Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO reviewed the Bureau of Prisons to determine whether it had made overpayments to contractors. During fiscal year 2001, the Bureau of Prisons had 24 open construction contracts that totaled about $1.9 billion. In addition to general disbursement controls, GAO found internal controls specific to construction contracts in which both the project representative and the contracting officer must approve each monthly progress payment invoice. GAO sampled 27 payments on five construction contracts to determine if construction contract payment controls were properly designed, in place, and operating to prevent or detect overpayments. GAO found that the internal controls were in place and operating and construction contract payment amounts were correct, or, if errors occurred, they were detected and corrected promptly as a normal part of the payment system. A few minor clerical errors were subsequently detected and corrected by the Bureau of Prisons through its own routine control procedures before GAO made its review. GAO concludes that the risk of undetected construction contractor overpayments at the Bureau of Prisons appears to be small."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Both federal and state governments exercise regulatory authority in many of the same policy areas. In enacting new legislation in these shared areas, Congress must provide federal protections, guarantees, or benefits while preserving an appropriate balance between federal and state regulatory authority and responsibility. State efforts can be directed toward federal or nationally shared regulatory objectives through various arrangements, each of which reflects a way to define and issue regulations or standards and assign responsibility for their implementation or enforcement. Regulatory and standard-setting mechanisms for achieving nationwide coverage include (1) fixed federal standards that preempt all state regulatory action, (2) minimum federal standards that preempt less stringent state laws but permit states to establish more stringent standards, (3) the inclusion of federal regulatory provisions in grants or other forms of assistance, (4) cooperative programs in which voluntary national standards are formulated by federal and state officials working together, and (5) widespread state adoption of voluntary standards formulated by quasi-official entities. The first two of these mechanisms involve preemption; the other three represent alternative approaches. Each represents a different combination of federal and state regulatory authority. The …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Financial management problems at the Department of Defense (DOD) are complex, long-standing, and deeply rooted throughout its business operations. DOD's financial management deficiencies represent the single largest obstacle to achieving an unqualified opinion on the U.S. government's consolidated financial statements. So far, none of the military services or major DOD components have passed the test of an independent financial audit because of pervasive weaknesses in financial management systems, operations, and controls. These problems go back decades, and earlier attempts at reform have been unsuccessful. DOD continues to rely on a far-flung, complex network of finance, logistics, personnel, acquisition, and other management information systems for financial data to support day-to-day management and decision-making. This network has evolved into an overly complex and error-prone operation with (1) little standardization across DOD components; (2) multiple systems performing the same tasks; (3) the same data stored in multiple systems; (4) manual data entry into multiple systems; and (5) a large number of data translations and interfaces, which combine to exacerbate problems with data integrity. Many of the elements that are crucial to financial management reform and business process transformation--particularly those that rely …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In fiscal years 1996 to 2000, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was one of the few agencies that received an unqualified opinion on its financial statements and was in substantial compliance with the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act (FFMIA). This suggested that NASA could generate reliable information for annual external financial reporting and could provide accurate, reliable information for day-to-day decision-making. In contrast with the unqualified or "clean" audit opinions of its previous auditor, Arthur Andersen, NASA's new independent auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, disclaimed an opinion on the agency's fiscal year 2001 financial statements because of significant internal control weaknesses. PricewaterhouseCoopers also concluded that NASA's financial management systems do not substantially comply with the requirements of FFMIA. Modernizing NASA's financial management system is essential to providing accurate, useful information for external financial reporting as well as internal management decision-making. NASA is working on an integrated financial management system that it expects to have fully operational in fiscal year 2006 at an estimated cost of $475 million. This is NASA's third attempt to implement a new financial management system. The first two efforts were abandoned after 12 years and …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Highway Trust Fund "guarantees" specific annual funding levels for most highway programs on the basis of projected receipts to the fund. It also makes annual adjustments to these funding levels on the basis of actual receipts and revised projections of trust fund revenue. These adjustments are called the Revenue Aligned Budget Authority (RABA). GAO concludes that the fiscal year 2003 RABA calculation appears reasonable. Although the RABA adjustment is clearly severe, it reflects the many ways in which an economic downturn affects the calculation. In late January 2002, the administration announced that the fiscal year 2003 RABA adjustment would be a negative $4.965 billion. Within a few days of the announcement, the administration reported that an error had been made and the correct amount was a negative $4.369 billion--a $600 million difference. Treasury is taking steps to improve its internal controls in order to prevent this type of error from reoccurring. The use of ethanol blended fuel instead of gasoline reduces Highway Trust Fund revenue because it is partially exempt from the standard excise tax on gasoline and 2.5 cents of the tax received on each gallon …

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Army National Guard's funding requests for fiscal years 2000 and 2001 were overstated by $42.9 million and $31.6 million, respectively, because of inaccurate military strength and participation rates used to develop projected and actual military force levels. To correct these overstatements, the Guard is placing more emphasis on an existing personnel database reporting system that identifies the personnel assigned to a unit but who have not been paid for inactive duty training for three months or more. The Guard also improved the method it uses to calculate inactive duty training participation rates, now basing the rate on the number of people who have actually been paid for training, rather than on expected program costs."

The treatment of Social Security in the federal budget is often confusing. In legislation enacted in 1983, 1985, and 1990, Social Security was excluded from official budget calculations and largely exempted it from congressional procedures for controlling budget revenues and expenditures. However, because Social Security represents more than a fifth of federal revenues and expenditures, it often is included in summaries of the government's financial flows, or what is referred to as the "unified" budget.

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

Weekly student newspaper from the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas that includes campus news and commentaries along with advertising.

Radioactive waste is scheduled to be retrieved from Hanford double-shell tanks AN-103, AN-104, AN-105 and AW-101 to the vitrification plant beginning about 2009. Retrieval may involve decanting the supernatant liquid and/or mixing the waste with jet pumps. In these four tanks, which contain relatively large volumes of retained gas, both of these operations are expected to induce buoyant displacement gas releases that can potentially raise the tank headspace hydrogen concentration to very near the lower flammability limit. This report describes the theory and detailed physical models for both the supernate decant and jet mixing processes and presents the results from applying the models to these operations in the four tanks. The technical bases for input parameter distributions are elucidated.

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

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

A rigorous full waveform inversion of seismic data has been a challenging subject partly because of the lack of precise knowledge of the source. Since currently available approaches involve some form of approximations to the source, inversion results are subject to the quality and the choice of the source information used. We propose a new full waveform inversion methodology that does not involve source spectrum information. Thus potential inversion errors due to source estimation can be eliminated. A gather of seismic traces is first Fourier-transformed into the frequency domain and a normalized wavefield is obtained for each trace in the frequency domain. Normalization is done with respect to the frequency response of a reference trace selected from the gather, so the complex-valued normalized wavefield is dimensionless. The source spectrum is eliminated during the normalization procedure. With its source spectrum eliminated, the normalized wavefield allows us construction of an inversion algorithm without the source information. The inversion algorithm minimizes misfits between measured normalized wavefield and numerically computed normalized wavefield. The proposed approach has been successfully demonstrated using a simple two-dimensional scalar problem.

This project focuses on the synthesis of mesoporous aluminophosphate (AlPO) catalysts for application in the acid catalyzed conversion of large petroleum feedstock compounds to Useful middle distillates and naphtha transportation fuels.

We present the calculation of the generating functions and the rth-order correlations for densities of the form {rho}(x) {proportional_to} where g(s) is a non-negative function of the quadratic ''action'' s(x)={summation}{sub i,j}H{sub ij}x{sub i}x{sub j}, where x = (x{sub 1},x{sub 2}...,x{sub n}) is a real n-dimensional vector and H is a real, symmetric n x n matrix whose eigenvalues are strictly positive. In particular, we find the connection between the (r+2)th-order and rth-order correlations, which constitutes a generalization of the Gaussian moment theorem, which corresponds to the particular choice g(s)=e{sup -s/2}. We present several examples for specific choices for g(s), including the explicit expression for the generating function for each case and the subspace projection of {rho}(x) in a few cases. We also provide the straightforward generalizations to: (1) the case where g=g(s(x)+a {center_dot} x), where a=(a{sub 1},a{sub 2},...,a{sub n}) is an arbitrary real n-dimensional vector, and (2) the complex case, in which the action is of the form s(z) = {summation}{sub i,j}H{sub ij}z{sup *}{sub i} z{sub j} where z=(z{sub 1},z{sub 2}...z{sub n}) is an n-dimensional complex vector and H is a Hermitian n x n matrix whose eigenvalues are strictly positive.

The DOE is faced with a wide variety of waste treatment problems throughout the complex. The diversity in physical, chemical, and radiological characteristics of these waste streams will necessitate an array of treatment technologies since, at present, there exists no single solution. Thermal treatment technologies have an important, but by no means singular, role to play in addressing this problem since they generally offer the potential for significant volume reductions, leach resistant waste forms, considerable versatility, and are relatively well developed. In particular, DOE has made significant investments in the development and deployment of vitrification technologies for the treatment of high-level nuclear wastes and, more recently, for mixed wastes. The general area of materials of construction is especially important for thermal processes due to the inherently high-temperature and the often-corrosive environments involved. The performance of these materials directly impacts treatment costs since this determines maintenance downtime and the useful service life of the treatment unit.

The Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) was awarded a grant by the Department of Energy that provided partial support for the IMA Career Workshop: Connecting Women in Mathematical Sciences to Industry. The workshop took place on September 8 to 10, 2000 at the IMA was co-sponsored by the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), and also received additional funding from Coastcom. This report highlights the activities and the accomplishments of the program.

The structural integrity of High Level Waste tanks is defined by the demonstrated confinement of the waste by the tank structure under design basis conditions. a comprehensive test plan is presented here to develop a mechanical and corrosion properties database to develop a fundamental understanding of the synergistic effects of DSA and SCC due to high temperature service of the HLW tanks.

Semiweekly newspaper from Levelland, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

The primary objectives of this project are to assess, and improve our understanding of: (1) The effectiveness of various strategies to intentionally store carbon in the ocean through fertilization of the surface ocean with iron and/or macronutrients; and (2) Unanticipated environmental consequences of these ocean fertilization strategies. We propose to use what may be the best global ocean biogeochemical model in the world (PISCES) and apply it to perform the most realistic global-scale simulations of various iron fertilization scenarios. Versions of PISCES are currently used by MPI in Germany and IPSL in France. The model represents diatoms, coccolithophorids, and two classes of zooplankton. This model considers Fey N, P, O{sub 2}, Si, alkalinity, and carbon; for some of these it considers dissolved inorganic and organic, as well as particulate, forms. We would install the PISCES model with a minimum of modification into the LLNL ocean model, and perform an initial suite of simulations of both iron fertilization experiments (e.g., SOFeX) and proposed iron fertilization strategies. Based on the simulated experiments, we will analyze model deficiencies with respect to the observations and use this analysis to improve future versions of the model. The source code for and results from this set …

Laboratory experiments on wave propagation through saturated and partially saturated porous media have often been conducted on porous cylinders that were initially fully saturated and then allowed to dry while continuing to acquire data on the wave behavior. Since it is known that drying typically progresses from the outside to the inside, a sensible physical model of this process is concentric cylinders having different saturation levels--the simplest example being a fully dry outer cylindrical shell together with a fully wet inner cylinder. We use this model to formulate the equations for wave dispersion in porous cylinders for patchy saturation (i.e., drainage) conditions. In addition to multiple modes of propagation obtained numerically from these dispersion relations, we find two distinct analytical expressions for torsional wave modes.

Potential leak detection, monitoring, and mitigation techniques are being developed to support Hanford single-shell tank waste retrieval operations. In July and August 2001, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory demonstrated several of these technologies for CH2M HILL Hanford Group, Inc., at the Mock Tank Site in the 200 East Area. These subsurface air flow and extraction (SAFE) technologies use air injection and extraction wells to create an advective air flowfield beneath a tank. SAFE includes the following technologies: 1) leak detection--in-tank tracers, flowfield disturbance, radon displacement, and tank waste vapors; 2) leak monitoring--partitioning tracer method and reactive tracers; 3) leak mitigation--soil desiccation before and after leakage and in situ gaseous reduction; and 4) subsurface characterization--interfacial tracers. This report provides an overview of these technologies and discusses the FY 2001 demonstration activities at the Mock Tank Site, their results, and implications for future work.