A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The U.S. government owns about 3,500 properties overseas at more than 220 locations, including embassy and consular office buildings, housing, and land. The Department of State is responsible for acquiring, managing, and disposing of these properties. In 1996, GAO reported that the State Department did not have an effective process for identifying and selling unneeded overseas real estate, and that decisions concerning the sale of some properties had been delayed for years because of parochial conflicts among the parties involved. The State Department has taken steps to implement a more systematic process for identifying unneeded properties by (1) requesting posts to annually identify excess, underutilized, and obsolete property and (2) requesting its own staff and Inspector General officials to place greater emphasis on identifying such property when they visit posts. The State Department has significantly increased its sales of unneeded properties in the last 5 years. From 1997 through 2001, it sold 104 overseas properties for over $404 million, almost triple the proceeds compared with the previous 5 year period. However, the department still has a large number of unneeded properties that have not yet been …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Labor's Unemployment Insurance (UI) program is a federal-state partnership designed to partially replace lost earnings of individuals who become unemployed through no fault of their own and to stabilize the economy in times of economic downturn. The health of each state's UI program depends, in part, on their ability to control benefit payments by accurately determining eligibility for UI benefits in a timely manner. Labor's Office of Inspector General (OIG) and others have identified numerous aspects of the UI program that may be vulnerable to overpayments and fraud. Of the $30 billion in UI benefits paid in calendar year 2001, Labor estimates that this includes $2.4 billion in overpayments, including $560 million attributable to fraud or abuse. Labor's analysis also suggests that the states could have detected or recovered $1.3 billion of the total overpayments given their current policies and procedures. The management and operational practices at both the state and federal level contribute to overpayments in the UI program. At the state level, many states place a higher priority on quickly processing and paying UI claims than on taking the necessary steps to adequately …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Senior Department of Defense (DOD) and military service officials have testified that they face increasing difficulties in carrying out realistic training at military installations. There are eight "encroachment" issues that affect or have the potential to affect military training and readiness. The eight encroachment issues are: endangered species habitat on military installations, unexploded ordnance and munitions constituents, competition for radio frequency spectrum, protected marine resources, competition for airspace, air pollution, noise pollution, and urban growth around military installations. Whenever possible, the services work around these issues by modifying the timing, tempo, and location of training, as well as the equipment used. However, these workarounds are becoming increasingly difficult and costly and they compromise the realism essential to effective training. Over time, the military services report they have increasingly lost training range capabilities because of encroachment. Each of the four installations and two major commands GAO visited reported having lost some capabilities in terms of the time training ranges were available or the types of training that could be conducted. Higher-than-average population growth around installations makes further encroachment losses likely. Despite the loss of some capabilities, service …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWPRA) of 1996 changed the nation's cash assistance program for needy families with children. The former program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), was replaced with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant, which provides states with $16.5 billion each year through 2002 to serve this population. TANF's goals include ending the dependence of needy families on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage; preventing and reducing the incidence of nonmarital pregnancies; and encouraging two-parent families. PRWORA expanded the scope of services that could potentially be contracted out, such as determining eligibility for TANF, which had traditionally been done by government employees. Moreover, with the large drop in TANF caseloads nationally, a greater share of federal TANF block grant funds and state funds is now devoted to various support services that are typically contracted out. Although PRWORA expanded the flexibility of states to design and administer TANF programs, its also limited the ability of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to regulate states' TANF programs. Contracting with nongovernmental entities to provide …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses Social Security Administration (SSA) improvements in the claims process for its two disability programs, Disability Insurance (DI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Managing its disability caseloads with fair, consistent, and timely eligibility decisions in the face of resource constraints has become one of SSA's most pressing management challenges. SSA has spent more than $39 million over the past 7 years to test and implement initiatives designed to improve the timeliness, accuracy, and consistency of its disability decisions and to make the process more efficient and understandable for claimants. These have included efforts to improve the initial claims process as well as handling appeals of denied claims. The results to date have been disappointing. SSA's two tests to improve the initial claims process produced some benefits; however, both initiatives as tested would have significantly raised costs, and one would have lengthened the wait for final decisions for many claimants. As a result, SSA is considering additional changes to one of these initiatives and has shelved the other. One initiative to change the process for handling appealed claims in SSA's hearing offices has resulted in even slower …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "As new technologies that depend on the radio spectrum continue to be developed and used more widely, managing the spectrum can grow increasingly challenging. The current legal framework for domestic spectrum management evolved as a compromise over the questions of who should determine the distribution of the spectrum among competing users and what standard should be applied in making this determination. Although initially, all responsibility for spectrum management was placed in the executive branch, this responsibility has been divided between the executive branch for managing federal use and an independent commission for managing non-federal use since 1927 . The current shared U.S. spectrum management system has processes for allocating spectrum, but these processes have occasionally resulted in lengthy negotiations between the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) over allocation issues. The United States also faces challenges in effectively preparing for World Radiocommunication Conferences. NTIA has several activities to encourage efficient spectrum use by federal agencies, but it lacks the assurance that these activities are effective. NTIA is required to promote efficiency in the federal spectrum it manages, which included more than 270,000 federal …

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether the requirement of section 341.502(a) of the Finance Code applies to loan transactions other than those "regulated by the Office of Consumer Credit Commissioner" (RQ-0483-JC)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a constable who fails to provide evidence of permanent peace officer licensure under section 86.0021(b) of the Local Government Code automatically forfeits his office, and related questions (RQ-0484-JC)

A four-chamber piston pump is powered by decomposed 85% hydrogen peroxide. The performance envelope of the evolving 400 gram pump has been expanded to 172 cc/s water flow at discharge pressures near 5 MPa. A gas generator cycle system using the pump has been tested under similar conditions of pressure and flow. The powerhead gas is derived from a small fraction of the pumped hydrogen peroxide, and the system starts from tank pressures as low as 0.2 MPa. The effects of steam condensation on performance have been evaluated.

Deposit summary of $75.00 made on June 11, 2002.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has been awarded a total of 80 Environmental Management Science Program (EMSP) research grants since the inception of the program in 1996. The Laboratory has collaborated on an additional 14 EMSP awards with funding received through other institution. This report describes how each of the projects awarded in 1999, 2000, and 2001 addresses significant U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) cleanup issues, including those at the Hanford Site. The technical progress made to date in each of these research projects is addressed in the individual project reports included in this document. Projects are under way in three main areas: Tank Waste Remediation, Decontamination and Decommissioning, and Soil and Groundwater Cleanup.

Weekly newspaper from Emory, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

The Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) is one of the most promising power sources for stand-alone utility and electric vehicle applications. Platinum (Pt) Catalyst is used for both fuel and air electrodes in PEMFCs. However, carbon monoxide (CO) contamination of H{sub 2} greatly affects electro catalysts used at the anode of PEMFCs and decreases cell performance. The irreversible poisoning of the anode can occur even in CO concentrations as low as few parts per million (ppm). In this work, we have synthesized several novel elctrocatalysts (Pt/C, Pt/Ru/C, Pt/Mo/C, Pt/Ir and Pt/Ru/Mo) for PEMFCs. These catalysts have been tested for CO tolerance in the H{sub 2}/air fuel cell, using CO concentrations in the H{sub 2} fuel that varies from 10 to 100 ppm. The performance of the electrodes was evaluated by determining the cell potential against current density. The effects of catalyst composition and electrode film preparation method on the performance of PEM fuel cell were also studied. It was found that at 70 C and 3.5 atm pressure at the cathode, Pt-alloy catalyst (10 wt% Pt/Ru/C, 20 wt% Pt/Mo/C) were more CO tolerant than the 20 wt% Pt/C catalyst alone. It was also observed that spraying method was better …

The resistive wall impedance is usually calculated assuming the skin depth being much smaller than the chamber thickness. This approximation is not always correct. In particular, it is not valid when the revolution frequency is very low (as in VLHC [1]), or the surface is coated by a thin conductive layer (as for extraction kickers [2]), or for the coherent effects in the closed orbit motion [3]. A method of analytical calculation of the transverse impedance is developed here for multi-layer vacuum chambers and applied to an arbitrary two-layer structure.

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hcp Co disk-shaped nanocrystals were obtained by rapid decomposition of cobalt carbonyl in presence of linear amines. Other surfactants, in addition to the amines, like phosphine oxides and oleic acid were used to improve size dispersion, shape control and nanocrystal stability. Co disks are ferromagnetic in character and they spontaneously self-assemble into long ribbons. X-ray and electron diffraction, electron microscopy and SQUID magnetometry have been employed to characterize this material.

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This report examines the gas phase growth from a supersaturated, slightly compressible, liquid in a porous medium, driven by heat transfer and controlled by the application of a constant-rate decline of the system pressure.

This report extend the approach to heterogeneous systems, by considering the simpler case of in-situ combustion in layered porous media (and particularly to a two-layer model). Analytical models were developed to delineate the combined elects of fluid flow, reaction and heat transfer on the dynamics of combustion fronts in layered porous media, using as parameters the thermal coupling between the layers, the heat transfer to the surroundings and the permeability contrast.

The proposed Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA) Facility includes a post-accelerator for rare isotopes (RIB linac) which must produce high-quality beams of radioactive ions over the full mass range, including uranium, at energies above the coulomb barrier, and have high transmission and efficiency. The latter requires the RIB linac to accept at injection ions in the 1+ charge state. A concept for such a post accelerator suitable for ions up to mass 132 has been previously described [1]. This paper presents a modified concept which extends the mass range to uranium. A high resolution separator for purifying beams at the isobaric level precedes the RIB linac. The mass filtering process will provide high purity beams while preserving transmission. For most cases a resolution of about m/{Delta}m=20,000 is adequate at mass A=100 to obtain a separation between isobars of mass excess difference of 5 MeV. The design for a device capable of purifying beams at the isobaric level included calculations up to 5th order. The RIB linac will utilize existing superconducting heavy-ion linac technology for all but a small portion of the accelerator system. The exceptional piece, a very-low-charge-state injector, section needed for just the first few MV of the RIB accelerator, …

The low energy beam transport (LEBT) for VENUS will provide for extraction, mass analysis and transport to the axial injection line for the 88-Inch Cyclotron. The new LEBT was designed from the beginning to handle high intensity beams where space charge forces strongly affect the transmission. The magnet has a unique design with specially shaped poles to apply sextupole correction in both the horizontal and vertical plane.

Over the last three decades, microscopists and microanalysts have successfully developed, documented and exploited a large number of experimental techniques for the characterization of the morphology, crystallography, elemental, chemical and electronic structure of their samples. While the application of any of these now ''routine'' tools of microcharacterization remains the foundation of the work reported in the microscopy or microanalysis literature, it can be safely asserted that the technologically important problems of the next decade will demand an ever increasing sophistication in how we attack and solve the ensuing generation of problems using the resources we have at hand. It is also reasonably safe to say that while improving something as basic as the resolution of an instrument will generally facilitate studying a new class of materials, it will not fundamentally change how we work, it will only change what one studies. To truly create a new paradigm of how we, as experimentalists, enlist resources to solve vexing problems; we have to step back and consider what are all the limiting factors to employing our resources to their greatest utility, then we must come up with new ways of combining these resources to change the how we might tackle new problems.

Beam loss reduction and control challenges confronting the Fermilab Booster are presented in the context of the current operational status. In Summer 2002 the programmatic demand for 8 GeV protons will increase to 5E20/year. This is an order of magnitude above recent high rates and nearly as many protons as the machine has produced in its entire 30-year lifetime. Catastrophic radiation damage to accelerator components must be avoided, maintenance in an elevated residual radiation environment must be addressed, and operation within a tight safety envelope must be conducted to limit prompt radiation in the buildings and grounds around the Booster. Diagnostic and performance tracking improvements, enhanced orbit control, and a beam loss collimation/localization system are essential elements in the approach to achieving the expected level of performance and are described here.

In this report, we identify and describe 24 practical diagnostics that are ready now to evaluate residential commissioning metrics, and that we expect to include in the commissioning guide. Our discussion in the main body of this report is limited to existing diagnostics in areas of particular concern with significant interactions: envelope and HVAC systems. These areas include insulation quality, windows, airtightness, envelope moisture, fan and duct system airflows, duct leakage, cooling equipment charge, and combustion appliance backdrafting with spillage. Appendix C describes the 83 other diagnostics that we have examined in the course of this project, but that are not ready or are inappropriate for residential commissioning. Combined with Appendix B, Table 1 in the main body of the report summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of all 107 diagnostics. We first describe what residential commissioning is, its characteristic elements, and how one might structure its process. Our intent in this discussion is to formulate and clarify these issues, but is largely preliminary because such a practice does not yet exist. Subsequent sections of the report describe metrics one can use in residential commissioning, along with the consolidated set of 24 practical diagnostics that the building industry can use now …