A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense's (DOD) policy and practices for developing core depot maintenance capabilities are creating gaps between actual capabilities and those needed for future national defense emergencies and contingencies. If the existing policy is not clarified and current practices continue, the military depots will not have the equipment, facilities, and trained personnel to provide logistics support on many of the weapon systems and related equipment for military use in the next five to 15 years. Although DOD intends for its depots to have these capabilities, actual practices are much different. Core policy does not adequately take into consideration future systems repair needs and the impact of retiring systems on developing capabilities. Furthermore, the practices of individual services hinder the establishment of future core capabilities and management oversight. Additional investments in new facilities, equipment, and workforce training and revitalization have been limited for some time. Finally, there is no strategic plan and associated service implementation plans to create and sustain a viable depot maintenance capability."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Local emergency medical systems (EMS) have reported substantial needs in such areas as personnel, training, equipment, and the availability of doctors to advise emergency personnel in the field. Federal agencies have supported EMS improvements by acting as facilitators rather then by establishing requirements or providing significant funding. The agencies provide technical assistance, set voluntary standards for licensing EMS providers, and administer limited grant funding. The four federal agencies GAO studied have separately begun to collect EMS data or promote data consistency. However, progress in developing this information has been slow. State and local EMS officials attributed the lack of progress to the many competing demands on their time and said that EMS providers and local systems have few incentives to collect and report EMS information."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Risk management is a systematic and analytical process that weighs the likelihood that a threat will endanger an asset, individual, or function and identifies actions to reduce the risk and mitigate the consequences of an attack. A good risk management approach includes the following three assessments: a threat, a vulnerability, and a criticality. After these assessments have been completed and evaluated, key steps can be taken to better prepare the United States against potential terrorist attacks. Threat assessments alone are insufficient to support the key judgments and decisions that must be made. However, along with vulnerability and criticality assessments, leaders and managers will make better decisions using this risk management approach. If the federal government were to apply this approach universally and if similar approaches were adopted by other segments of society, the United States could more effectively and efficiently prepare in-depth defenses against terrorist acts."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The National Defense Authorization Act for 2001 authorized the military archives to (1) charge fees to persons requesting information and (2) retain collected fees to help defray costs of providing the information. Although none of the archives has yet implemented a fee, one archive plans to do so by October 2001. The Department of Defense's (DOD) archives and other offices are also authorized under both the User Charge Statute and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to charge for information provided to the public. However, neither of these statutes authorizes an agency to retain those fees. The four designated archives are charging fees to public requesters but are not using the fee schedule mandated by the DOD regulation implementing the User Charge Statute. Similarly, DOD's fee schedules for charges under FOIA are outdated. DOD's inconsistent use of the authority to charge fees and the use of outdated DOD fees schedules result in uncollected fees of a million dollars or more annually and inconsistent handling of public requests for historical information."

As part of the effort to modernize safeguards equipment, the IAEA is continuing to acquire and install equipment for upgrading obsolete surveillance systems with digital technology; and providing remote-monitoring capabilities where and when economically justified. Remote monitoring is expected to reduce inspection effort, particularly at storage facilities and reactor sites. Remote monitoring technology will not only involve surveillance, but will also include seals, sensors, and other unattended measurement equipment. The experience of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) with the Argus Security System offers lessons for the design, deployment, and maintenance of remote monitoring systems. Argus is an integrated security system for protection of high-consequence U.S. Government assets, including nuclear materials. Argus provides secure transmission of sensor data, administrative data, and video information to support intrusion detection and access control functions. LLNL developed and deployed the Argus system on its own site in 1988. Since that time LLNL has installed, maintained, and upgraded Argus systems at several Department of Energy and Department of Defense sites in the U.S. and at the original LLNL site. Argus has provided high levels of reliability and integrity, and reduced overall life-cycle cost through incremental improvements to hardware and software. This philosophy permits expansion of functional …

The Hanford Site 200 Area Effluent Treatment Facility (ETF) processes contaminated liquids derived from Hanford Site facilities. The clean water generated by these processes is occasionally enriched in tritium, and is discharged to the 200 Area State Approved Land Disposal Site (SALDS). Groundwater monitoring for tritium and other constituents is required by the state-issued permit at 22 wells surrounding the facility. During FY 2001, tritium activities in the SALDS proximal well 699-48-77A increased (maximum 670,000 pCi/L) as a result of the resumption of tritium disposal in September 2000, following a 16-month hiatus in significant tritium discharges. Well 699-48-77C, where tritium results reached a maximum value of 980,000 pCi/L, is reflecting the result of the delayed penetration of effluent deeper into the aquifer from 1999 SALDS tritium discharges. Speculation in FY 2000 (Barnett 2000b) that tritium may have reached two wells due south of the facility is probably premature. FY 2001 results indicate no departures from historical levels of tritium in these wells.

B-roll footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story.

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

Semi-weekly newspaper from Clifton, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

A need arose to define the hazards associated with the operation of a process. The process involved the evolution of a hydrogen gas stream from thermal decomposition of uranium hydride at approximately 400 C into the interior of a purged argon-filled glove box. Specific hazards of interest included the potential reaction severity of the evolved hydrogen with atmospheric oxygen, either downstream in the vent system or inside the box in the event of serious air inleakage. Another hazard might be the energetic reaction of inleaked air with the hot uranium and uranium hydride powder bed, possibly resulting in the dispersion of powders into an air atmosphere and the rapid combustion of the powders. This was approached as a problem in calculational simulation. Given the parameters associated with the process and the properties of the glove box system, certain scenarios were defined and the potential for flammable or detonation reactions estimated. Calculation tools included a comprehensive fluid dynamics code, a spreadsheet, a curve-fitting program, an equation solver, and a thermochemistry software package. Results are reported which suggest that the process can be operated without significant hazard to operators or significant damage to equipment, assuming that operators take account of potential upset …

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A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Several factors affect employers' decisions to participate in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA) consultation program. GAO surveyed industry associations, employee representatives, and participating employers and found that the two main incentives for program participation are (1) making the employer's workplace safer and reducing worker injury and illness by promoting workplace safety and health and (2) preparing the employer's workplace for an OSHA inspection. The measurement system OSHA uses lacks enough data to separate the program outcomes from the outcomes of OSHA's other efforts to reduce workplace injuries and illnesses. OSHA's process for allocating funds to the state consultation programs plays no role in encouraging participating states to achieve agency goals."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The military's health program--TRICARE--provides medical care to about 8.3 million active duty service members and retired beneficiaries and their dependents and survivors. The Department of Defense (DOD) also provides benefits for persons severely disabled by physical or mental problems through its Individual Case Management Program for Persons with Extraordinary Conditions (ICMP-PEC) and for less severely disabled active duty dependents through its Program for Persons with Disabilities (PFPWD). Recently, military families and advocacy groups have raised concerns about accessing ICMP-PEC benefits. Also, the DOD Authorization Act for 2001 entitled military retirees age 65 and older and their dependents and survivors to TRICARE benefits for life which may have caseload and cost effects on ICMP-PEC. As of June 2001, 38 ICMP-PEC participants were projected to receive $6 million in services in fiscal year 2001, Their annual per-case costs were projected to range from $13,000 to $382,000. ICMP-PEC now lacks a clear purpose, well-defined eligibility criteria and benefits, and an efficient application process. In contrast, PFPWD is an established program with well defined criteria and benefits that assist thousands of ADFMs with their special health care service and equipment …

Newspaper from Rose State College in Midwest City, Oklahoma that includes national, local, and campus news along with advertising.

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

A complete trace of communication activity for a terascale application is overwhelming in terms of overhead and storage. We propose a novel alternative that enables profiling of the application's communication activity using statistical message sampling during runtime. We have implemented an operational prototype and our evidence shows that this new technique can provide an accurate, low-overhead, tractable alternative for performance analysis of communication activity. Moreover, this alternative enables an assortment of runtime analysis techniques not previously available with post-mortem, trace-based systems. Our assessment of relative performance and coverage of different sampling and analysis methods shows that purely random selection is preferred over counter- and timer-based sampling. Experiments on several applications running up to 128 processors demonstrate the viability of this approach. In particular, on one application, statistical profiling results contradict conclusions based on evidence from tracing. The design of our prototype reveals that parsimonious modifications to the MPI runtime system could facilitate such techniques on production computing systems, and it suggests that this sampling technique could execute continuously for long-running applications.

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Photograph of a Victorian Christmas scene in Historic Downtown Guthrie.

Photograph of a Victorian Christmas scene in Historic Downtown Guthrie.

Photograph of a Victorian Christmas scene in Historic Downtown Guthrie.

Photograph of a Victorian Christmas scene in Historic Downtown Guthrie.

Photograph of a Victorian Christmas scene in Historic Downtown Guthrie.