A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "There are currently 57 inspectors general (IG) subject to the Inspector General Act of 1978 or similar statutory provisions. The President appoints 29 IGs who are confirmed by the Senate. Twenty-eight IGs in designated federal entities (DFE IGs) are appointed by their agency heads. GAO developed a survey that included key elements related to IG independence, quality of work, and resources. Responses to the survey indicate a clear delineation between the responses of the presidential and DFE IGs regarding the potential impact of conversion and consolidation. The presidential IGs indicated that DFE IG independence, quality and use of resources could be strengthened by conversion and consolidation. DFE IGs responses to these same questions indicated that there would be no impact or that these elements would be weakened. The Presidential IGs indicated that several elements affecting the DFE IGs' quality of work could be strengthened through consolidation, including the ability to issue hard-hitting reports when necessary, to audit issues of high risk, to review issues across agencies, to get attention to recommendations made by the IGs, and to plan work. The IGs overwhelmingly responded that establishing the …

Weekly newspaper from Albany, Texas that includes local, county, and state news along with extensive advertising.

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

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

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

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Petroleum Technology Office (NPTO) is interested in promoting new technologies that can produce oil and gas at a lower cost or with enhanced environmental protection at a reasonable cost. Several years ago, DOE became aware of a new technology for produced water management known as a downhole oil/water separator (or DOWS). A DOWS system separates oil from water at the bottom of a production well and injects the water directly to a disposal zone without lifting it to the surface. DOWS technology offered three potential advantages over traditional pumping systems. First, DOWS were reported to reduce the volume of produced water brought to the surface. Second, the volume of oil produced often increased. Third, because large volumes of produced water were not being lifted to the surface past drinking water zones and subsequently reinjected downward past the same drinking water zones, there was less opportunity for contamination of those zones.

This research project focuses on pollutants from the combustion of mixtures of dried municipal sewage sludge (MSS) and coal. The objective is to determine the relationship between (1) fraction sludge in the sludge/coal mixture, and (2) combustion conditions on (a) NOx concentrations in the exhaust, (b) the size segregated fine and ultra-fine particle composition in the exhaust, and (c) the partitioning of toxic metals between vapor and condenses phases, within the process. The proposed study will be conducted in concert with an existing ongoing research on toxic metal partitioning mechanisms for very well characterized pulverized coals alone. Both high NOx and low NOx combustion conditions will be investigated (unstaged and staged combustion). Tradeoffs between CO2 control, NOx control, and inorganic fine particle and toxic metal emissions will be determined. Previous research has yielded data on trace metal partitioning for MSS by itself, with natural gas assist, for coal plus MSS combustion together, and for coal alone. We have re-evaluated the inhalation health effects of ash aerosol from combustion of MSS both by itself and also together with coal. We have concluded that ash from the co-combustion of MSS and coal is very much worse from an inhalation health point of …

The ideal structural steel combines high strength with high fracture toughness. This dissertation discusses the toughening mechanism of the Fe/Co/Ni/Cr/Mo/C steel, AerMet 100, which has the highest toughness/strength combination among all commercial ultrahigh strength steels. The possibility of improving the toughness of this steel was examined by considering several relevant factors.

The Espresso Scientific Modeling Interface (Espresso) is a scientific modeling productivity tool developed from climate modelers. Espresso was designed to be an extensible interface to both scientific models and Grid resources. It also aims to be a contemporary piece of software that relies on Globus.org's Java CoG Kit for a Grid toolkit, Sun's Java 2 API and is configured using XML. This article covers the design implementation of Espresso's Grid functionality and how it interacts with existing scientific models. The authors give specific examples of how they have designed Espresso to perform climate simulations using the PSU/NCAR MM5 atmospheric model. Plans to incorporate the CCSM and FOAM climate models are also discussed.

A steady-state model of the Sodium-Bearing Waste steam reforming process at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory has been performed using the commercial ASPEN Plus process simulator. The preliminary process configuration and its representation in ASPEN are described. As assessment of the capability of the model to mechanistically predict product stream compositions was made, and fidelity gaps and opportunities for model enhancement were identified, resulting in the following conclusions: (1) Appreciable benefit is derived from using an activity coefficient model for electrolyte solution thermodynamics rather than assuming ideality (unity assumed for all activity coefficients). The concentrations of fifteen percent of the species present in the primary output stream were changed by more than 50%, relative to Electrolyte NRTL, when ideality was assumed; (2) The current baseline model provides a good start for estimating mass balances and performing integrated process optimization because it contains several key species, uses a mechanistic electrolyte thermodynamic model, and is based on a reasonable process configuration; and (3) Appreciable improvement to model fidelity can be realized by expanding the species list and the list of chemical and phase transformations. A path forward is proposed focusing on the use of an improved electrolyte thermodynamic property method, …

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In this paper we discuss the development of a high performance climate modeling system as an example of the application of Grid based technology to climate modeling. The climate simulation system at Argonne currently includes a scientific modeling interface (Espresso) written in Java which incorporates Globus middleware to facilitate climate simulations on the Grid. The climate modeling system also includes a high performance version of MM5v3.4 modified for long climate simulations on our 512 processor Linux cluster (Chiba City), an interactive web based tool to facilitate analysis and collaboration via the web, and an enhanced version of the Cave5D software capable of visualizing large climate data sets. We plan to incorporate other climate modeling systems such as the Fast Ocean Atmosphere Model (FOAM) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research's (NCAR) Community Climate Systems Model (CCSM) within Espresso to facilitate their application on computational grids.

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

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Social Security benefits are payable to the spouses of retired, disabled, or deceased workers. The benefits often provide income to wives and husbands who have little or no Social Security benefits of their own. Until 1977, workers receiving pensions from government positions not covered by Social Security could receive their full pension benefit and their full spousal benefits as if they were nonworking spouses. Since then, a government pension offset has been in effect to equalize the treatment of workers covered by Social Security and those with noncovered government benefits. This report was prompted by a referral to GAO's Fraudnet that questioned a practice in which individuals in Texas were transferring to Social Security-covered positions for one day to avoid the offset. GAO found no central data on the use of the offset exemption by individuals, and time constraints did not permit in-depth audit work on the 2,300 state and local government retirement plans. However, GAO did establish that, as of June 2002, more than 4,800 persons in Texas and Georgia worked for brief periods in jobs covered by Social Security to qualify for the "last-day …

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

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

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

Semi-monthly newspaper from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news and advertising of interest to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community.

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Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

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