A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Comptroller General convened a forum in September 2002 to identify useful practices and lessons learned from major private and public sector mergers, acquisitions, and organizational transformations. This was done to help federal agencies implement successful transformations of their cultures, as well as the new Department of Homeland Security merge its various originating components into a unified department. There was general agreement on a number of key practices found at the center of successful mergers, acquisitions, and transformations. In this report, we identify the specific implementation steps for the key practices raised at the forum with illustrative private and public sector examples. To identify these implementation steps and examples, we relied primarily on interviews with selected forum participants and other experts about their experiences implementing mergers, acquisitions, and transformations and also conducted a literature review."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) provides graduate medical education (GME) to as many as one-third of U.S. resident physicians, but oversight responsibilities spread across VA's organizational components and multiple affiliated hospitals and medical schools could allow supervision problems to go undetected or uncorrected. GAO was asked to examine VA's procedures for (1) monitoring VA medical centers' adherence to VA's requirements for resident supervision, (2) using evaluations of supervision by GME accrediting bodies and residents, and (3) using information about resident supervision drawn from VA's programs for monitoring the quality and outcomes of patient care."

The production of a Higgs boson in association with a pair of t{bar t} or b{bar b} quarks plays a very important role at both the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider. The theoretical prediction of the corresponding cross sections has been improved by including the complete next-to-leading order QCD corrections. After a brief description of the most relevant technical aspects of the calculation, we review the results obtained for both the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider.

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Analytical formulas for detailed longitudinal IBS and electron cooling rates are presented for bunched beams. Ratio of electrons over ions (pbars) per bunch required for IBS compensation is found.

A numerical likelihood approach to the determination of cosmic ray anisotropies is presented which offers many advantages over other approaches. It allows a wide range of statistically meaningful hypotheses to be compared even when full sky coverage is unavailable, can be readily extended in order to include measurement errors, and makes maximum unbiased use of all available information.

Issues in reconfigurability and adaptability in heterogeneous distributed systems for high-performance computing are the focus of the work funded by this grant. Our efforts are part of an ongoing research project in metacomputing and are a follow on to the DOE funded PVM system that has witnessed over a decade of use at numerous institutions worldwide. The current project, termed Harness, investigates novel methodologies and tools for distributed metacomputing, focusing on dynamically reconfigurable software frameworks. During the first phase, we defined the metacomputing architecture embodied in Harness and developed prototype subsystems as proof of concept exercises. Subsequently, we designed and developed a complete software framework manifesting the Harness architecture, and also developed several tools and subsystems that demonstrated the viability and effectiveness of our proposed model for next generation metacomputing. We then used this substrate to emulate multiple programming environments on Harness, and conducted performance evaluation and tuning exercises. The main research results from these efforts include the establishment of software metacomputing systems as viable and cost-effective alternatives to MPPs; the demonstration of dynamic and reconfigurable platforms as effective methods of tailoring parallel computing environments; the development of methodologies to construct plugin modules for component-based distributed systems; contributions to performance …

A portion of the HEP community has perceived the need for a minimization package written in C++ and taking advantage of the Object-Oriented nature of that language. To be acceptable for HEP, such a package must at least encompass all the capabilities of Minuit. Aside from the slight plus of not relying on outside Fortran compilation, the advantages that a C++ package based on O-O design would confer over the multitude of available C++ Minuit-wrappers include: Easier extensibility to different algorithms and forms of constraints; and usage modes which would not be available in the global-common-based Minuit design. An example of the latter is a job pursuing two ongoing minimization problems simultaneously. We discuss the design and implementation of such a package, which extends Minuit only in minor ways but which greatly diminishes the programming effort (if not the algorithm thought) needed to make more significant extensions.

We present an optical and near-infrared survey of galaxies in nearby clusters aimed at determining fundamental quantities of galaxies, such as multivariate luminosity function and color distribution for each Hubble type. The main characteristics of our survey are completeness in absolute magnitude, wide wavelength coverage and faint limiting magnitudes.

Use of an intermediate gas in the reaction chamber of an inertial fusion power reactor is under consideration to decrease the thermal shock to the walls resulting from target implosions. A model was developed and implemented in HEIGHTS package to simulate hydrodynamic and radiation shock waves in the chamber and used to determine the effect of xenon gas at various densities ranging from mtorr up to tens of torr. Numerical calculations for the dense-gas case indicated that two pressure peaks result from the shock wave interacting with the chamber wall, and radiation energy accumulates directly in front of the hydrodynamic shock wave. The shock wave should reach a maximum pressure peak when the chamber gas has a density between the two extremes analyzed. In general, calculated results with our model compared favorably with previously published data.

The Steven Impact Test and associated modeling offer valuable practical predictions for evaluating numerous safety scenarios involving low velocity impact of energetic materials by different projectile geometries. One such scenario is the impact of energetic material by a transportation hook during shipping, which offers complexity because of the irregular hook projectile shape. Experiments were performed using gauged Steven Test targets with PBX9404 impacted by a transportation hook projectile to compliment previous non-gauged experiments that established an impact threshold of approximately 69 m/s. Modeling of these experiments was performed with LS-DYNA code using an Ignition and Growth reaction criteria with a friction term. Comparison of the experiment to the model shows reasonable agreement with some details requiring more attention. The experimental results (including carbon resistor gauge records), model calculations, and a discussion of the dominant reaction mechanisms in light of comparisons between experiment and model will be presented.

There has been rapid progress in inertial fusion in the past few years. This progress spans the construction of ignition facilities, a wide range of target concepts, and the pursuit of integrated programs to develop fusion energy using lasers, ion beams and z-pinches. Two ignition facilities are under construction (NIF in the U.S. and LMJ in France) and both projects are progressing toward an initial experimental capability. The LIL prototype beamline for LMJ and the first 4 beams of NIF will be available for experiments in 2003. The full 192 beam capability of NIF will be available in 2009 and ignition experiments are expected to begin shortly after that time. There is steady progress in the target science and target fabrication in preparation for indirect drive ignition experiments on NIF. Advanced target designs may lead to 5-10 times more yield than initial target designs. There has also been excellent progress on the science of ion beam and z-pinch driven indirect drive targets. Excellent progress on direct-drive targets has been obtained on the Omega laser at the University of Rochester. This includes improved performance of targets with a pulse shape predicted to result in reduced hydrodynamic instability. Rochester has also obtained …

Using data from the SUGAR and the AGASA experiments taken during a 10 yr period with nearly uniform exposure to the entire sky, we search for anisotropy patterns in the arrival directions of cosmic rays with energies > 10{sup 19.6} eV. We determine the angular power spectrum from an expansion in spherical harmonics for modes out to {ell} = 5. Based on available statistics, we find no significant deviation from isotropy. We compare the rather modest results which can be extracted from existing data samples with the results that should be forthcoming as new full-sky observatories begin operation.

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In recent years conflicting budget priorities and divided political control have accentuated the institutional tensions between the executive and legislative branches inherent in the federal budget process. President Clinton, like his two predecessors, called for an item veto, or possibly expanded impoundment authority, to provide him with greater control over federal spending. This report provides a brief history of impoundment and discusses the debate surrounding the line item veto.

U.S.-China economic ties have expanded substantially over the past several years. China is now the third largest U.S. trading partner, its second largest source of imports, and its fourth largest export market. However, U.S.-China commercial ties have been strained by a number of issues, including a surging U.S. trade deficit with China, China's refusal to float its currency, and failure to fully comply with its World Trade Organization (WTO) commitments, especially its failure to provide protection for U.S. intellectual property rights (IPR). This report explores these issues in detail, especially concerning the lack of protection for U.S. IPR.

This report (1) summarizes provisions of several laws and regulations, including the Patent Law, the Atomic Energy Act, International Traffic in Arms Control regulations, the USA PATRIOT Act (P.L. 107-56), the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-188), and the Homeland SecurityAct (P.L. 107-296), that permit the federal government to restrict disclosure of scientific and technical information that could harm national security; (2) describes the development of federal controls on “sensitive but unclassified” (SBU) scientific and technical information; (3) summarizes current controversies about White House policy on “Sensitive But Unclassified Information,” and “Sensitive Homeland Security Information” (SHSI) issued in March 2002; and (4) identifies controversial issues which might affect the development of Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and agency guidelines for sensitive unclassified information, which are expected to be released during 2003.

Digital television (DTV) is a new television service representing the most significant development in television technology since the advent of color television in the 1950s. DTV can provide sharper pictures, a wider screen, CD-quality sound, better color rendition, and other new services currently being developed. A successful deployment of DTV requires: the development by content providers of compelling digital programming; the delivery of digital signals to consumers by broadcast television stations, as well as cable and satellite television systems; and the widespread purchase and adoption by consumers of digital television equipment. A key issue in the Congressional debate over the digital transition has been addressing the millions of American over-the-air households whose existing analog televisions will require converter boxes in order to receive digital signals when the analog signal is turned off.

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Although it has been a high priority Army program, a number of factors have complicated the RAH-66 Comanche program. Since its inception, the program has been restructured several times–postponing the initial operational capability (IOC) and increasing overall program costs. Presently, there is debate within the Army regarding whether the program should be reduced significantly to make funds available to pursue other modernization priorities.

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