report has the following articles: (1) Deconstructing Microbes--metagenomic research on bugs in termites relies on new data analysis tools; (2) Popular Science--a nanomaterial research paper in Nano Letters drew strong interest from the scientific community; (3) Direct Approach--researchers employ an algorithm to solve an energy-reduction issue essential in describing complex physical system; and (4) SciDAC Special--A science journal features research on petascale enabling technologies.

The purpose of this study is to report on the results of a preliminary modeling framework to investigate the causes of the large hydraulic gradient north of Yucca Mountain. This study builds on the Saturated Zone Site-Scale Flow and Transport Model (referenced herein as the Site-scale model (Zyvoloski, 2004a), which is a three-dimensional saturated zone model of the Yucca Mountain area. Groundwater flow was simulated under natural conditions. The model framework and grid design describe the geologic layering and the calibration parameters describe the hydrogeology. The Site-scale model is calibrated to hydraulic heads, fluid temperature, and groundwater flowpaths. One area of interest in the Site-scale model represents the large hydraulic gradient north of Yucca Mountain. Nearby water levels suggest over 200 meters of hydraulic head difference in less than 1,000 meters horizontal distance. Given the geologic conceptual models defined by various hydrogeologic reports (Faunt, 2000, 2001; Zyvoloski, 2004b), no definitive explanation has been found for the cause of the large hydraulic gradient. Luckey et al. (1996) presents several possible explanations for the large hydraulic gradient as provided below: The gradient is simply the result of flow through the upper volcanic confining unit, which is nearly 300 meters thick near the …

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A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The 2006 U.S. National Security Strategy stated that the United States faces challenges from Iran, including Iran's proliferation efforts and involvement in international terrorism. To address these concerns, the United States employs a range of tools, including diplomatic pressure, a military presence in the Gulf, and sanctions. A U.S. sanction is a unilateral restriction or condition on economic activity imposed by the United States for reasons of foreign policy or national security. We were asked to review (1) U.S. sanctions targeting Iran and their implementation, (2) reported sanction impacts, and (3) factors limiting sanctions. To conduct the review, we assessed trade and sanction data, information on Iran's economy and energy sector, and U.S. and international reports on Iran, and discussed sanctions with U.S. officials and Iran experts."

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2007 was a year of progress and challenges for the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO). I believe that with the addition of a new Controller, the OCFO senior management team is stronger than ever. With the new Controller on board, the senior management team spent two intensive days updating our strategic plan for the next five years ending in 2012, while making sure that we continue to execute on our existing strategic initiatives. In 2007 the Budget Office, teaming with Human Resources, worked diligently with our colleagues on campus to reengineer the Multi-Location Appointment (MLA) process, making it easier for our Principal Investigators (PIs) to work simultaneously between the Laboratory and UC campuses. The hiring of a point-of-contact in Human Resources to administer the program will also make the process flow smoother. In order to increase our financial flexibility, the OCFO worked with the Department of Energy (DOE) to win approval to reduce the burden rates on research and development (R&D) subcontracts and Intra-University Transfers (IUT). The Budget Office also performed a 'return on investment' (ROI) analysis to secure UCRP funding for a much needed vocational rehabilitation counselor. This new counselor now works with employees who are on …

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We investigate sum rules for heavy-to-light transition form factors at large recoil derived from correlation functions with interpolating currents for light pseudoscalar or vector fields in soft-collinear effective theory (SCET). We consider both, factorizable and nonfactorizable contributions at leading power in the {Lambda}/m{sub b} expansion and to first order in the strong coupling constant {alpha}{sub s}, neglecting contributions from 3-particle distribution amplitudes in the B-meson. We pay particular attention to various sources of parametric and systematic uncertainties. We also discuss certain form factor ratios where part of the hadronic uncertainties related to the B-meson distribution amplitude and to logarithmically enhanced {alpha}{sub s} corrections cancel.

Significant dependence of the vertical emittance growth on the beam intensity was experimentally observed at the ATF/KEK extraction beamline. This technical note describes the simulations of possible vertical emittance growth sources, particularly in the extraction channel, where the magnets are shared by both the ATF extraction beamline and its damping ring. The vertical emittance growth is observed in the simulations by changing the beam orbit in the extraction channel even with all optics corrections. The possible reasons for the experimentally observed dependence of the vertical emittance growth on the beam intensity are discussed. An experiment to measure the emittance vs beam orbit at the existing ATF extraction beamline is proposed.

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This report provides information about the Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities and Issues for Congress on China Naval Modernization since Concern has grown in congress about the china military modernization.

The investigation reported here was conducted by the Commodity Credit Corporation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (CCC/USDA) in 2006. The investigation addressed carbon tetrachloride contamination on the former CCC/USDA grain storage facility at Ramona, Kansas. The results clearly demonstrate that only minimal contamination is associated with the past use of carbon tetrachloride on the former CCC/USDA property. No soil contamination was detected at concentrations above Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) risk-based screening level (RBSL) Tier 2 standard of 200 {micro}g/kg for the soil-to-groundwater protection pathway. Carbon tetrachloride concentrations in groundwater above the RBSL and maximum contaminant level (MCL) value of 5.0 {micro}g/L were detected in only two samples, collected at adjacent locations on the southeast part of the property. The relatively low concentrations detected and the limited areal extent of the contamination demonstrate that no imminent threat exists on the former CCC/USDA property to warrant remediation. The soil and groundwater contamination detected on the former CCC/USDA property is clearly separate from contamination detected at off-site locations. The carbon tetrachloride and chloroform contamination in groundwater (at concentrations above the RBSL and MCL value) associated with past activities on the former CCC/USDA property is contained within the property boundaries. …

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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's New Architectures Testbed recently evaluated Exegy's Text Miner appliance to assess its applicability to high-performance, automated native language analysis. The evaluation was performed with support from the Computing Applications and Research Department in close collaboration with Global Security programs, and institutional activities in native language analysis. The Exegy Text Miner is a special-purpose device for detecting and flagging user-supplied patterns of characters, whether in streaming text or in collections of documents at very high rates. Patterns may consist of simple lists of words or complex expressions with sub-patterns linked by logical operators. These searches are accomplished through a combination of specialized hardware (i.e., one or more field-programmable gates arrays in addition to general-purpose processors) and proprietary software that exploits these individual components in an optimal manner (through parallelism and pipelining). For this application the Text Miner has performed accurately and reproducibly at high speeds approaching those documented by Exegy in its technical specifications. The Exegy Text Miner is primarily intended for the single-byte ASCII characters used in English, but at a technical level its capabilities are language-neutral and can be applied to multi-byte character sets such as those found in Arabic and Chinese. The system is …

This report describes the technical results of tasks and activities conducted in FY07 to support the DOE-CEA collaboration on the OSMOSE program. The activities are divided into five high-level tasks: reactor modeling and pre-experiment analysis, sample fabrication and analysis, reactor experiments, data treatment and analysis, and assessment for relevance to high priority advanced reactor programs (such as GNEP and Gen-IV).

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The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) is considering a list of reactors and nuclear fuels as part of its chartered initiative. Because many of the candidate materials have not been explored experimentally under the conditions of interest, and in order to economize on program costs, analytical support in the form of combined first principle and mechanistic modeling is highly desirable. The present work is a compilation of mechanistic models developed in order to describe the fission product behavior of irradiated nuclear fuel. The mechanistic nature of the model development allows for the possibility of describing a range of nuclear fuels under varying operating conditions. Key sources include the FASTGRASS code with an application to UO{sub 2} power reactor fuel and the Dispersion Analysis Research Tool (DART ) with an application to uranium-silicide and uranium-molybdenum research reactor fuel. Described behavior mechanisms are divided into subdivisions treating fundamental materials processes under normal operation as well as the effect of transient heating conditions on these processes. Model topics discussed include intra- and intergranular gas-atom and bubble diffusion, bubble nucleation and growth, gas-atom re-solution, fuel swelling and ?scion gas release. In addition, the effect of an evolving microstructure on these processes (e.g., irradiation-induced recrystallization) …

Aluminum is a principal element in alkaline nuclear sludge waste stored in high level waste (HLW) tanks at the Savannah River Site. The mass of sludge in a HLW tank can be reduced through the caustic leaching of aluminum, i.e. converting aluminum oxides (gibbsite) and oxide-hydroxides (boehmite) into soluble hydroxides through reaction with a hot caustic solution. The temperature limits outlined by the chemistry control program for HLW tanks to prevent caustic stress corrosion cracking (CSCC) in concentrated hydroxide solutions will potentially be exceeded during the sludge mass reduction (SMR) campaign. Corrosion testing was performed to determine the potential for CSCC under expected conditions. The experimental test program, developed based upon previous test results and expected conditions during the current SMR campaign, consisted of electrochemical and mechanical testing to determine the susceptibility of ASTM A516 carbon steel to CSCC in the relevant environment. Anodic polarization test results indicated that anodic inhibition at the temperatures and concentrations of interest for SMR is not a viable, consistent technical basis for preventing CSCC. However, the mechanical testing concluded that CSCC will not occur under conditions expected during SMR for a minimum of 35 days. In addition, the stress relief for the Type III/IIIA …

This report provides an overview of the international investment position on the United States as a net debtor nation.