A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "When shipments of dangerous goods (hazardous chemical substances that could endanger public safety or the environment, such as flammable liquids or radioactive materials) are not properly packaged and labeled for air transport, they can pose significant threats because there is little room for error when something goes wrong in flight. To better understand the risks posed by improper ("undeclared") air shipments, we assessed what is known about their nature and frequency, what key mechanisms are in place to prevent their occurrence, and what the Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Postal Service do to enforce federal regulations for shipping dangerous goods by air."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Rising prescription drug costs have contributed to rising employer health plans premiums in recent years. Most federal employees, retirees, and their dependents participating in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), administered by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), are enrolled in plans that contract with pharmacy benefit managers (PBM) to administer their prescription drug benefits. GAO was asked to examine how pharmacy benefits managers participating in the federal program affect health plans, enrollees, and pharmacies. GAO examined the use of PBMs by three plans representing about 55 percent of the 8.3 million people covered by FEHBP plans. For example, GAO surveyed 36 retail pharmacies on prices that a customer without third party coverage would pay for 18 high-volume or high-expenditure drugs and compared these prices to prices paid by the plans and PBMs."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In 2001, Medicare's outpatient expenditures for blood clotting factor used to treat the estimated 1,100 beneficiaries with hemophilia totaled about $105 million, or more than 2 percent of total Medicare spending on outpatient drugs. Earlier work by GAO indicated that Medicare's payment for certain outpatient drugs is substantially higher than providers' acquisition costs. Concerns have been raised about Medicare's payment for blood clotting factor. GAO was asked to compare provider costs of purchasing clotting factor with Medicare's payment for it and to identify costs to providers associated with delivering clotting factor."

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, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether the wealth-reduction provisions of chapter 41 of the Texas Education Code apply to that portion of local property tax revenues attributable to a school district’s tax rate in excess of $1.50 per $100 valuation (RQ-0562-JC)

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, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether the divestiture in section 12.152(b) of the Utilities Code applies to an interest under section 12.053(b)(1)(B) (RQ-0575-JC)

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is the lead federal agency in the partnership between the U.S. automobile industry and the federal government to develop fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) as part of the FreedomCAR Partnership. DOE's FreedomCAR and Vehicle Technologies Office sponsors the Advanced Technology Development (ATD) Program--involving 5 of its national laboratories--to assist the industrial developers of high-power lithium-ion batteries to overcome the barriers of cost, calendar life, and abuse tolerance so that this technology can be rendered practical for use in HEV and FCEV applications under the FreedomCAR Partnership. In the area of cost reduction, Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) is working to identify and develop advanced anode, cathode, and electrolyte components that can significantly reduce the cost of the cell chemistry, while simultaneously extending the calendar life and enhancing the inherent safety of this electrochemical system. The material cost savings are quantified and tracked via the use of a cell and battery design model that establishes the quantity of each material needed in the production of batteries that are designed to meet the requirements of a minimum-power-assist HEV battery or a maximum-power-assist HEV battery for the FreedomCAR Partnership. Similar models will be …

Colloid-facilitated migration of plutonium in fractured rock has been implicated in both field and laboratory studies. Other reactive radionuclides may also experience enhanced mobility due to groundwater colloids. Model prediction of this process is necessary for assessment of contaminant boundaries in systems for which radionuclides are already in the groundwater and for performance assessment of potential repositories for radioactive waste. Therefore, a reactive transport model is developed and parameterized using results from controlled laboratory fracture column experiments. Silica, montmorillonite and clinoptilolite colloids are used in the experiments along with plutonium and Tritium. The goal of the numerical model is to identify and parameterize the physical and chemical processes that affect the colloid-facilitated transport of plutonium in the fractures. The parameters used in this model are similar in form to those that might be used in a field-scale transport model.

Two types of fluids are encountered in the Onikobe geothermal reservoir, one is neutral and the other is acidic (pH=3). It is hypothesized that acidic fluid might be upwelling along a fault zone and that an impermeable barrier might be present between the acidic and neutral fluid zones. We carried out reactive geothermal transport simulations using TOUGHREACT (Xu and Pruess, 1998 and 2001) to test such a conceptual model. One-dimensional models were used to study the geochemical behavior due to mixing of the two fluids. Mn-rich smectite precipitated near the mixing front and is likely to form an impermeable barrier between regions with acidic and neutral fluids.

Task 7 was completed by reaching Milestone 7: Test free piston cryogenic pump (FPCP) in Integrated LNG System. Task 4: Alternative Pump Design was also completed. The type of performance of the prototype LNG system is consistent with requirements of fuel systems for heavy vehicles; however, the maximum flow capacity of the prototype LNG system is significantly less than the total flow requirement. The flow capacity of the prototype LNG system is determined by a cavitation limit for the FPCP.

None

The automated production of maps of human settlement from recent satellite images is essential to studies of urbanization, population movement, and the like. The spectral and spatial resolution of such imagery is often high enough to successfully apply computer vision techniques. However, vast amounts of data have to be processed quickly. In this paper, we propose an approach that processes the data in several different stages. At each stage, using features appropriate to that stage, we identify the portion of the data likely to contain information relevant to the identification of human settlements. This data is used as input to the next stage of processing. Since the size of the data has reduced, we can now use more complex features in this next stage. These features can be more representative of human settlements, and also more time consuming to extract from the image data. Such a hierarchical approach enables us to process large amounts of data in a reasonable time, while maintaining the accuracy of human settlement identification. We illustrate our multi-stage approach using IKONOS 4-band and panchromatic images, and compare it with the straight-forward processing of the entire image.

None

None

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.

Region of interest (ROI) quantitation is an important task in emission tomography (e.g., positron emission tomography and single photon emission computed tomography). It is essential for exploring clinical factors such as tumor activity, growth rate, and the efficacy of therapeutic interventions. Bayesian methods based on the maximum a posteriori principle (or called penalized maximum likelihood methods) have been developed for emission image reconstructions to deal with the low signal to noise ratio of the emission data. Similar to the filter cut-off frequency in the filtered backprojection method, the smoothing parameter of the image prior in Bayesian reconstruction controls the resolution and noise trade-off and hence affects ROI quantitation. In this paper we present an approach for choosing the optimum smoothing parameter in Bayesian reconstruction for ROI quantitation. Bayesian reconstructions are difficult to analyze because the resolution and noise properties are nonlinear and object-dependent. Building on the recent progress on deriving the approximate expressions for the local impulse response function and the covariance matrix, we derived simplied theoretical expressions for the bias, the variance, and the ensemble mean squared error (EMSE) of the ROI quantitation. One problem in evaluating ROI quantitation is that the truth is often required for calculating the …

This report discusses the budget for fiscal year 2003. It debates issues such as budget action, receipts surpluses or deficits, and the economy.

This report presents basic background information on the collapse of the Enron Corporation, identifying public policy issues in financial market oversight. This report briefly summarizes some federal laws carrying criminal penalties which may be implicated in the events surrounding the collapse of the Enron Corp. This report compares the auditing and accounting reform measures passed by the House (H.R. 3763) and reported by the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. This report compares the major provisions of three auditor and accounting reform proposals: H.R. 3763, S. 2673, and a rule proposed on June 20, 2002, by the SEC that would create a new auditor oversight board by using the SEC’s existing authority to regulate corporate accounting. The report focuses on Section 404(a) of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), the federal statute that regulates employer-sponsored pension plans. Section 404(a) is considered the “touchstone for understanding the scope and object of an ERISA fiduciary’s duties.”

Congressional Research Service (CRS) report entailing information about reauthorization and appropriations of the Sade and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act. Topics include, state grants, national programs, appropriations and funding history, the Gun Free School Act, etc..

None

None

None

There is a lack of consensus regarding the best method of balancing scientific publishing and national security. The current federal policy, as described in National Security Decision Directive 189, is that fundamental research should remain unrestricted and that in the rare case where it is necessary to restrict such information, classification is the appropriate vehicle to do so. Other mechanisms restrict international information flow, where Export Administration Regulations (EAR) and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) control export of items and technical information on specific lists. Both EAR and ITAR contain a fundamental research exclusion, but this exclusion is lost if prepublication review of research results for sensitive information occurs.

None

This final report covers results of research initially focused on particle transport and then extended to study of measurement scale and scaling. Experimental, numerical, and theoretical findings were published in the areas of hydraulics in heterogeneous media, particle-chemical-microbial transport in heterogeneous media, sampling design, stochastics and wellhead protection. This work has resulted in 17 journal publications, a number of conference presentations, two Ph.D. dissertations, two Master's theses, and two manuscripts upon which undergraduate students have been co-authors.