A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Because of internal control weaknesses, the Department of Education's student financial assistance programs are at high risk for fraud or erroneous payments. GAO discovered fraud in the grant and loan areas and pervasive control breakdowns and improper payments in other areas. Controls over grant and loan disbursements lacked a key edit check or follow-up process that would identify schools improperly disbursing Pell Grants. Significant internal control weaknesses over Education's third party drafts also increased the department's vulnerability. GAO found that individual Education employees could control the entire payment process for third party drafts. Education employees also circumvented a key computerized control designed to prevent duplicate payments. Education eliminated third party drafts in May 2001. Inconsistent and inadequate authorization and review processes for purchase cards, combined with a lack of monitoring, meant that improper purchases were unlikely to be detected. Inadequate control over these expenditures, combined with the inherent risk of fraud and abuse associated with purchase cards, led to fraudulent, improper, and questionable purchases totaling $686,000. Poor internal controls over computers acquired with purchase cards and third party drafts led to 241 missing personal computers and …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Federal, state, and local governments share responsibility in preparing for catastrophic terrorist attacks. Because the national security threat is diffuse and the challenge is intergovernmental, national policymakers need a firm understanding of the interests, capacity, and challenges when formulating antiterrorism strategies. Key aspects of this strategy should include a definition and clarification of the appropriate roles and responsibilities of federal, state, and local entities. GAO has found fragmentation and overlap among federal assistance programs. More than 40 federal entities have roles in combating terrorism, and past federal efforts have resulted in a lack of accountability, a lack of cohesive effort, and program duplication. This situation has led to confusion, making it difficult to identify available federal preparedness resources and effectively partner with the federal government. Goals and performance measures should be established to guide the nation's preparedness efforts. For the nation's preparedness programs, however, outcomes have yet to be defined in terms of domestic preparedness. Given the recent and proposed increases in preparedness funding, real and meaningful improvements in preparedness and establishing clear goals and performance measures are critical to ensuring a successful and a fiscally responsible effort. …

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

This report outlines several ways in which dropout rates are measured and reported.

The purpose of this report is to provide detailed information on each of the programs administered by the Corporation. This includes a description of the services provided, individual eligibility requirements, and the FY2002 funding level.

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

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

Weekly newspaper from Comanche, 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.

Charge-coupled devices (CCD's) have been fabricated on high-resistivity silicon. The resistivity, on the order of 10,000 {Omega}-cm, allows for depletion depths of several hundred microns. Fully-depleted, back-illuminated operation is achieved by the application of a bias voltage to a ohmic contact on the wafer back side consisting of a thin in-situ doped polycrystalline silicon layer capped by indium tin oxide and silicon dioxide. This thin contact allows for good short wavelength response, while the relatively large depleted thickness results in good near-infrared response.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Environmental Management (EM) Office of Nuclear Material & Spent Fuel, EM-21, tasked the CSSG to perform a scoping study to determine the feasibility of increasing the fissile mass loading limits for specified TRUPACT-II and HalfPACT packages and containers. The results of the scoping study may provide insights and technical guidance for establishing fissile mass loading limits at waste generator sites and at the waste repository. The goal is to reduce costs of transporting fissile material to the WIPP from EM's various closure sites. This report documents the results of the scoping study and demonstrates that it is feasible to significantly increase the fissile mass loading limits in the TRUPACT-II and HalfPACT packages and containers. Depending upon the particular payload containers used, the number of shipments to WIPP could be reduced by at least a factor of 2 and as much as a factor of 16 and the number of total payload containers required ''down-hole'' at WIPP could be reduced by at least a factor of 2 and as much as about 6. These cost savings result simply from applying a more realistic criticality analysis model rather than the very conservative, hypothetical, bounding analysis used …

This report provides the results of experimental demonstrations related to processing of a legacy solution containing americium and curium through the High Level Waste (HLW) system. The testing included eight experiments covering the baseline, mitigation, and enhanced nitrate processing studies. In general, each experiment studied the mixtures generated over a period of time to emulate the lifecycle of actual sludge in the High Level Waste system. While the data in previous reports remain valid, this report supercedes all the previous reports and provides a collective overview of the work.

Consistent with the intent of this International Atomic Energy Agency technical meeting, decommissioning operating experience and contributions to the preparation for the Coordinated Research Project from Experimental Breeder Reactor-II activities will be discussed. This paper will review aspects of the decommissioning activities of the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II, make recommendations for future decommissioning activities and reactor system designs and discuss relevant areas of potential research and development. The Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II) was designed as a 62.5 MWt, metal fueled, pool reactor with a conventional 19 MWe power plant. The productive life of the EBR-II began with first operations in 1964. Demonstration of the fast reactor fuel cycle, serving as an irradiation facility, demonstration of fast reactor passive safety and lastly, was well on its way to close the fast breeder fuel cycle for the second time when the Integral Fast Reactor program was prematurely ended in October 1994 with the shutdown of the EBR-II. The shutdown of the EBR-II was dictated without an associated planning phase that would have provided a smooth transition to shutdown. Argonne National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy arrived at a logical plan and sequence for closure activities. The decommissioning activities as described herein …

This paper provides a justification for prominent inclusion of currently available gaseous-fueled vehicles (i.e., vehicles powered by propane, sometimes called liquefied petroleum gas [LPG], or natural gas--chiefly, methane--stored onboard the vehicle in gaseous or liquid state but combusted as a gas) in the mix of strategies to (a) reduce public exposure to toxic and fine particulate emissions in the urbanized areas of the developing world and (b) achieve local and regional improvements in ozone air quality. It also presents estimates of associated emission reduction credits into the future. Important considerations discussed are the location of fine particle and toxic emissions in congested urban areas, and the location and timing of ozone precursor emissions, with emphasis on how gaseous-fueled vehicles' role in the relationship among and magnitude of these variables differs from that of their conventionally-fueled counterparts. Efforts to enhance the measurement and quantification of gaseous-fuel benefits are also described.

We describe a framework for direct volume rendering of adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) data that operates directly on the hierarchical grid structure, without the need to resample data onto a single, uniform rectilinear grid. The framework can be used for a range of renderers optimized for particular hardware architectures: a hardware-assisted renderer for single-processor graphics workstations, and a massively parallel software-only renderer for supercomputers. It is also possible to use the framework for distributed rendering servers. By exploiting the multiresolution structure of AMR data, the hardware-assisted renderers can render large AMR data sets at interactive rates, even if the data is stored remotely.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) has experienced significant increases in the prices it pays for consumable spare parts, which are "consumed" when used or discarded when worn out because they cannot be cost effectively repaired. The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) manages four million consumable spare parts or 93 percent of all consumable spare parts used by the military services. DOD is required to perform price trend analyses on some categories of commercial spare parts, address unreasonable price escalation, and report the results to Congress for three consecutive years beginning in April 2000. DLA has completed two price trend analyses for DOD. In addition to the price trend analyses, DLA also did a procurement management review in fiscal year 2000 to assess the overall risk of spare parts overpricing. The agency also has three information technology initiatives underway to determine price reasonableness for DLA customers and buyers. These efforts are in various stages of completion, and it is too early to assess their results."

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

Weekly newspaper from Stamford, 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.

Video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC 5 television station in Fort Worth, Texas, covering a news story.

Funeral program for Vernon "Bud" Shannon, born September 9, 1952 and died March 22, 2002. The funeral was held Thursday, March 28, 2002 at St. Paul United Methodist Church, officiated by Rev. Terrence K. Hayes. Funeral arrangements were made through Lewis Funeral Home and he was buried in Meadowlawn Memorial Park in San Antonio, Texas.

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

The high frequency behavior of the bulk modulus of fluid-saturated rock can be obtained from a double-porosity constitutive model, which is a direct conceptual extension of Biot's (1941) constitutive equations and which provides additional stiffening due to unrelaxed induced pore pressures in the soft porosity phase. Modeling the stiffening of the shear modulus at high frequency requires an effective medium average over the unequal induced pore pressures in cracks of different orientations. The implicit assumptions are that pore fluid equilibration does not occur between cracks of different orientations and between cracks and porous matrix. The correspondence between the constitutive equations of Berryman and Wang (1995) and Mavko and Jizba (1991) is explicitly noted.