Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Our June 2000 report Securities Arbitration: Actions Needed to Address Problem of Unpaid Awards revealed that, although investors had won a majority of awards against brokers, a high proportion of those awards had not been paid. Nearly all of the unpaid awards involved cases decided in the National Association of Securities Dealer's (NASD) arbitration program and most involved brokers that had left the securities industry. A year later we reported on limited data suggesting that the rate of unpaid awards had declined. However, we noted that given the short time period that the data covered, regulators needed to continue monitoring the payment of the awards to determine whether additional steps need to be taken. Arbitration attorneys and claimants have also expressed concern about the timeliness of NASD's updating of arbitrator disclosure information, which can be used by the parties in arbitration to judge the competence and objectivity of arbitrators, and with NASD's ability to remove arbitrators from cases if conflicts arise. In addition, arbitration attorneys also expressed concern about the use of motions to dismiss and motions for summary judgment to terminate NASD-administered arbitration cases. This report responds …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Due to the Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) increasing use of purchase cards and the inherent risk associated with their use, Congress asked GAO to audit the purchase card program concentrating on assessing internal controls and determining whether purchases being made are a valid use of government funds."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Establishing a 34-nation Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement has been under negotiation since 1998. This agreement would eliminate tariffs and create common trade and investment rules for these nations. Most recently, the United States, along with Brazil, assumed the leadership of the negotiations. GAO was asked to analyze (1) the challenges for the current negotiating phase, which will include a ministerial meeting in Miami, Florida, in November 2003; and (2) the U.S.'s readiness to serve as co-chair of the negotiations and host of the November 2003 ministerial."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Over the next 5 years, DOD's overall investments are expected to average $150 billion a year to modernize and transition our forces. In addition, DOD must modernize its forces amid competing demands for federal funds, such as health care and homeland security. Therefore, it is critical that DOD manage its acquisitions in the most cost efficient and effective manner possible. DOD's newest acquisition policy emphasizes the use of evolutionary, knowledge-based concepts that have proven to produce more effective and efficient weapon systems outcomes. However, most DOD programs currently do not employ these practices and, as a result, experience cost increases, schedule delays, and poor product quality and reliability. This testimony compares the best practices for developing new products with the experiences of the F/A-22 program."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Paperwork Reduction Act requires federal agencies to minimize the paperwork burden they impose on the public. The act also requires agencies to obtain approval from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) before collecting covered information. GAO examined changes during the past fiscal year in federal agencies' paperwork burden estimates and their causes, focusing on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). GAO also examined changes in the number of violations of the Paperwork Reduction Act."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Taxpayers rated the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) ability to provide clear and easy-to-use forms and instructions among the lowest of 27 indicators of service in 1993. Due to continuing concerns about unclear forms and instructions, GAO was asked to determine (1) whether and how often IRS tests the clarity of new and revised individual income tax forms and instructions; (2) the benefits, if any, of testing forms and instructions for clarity prior to their use; and (3) whether any factors limit IRS's ability to do more tests and if so, how they can be addressed."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Successful strategic human capital management requires the integration of human capital approaches with strategies for accomplishing organizational missions and program goals. Such integration allows the agency to ensure that its core processes efficiently and effectively support mission-related outcomes. Based on the recommendations of various human capital experts, GAO identified six executive branch agencies that had taken key actions to integrate their human capital approaches with their strategic planning and decision making. The agencies were the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the General Services Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the U.S. Geological Survey. These key actions may prove helpful to other agencies as they seek to ensure that their human capital approaches are aligned with their program goals."

This paper discusses issues with the limited precision of hardware-based volume visualization. We will describe the compositing OVER operator and how fixed-point arithmetic affects it. We propose two techniques to improve the precision of fixed-point compositing and the accuracy of hardware-based volume visualization. The first technique is to perform dithering of color and alpha values. The second technique we call exponent-factoring, and captures significantly more numeric resolution than dithering, but can only produce monochromatic images.

The DOE-funded accelerator BNCT program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has resulted in the only operating accelerator-based epithermal neutron beam facility capable of generating significant dose rates in the world. With five separate beamlines and two different epithermal neutron beam assemblies installed, we are currently capable of treating patients with rheumatoid arthritis in less than 15 minutes (knee joints) or 4 minutes (finger joints) or irradiating patients with shallow brain tumors to a healthy tissue dose of 12.6 Gy in 3.6 hours. The accelerator, designed by Newton scientific Incorporated, is located in dedicated laboratory space that MIT renovated specifically for this project. The Laboratory for Accelerator Beam Applications consists of an accelerator room, a control room, a shielded radiation vault, and additional laboratory space nearby. In addition to the design, construction and characterization of the tandem electrostatic accelerator, this program also resulted in other significant accomplishments. Assemblies for generating epithermal neutron beams were designed, constructed and experimentally evaluated using mixed-field dosimetry techniques. Strategies for target construction and target cooling were implemented and tested. We demonstrated that the method of submerged jet impingement using water as the coolant is capable of handling power densities of up to 6 x 10(sup …

Final technical report for the KSU reactor sharing program indicating institutions and participants

Weekly student newspaper from San Antonio College in San Antonio, Texas that includes campus news along with advertising.

Student newspaper of Harper Independent School District in Harper, Texas that includes school news and information along with advertising.

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

This is the seventh year of a multi-year project, monitoring the outmigration and survival of juvenile salmonids in the lower Umatilla River. This project both supplements and complements ongoing and completed work within the Umatilla River basin. Knowledge gained on juvenile outmigration and survival assists researchers and managers in adapting hatchery practices, flow enhancement strategies, canal and fish ladder operations, and supplementation and enhancement efforts of natural and restored fish populations. Findings from this study also measure the success of upriver habitat improvement projects and provide an overall evaluation of the Umatilla River fisheries restoration program. The general objectives for 2001 were to: (1) Estimate migrant abundance and survival and determine migration parameters of PIT-tagged hatchery and natural juvenile salmonids; (2) Monitor natural production and estimate overall abundance of pacific lamprey, chinook and coho salmon and summer steelhead; (3) Assess the condition and health of migrants and determine length-frequency distributions through time; (4) Investigate the effects of canal and fishway operations and environmental conditions on fish migration and survival; (5) Investigate and implement improved tag monitoring capabilities; and (6) Participate in planning and coordination activities within the basin and disseminate results. More specifically, 2001 objectives included the ongoing evaluation of …

Both the longitudinal and transverse beam impedance measurements for the Tevatron C0 and F0 lambertsons are presented. The C0 lambertsons were designed for circulating beam to travel through the 1 inch high by 6 inch wide field region. In the F0 lambertsons, circulating beam passes through the 2.5 inch high by 4 in ch wide field free region. The more recently designed F0 lambertsons have significantly less impedance than the older C0 lambertsons. Transverse impedance scales as one over the diameter of the aperture cubed. The three C0 style lambertsons were recently removed from the Tevatron. Four of the F0 lambertsons remain. Nine of the F0 style lambertsons are in the Main Injector and three more are required for Numi.

The Dense Optical Interface Module (DOIM) is a byte-wide optical link developed for the Run II upgrade of the CDF silicon tracking system [1]. The module consists of a transmitter with a laser-diode array for conversion of digitized detector signals to light outputs, a 22 m optical fiber ribbon cable for light transmission, and a receiver converting the light pulses back to electrical signals. We report on the design feature, characteristics, and radiation tolerance.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "As one response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Department of Justice (DOJ) initiated a project to interview aliens whose characteristics were similar to those responsible for the attacks. The purpose was to determine what knowledge the aliens might have of terrorists and terrorist activities. GAO was asked to (1) determine the criteria DOJ used in compiling the list of aliens to be questioned, (2) whether law enforcement complied with DOJ guidance for the project, (3) the interview project's status, and (4) what information resulted from it."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Critical choices on whether new technology will be covered for Medicare's 40 million beneficiaries are made nationally by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)--the agency that administers Medicare--or locally by contractors that process and pay claims. GAO was asked to review the degree to which new procedures and devices are incorporated into Medicare, the effect of Medicare coverage policy-making processes on beneficiaries, and to what extent CMS has addressed concerns about its national coverage process."

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.

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

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Multiple access (MA) in UWB communication is an area of active research. To date several time-division or code-division pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) or pulse position modulation (PPM) schemes have been proposed to separate multiple users in UWB communications. Conventionally, all users employ the same pulse shape and modulate the transmit pulse based on changing amplitude or position. One concern with using the same pulse for all channels is that the multiple access interference (MAI) increases as the number of users increase. This is due to increased cross-correlation between similar pulses of the different channels, raising thus the noise floor in such systems. In this paper we introduce and study the performance of a new MA scheme in the context of multiple orthogonal transmitted-reference (T-R) short duration (nsec) chirp pulses in the presence of multipath and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN).

This report provides background on payment limits related to farm commodity programs and discusses relevant legislation. The policy issue is mostly about farm size rather than the financial need of recipients, although the two may be related. Limits on commodity program payments have been imposed since 1970. The 2002 farm bill retains the former limits, adds limits for the new counter-cyclical program, and incorporates new commodities.