A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed federal agencies' certification requirements for goods and services, focusing on: (1) the extent and variety of certification activities in the federal government; (2) the extent to which there are policies, procedures, or guidance governing those activities, either governmentwide or within selected agencies; and (3) an agency certification procedure that could serve as an example or best practice for other agencies."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the process that the Office of National Drug Control Policy's (ONDCP) Counterdrug Technology Assessment Center (CTAC) uses to fund research and development (R&D) projects."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO examined: (1) whether exporter notification to the Department of Commerce of proposed sales of high performance computers (HPC) to countries of concern has resulted in license applications and what final action was taken on these licenses; and (2) how Commerce is conducting post-shipment verifications of the use of high performance computers after their export to these countries."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Federal Highway Administration's (FHwA) selection process for awarding discretionary grants, focusing on: (1) determining how FHwA has implemented the requirements specified in the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21); and (2) comparing the results of the selection process for fiscal years (FY) 1998-1999 with the results of the selection process for FY 1995 through FY 1997 that GAO previously reported on."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the District of Columbia's efforts to address the year 2000 challenge, focusing on the: (1) District's progress in fixing its systems and the remaining risks it faces; (2) actions it needs to take to mitigate these risks over the next 3 months; and (3) recent experience it needs to capitalize on to strengthen long-term information technology management."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed large bank holding company mergers and the impact of such mergers on low- and moderate-income (LMI) areas, focusing on: (1) the Federal Reserve Board's (FRB) legal responsibilities in assessing Bank Holding Company Act of 1956 (BHC) mergers for Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA) performance; (2) FRB's process for assessing the CRA performance of six large BHC merger applicants, including how FRB addressed the principal public concerns related to the CRA performance; and (3) the premerger and postmerger mortgage lending in LMI and minority communities for three large BHC mergers."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) safe drinking water research efforts, focusing on: (1) comparing EPA's budget requests for drinking water research during fiscal years (FY) 1997 through 2000 with: (a) the amounts authorized for such purposes by the Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments of 1996; and (b) the amounts estimated by EPA to be needed to support the regulations and regulatory determinations required under the amendments; (2) obtaining the views of stakeholders--those involved with supplying and ensuring the safety of drinking water--regarding the likelihood that EPA will be able to complete the research necessary to support new regulations and regulatory decisions over the next 10 years and the potential consequences if the research is not completed; and (3) assessing EPA's drinking water research plans, including the tasks, projected funding, and anticipated accomplishments, to support the development of new regulations and regulatory decisions over the next 10 years."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the District of Columbia's financial management issues related to its year 2000 efforts, focusing on the: (1) funds provided and the District's reported expenditures to date; (2) District's ability to track its year 2000 costs; and (3) additional funding requested by the District."

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 municipality that offers alarm monitoring services for a fee is subject to the licensing requirements of chapter 1702 of the Texas Occupations Code (RQ-0004)

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 school district may award back pay to employees who were indicted, suspended, and subsequently acquitted (RQ-0035)

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 commissioners court must vote unanimously to close a public road that is not a through street (RQ-0059)

This document identifies the tasks that are involved in preparing the ''standby'' portable exhauster (POR05 skid C) to support Interim Stabilization's schedule for saltwell pumping.

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 "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the implementation and monitoring of the U.S.-Japan insurance agreements, focusing on: (1) the views of U.S. insurance companies operating in Japan regarding the agreements' implementation and impact on their ability to compete in the Japanese market; (2) the roles and efforts of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) and the Departments of Commerce, State, and the Treasury in monitoring and enforcing the agreements, and U.S. government views on whether Japan has met its commitments under the agreements; and (3) U.S. insurance industry views on U.S. government monitoring and enforcement efforts."

This report presents several different measures of the distribution of the capital gains tax are presented. These measures examine the absolute and relative distribution across income classes, the effects on the distribution of taxes, and the proportion of the population affected by the tax.

Recent experiments using low power EM-radar like sensors (e.g, GEMs) have demonstrated a new method for measuring vocal fold activity and the onset times of voiced speech, as vocal fold contact begins to take place. Similarly the end time of a voiced speech segment can be measured. Secondly it appears that in most normal uses of American English speech, unvoiced-speech segments directly precede or directly follow voiced-speech segments. For many applications, it is useful to know typical duration times of these unvoiced speech segments. A corpus, assembled earlier of spoken ''Timit'' words, phrases, and sentences and recorded using simultaneously measured acoustic and EM-sensor glottal signals, from 16 male speakers, was used for this study. By inspecting the onset (or end) of unvoiced speech, using the acoustic signal, and the onset (or end) of voiced speech using the EM sensor signal, the average duration times for unvoiced segments preceding onset of vocalization were found to be 300ms, and for following segments, 500ms. An unvoiced speech period is then defined in time, first by using the onset of the EM-sensed glottal signal, as the onset-time marker for the voiced speech segment and end marker for the unvoiced segment. Then, by subtracting 300ms …

The development of a new EUV high NA small-field exposure tool has been proposed for obtaining mask defect printability data in a timeframe several years before beta-tools are available. The imaging system for this new Micro-Exposure Tool (MET), would have a numerical aperture (NA) of about 0.3, similar to the NA for a beta-tool, but substantially larger than the 0.10 NA for the Engineering Test Stand (ETS) and 0.088 NA for the existing 10x Microstepper. This memorandum discusses the development and summarizes the performance of the camera for the MET and includes a listing of the design prescription, detailed analysis of the distortion, and analysis demonstrating the capability to resolution 30 nm features under the conditions of partially coherent illumination.

These studies are part of a series of tests being conducted by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on the drying behavior of spent nuclear fuel elements removed from both the K-West and K-East Basins. This report describes the fuel element, the test methodology, and the testing results.

This report discusses the Energy and Water Development FY2000 appropriations bill, which includes funding for civil projects of the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Reclamation (BuRec), most of the Department of Energy (DOE), and a number of independent agencies.

The mission of Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is to continue the long tradition of outstanding research that has made it a premier national and international multiprogram laboratory. Laboratory activities are planned and conducted with full regard to protecting the public and the environment and complying with appropriate environmental laws and regulations. Both radiological and nonradiological activities are thoroughly monitored to assess their potential impact on the environment.

At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Python has proven to be a convenient language for the development of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) which allow scientists to view, plot, and analyze scientific data. Two such applications are described in this paper. The first, EOSView, is a browser application for an equation of state data library at LLNL. EOSView is used by scientists throughout the laboratory who use simulation codes that access the data library, or who need equation of state data for other purposes. EOSView provides graphical visualization capabilities, as well as the capability to analyze the data in many different ways. The second application, Zimp, is a GUI that allows interactive use of the Stark Line Shape Database. It is used to access and plot data. The quick construction of Zimp from elements of the EOSView code provides a useful lesson in code reuse, and illustrates how the object-oriented nature of Python facilitates this goal. In general, Python has proven to be an appropriate choice of language for applications of this type for several reasons, including the easy access to GUI functionality provided by Tkinter, the ease with which C functions can be called from Python, and the convenient handling …

The authors compare the results of a computer simulated flow field around building 170 (B170) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) with field measurements. In order to aid in the setup of the field experiments, the simulations were performed first. B170 was chosen because of its architectural complexity and because a relatively simple fetch exists upwind (a field lies southwest of the site). Figure 1 shows a computational model of the building which retains the major architectural features of the real building (e.g., courtyard, alcoves, and a multi-level roof). Several important characteristics of the cases presented here are: (1) the flow was assumed neutral and no heat flux was imposed at the ground, representing cloudy or morning conditions, (2) a simple canopy parameterization was used to model the effect of a large row of eucalyptus trees which is located to the northeast of the building, (3) the wind directions studied were 200, 225, 250 degrees measured clockwise from true north (the prevailing winds at LLNL are from the southwest in the summer), (4) the incoming wind profile was modeled as logarithmic with a maximum of about 3 meters per second. In addition, note that the building is rotated counterclockwise by …

CXX is a facility for extending Python using C++. Recently, the authors have substantially revised and improved the way in which you create extension objects and extension modules in C++. The method is now much more natural and has much less overhead, both in the code generated and in the effort needed to create the objects and extensions.

The Protein Crystallography Beamline at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source is a facility that is being used to solve the structure of proteins. The software that is being used to control this beamline uses Java for user interface applications which communicate via CORBA with workstations that control the beamline hardware. We describe the software architecture for the beamline and our experiences after two years of operation.