A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "A company formed by security guards at the Anchorage, Alaska, Federal Office Building (AFOB) competed unsuccessfully for two contracts and later alleged bias and preselection by the General Services Administration (GSA) in the contract award process. However, GAO's review of relevant documentation and discussions with officials of GSA and the company that alleged the irregularities did not disclose any evidence of bias or preselection in GSA's award of these contracts. GSA appears to have inadvertently used an outdated Department of Labor (DOL) wage determination in its most recent contract because of a misunderstanding of the wage determination process and incorrect advice provided by DOL in 1999. On the basis of the substantial amount of information GAO was able to obtain, including documents and oral information from the guards and GSA officials, GAO concludes that GSA could have done more to respond to the guards' concerns and help ensure and document that the contractor was providing for the safety of federal employees and the security of federal facilities in accordance with the contract. Also, GSA could have done more to respond to the guards' repeated charges of …

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: Legality of a business that locates property omitted from the appraisal rolls for a percentage of the amount of tax generated for a local taxing unit (RQ-0218-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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a county development district created under chapter 383 pf the Local Government Code is authorized to levy ad valorem taxes and whether, under chapter 383, a county development district may construct infrastructure for residential subdivision (RQ-0230)

The two-dimensional Steven impact test has been developed to be reproducible and amenable to computer modeling. This test has a hemispherical projectile traveling at tens of m/s impacting a metal cased explosive target. To assist in the understanding of this safety test, two-dimensional shock wave gauge techniques were used to measure the pressures of a few kilobars and times of reactions less than a millisecond. This work is in accord with a long-term goal to develop two-dimensional shock diagnostic techniques that are more than just time of arrival indicators. Experiments were performed where explosives were impacted at levels below shock initiation levels but caused low level reactions. Carbon foil and carbon resistor pressure gauges were used to measure pressures and time of events. The carbon resistor gauges indicate a late time low level reaction at 350 {micro}s after impact of the hemispherical projectile creating 0.5-6 kb peak shocks at the center of PBX 9501 (HMX/Estane/BDNPA-F; 95/2.5/2.5 wt %) explosive discs. The Steven test calculations are based on an ignition and growth criteria and found that the low level reaction occurs at 335 {micro}s, which is in good agreement with the experimental data. Some additional experiments simulating the Steven impact test …

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The purpose of this report is to provide a topical reference on the phenomena and prediction of uranium pyrophoricity for the Hanford Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) Project with specific applications to SNF Project processes and situations. Spent metallic uranium nuclear fuel is currently stored underwater at the K basins in the Hanford 100 area, and planned processing steps include: (1) At the basins, cleaning and placing fuel elements and scrap into stainless steel multi-canister overpacks (MCOs) holding about 6 MT of fuel apiece; (2) At nearby cold vacuum drying (CVD) stations, draining, vacuum drying, and mechanically sealing the MCOs; (3) Shipping the MCOs to the Canister Storage Building (CSB) on the 200 Area plateau; and (4) Welding shut and placing the MCOs for interim (40 year) dry storage in closed CSB storage tubes cooled by natural air circulation through the surrounding vault. Damaged fuel elements have exposed and corroded fuel surfaces, which can exothermically react with water vapor and oxygen during normal process steps and in off-normal situations, A key process safety concern is the rate of reaction of damaged fuel and the potential for self-sustaining or runaway reactions, also known as uranium fires or fuel ignition. Uranium metal and …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report focuses on school and community collaborations for improving student outcomes for at-risk youth. To better provide the support needed for these students to succeed in school and beyond, some schools and school districts have intensified their collaboration with businesses, community agencies, and other neighborhood organizations. These efforts, which go substantially beyond the usual links between schools and other agencies or organizations, go by such names as "extended-service schools," "full- service schools," "community schools," or, more generally, "school-community initiatives." The federal government plays a role in these initiatives because of the funding and support it provides through various programs serving youths who are disadvantaged or at risk of school failure. Schools with a large number of disadvantaged students often struggle to both educate their students and prepare them for further education or a career. The goals of the school-community initiatives GAO reviewed center on helping students achieve in school and readying them for life after graduation. Several officials GAO spoke with said that it is difficult to measure the success of these programs for at-risk youth. Officials cited the lack of funds and the complex …

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In December 1999 and January 2000, a 40-cm-thick spherical shell of sprayable concrete (''gunite'') was applied to the exterior surface of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) target chamber. Glow-discharge mass spectroscopy has been to determine the elemental composition of multiple gunite samples, which were collected at the time of application. These measured compositions are compared to the anticipated composition and both are used for neutron activation calculations. Contact dose rates are reported and implications for doses rates during operation and for the eventual facility decommissioning are discussed.

This paper addresses the need to support a very precise optical instrument while causing essentially no influence to its natural shape. Such influences could come from a number of sources, such as manufacturing tolerances, temperature changes, over-constrained structural members, or ground motion. Kinematic couplings have long been used for purposes of repeatable location and minimal influence to the supported object, however these couplings typically offer very little damping. This paper presents a kinematic coupling that utilizes constrained-layer damping techniques to damp out the first three modes of vibration of a precision optical instrument. Finite element analysis was used to aid in the design and tuning of the dampers for the kinematic coupling. Experimental tests were conducted and confirmed the effectiveness of the dampers. The quality factor (Q), which measure the amplification at resonance, dropped from 33.3 to 5.9 on the first mode, from 156.3 to 7.1 on the second mode, and from 147.1 to 18.5 on the third mode. These dampers help to ensure that the stringent vibration requirements necessary to produce high quality optical images are met.

Report describes status of Rock Mountain elk in the Rattlesnake Hills for the year 2000.

A better understanding of thermal cook-off is important for safe handling and storing explosive devices. A number of safety issues exist about what occurs when a cased explosive thermally cooks off. For example, violence of the events as a function of confinement are important for predictions of collateral damage. This paper demonstrates how adjacent materials can be gauged to measure the resulting pressure wave and how this wave propagates in this adjacent material. The output pulse from the thermal cook-off explosive containing fixture is of obvious interest for assessing many scenarios.

Theories in which neutrino masses are generated by a conventional see-saw mechanism generically yield masses which are O(v{sup 2}) in units where M{sub Pl} = 1, which is naively too small to explain the results from SuperKamiokande. In supersymmetric theories with gravity mediated supersymmetry breaking, the fundamental small parameter is not v/M{sub Pl}, but m{sub I}/M{sub Pl}, where m{sub I} is the scale of supersymmetry breaking in the hidden sector. We note that m{sub I}{sup 3}/M{sub Pl}{sup 2} is only slightly too large to explain SuperKamiokande, and present two models that achieve neutrino masses at this order in m{sub I}, one of which has an additional suppression {lambda}{sub {tau}}{sup 2}, while the other has additional suppression arising from a loop factor. The latter model shares a great deal of phenomenology with a class of models previously explored, including the possibility of viable sneutrino dark matter.

The 106th Congress is considering a general overhaul of derivatives regulation. Pending legislation would codify the unregulated status of certain derivatives, exempt many other currently-regulated contracts from oversight by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and permit the trading of a new kind of contract: a futures contract based on the stock of an individual corporation. Derivatives legislation has been reported out of committee in both House and Senate. This report analyzes this legislation in the 106th Congress, and will be updated as developments warrant.

The A0 photo-injector produces electron bunches of 1--14 nC charge with an energy of 18 MeV. Detailed measurements and optimization of emittance have been carried out for a number of gun and laser operating conditions, beam line optics conditions, and at a number of beam line locations. Results are compared with the predictions of simulations using HOMDYN.

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A generalized version of the Lindemann melting criterion has recently been used to develop a unified thermodynamic description of disorder-induced amorphization and heat-induced melting. This concept of amorphization as a melting process is based on the fact that the melting temperature of a defective crystal driven far from equilibrium will decrease relative to that of its defect-free equilibrium state. The broader view of melting provides a new perspective of damage-accumulation processes such as radiation damage, ion implantation, ion beam mixing, plastic deformation, and fracture. For example, within this conceptual framework, disorder-induced amorphization is simply polymorphous melting of a critically disordered crystal at temperatures below the glass transition temperature. In the present communication, we discuss the application of the concept to two specific cases: amorphous phase formation during ion implantation and solute segregation-induced intergranular fracture.

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From 1992 to 1995 the CDF experiment has taken 110 pb{sup {minus}1} of p{anti p} collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 1.8 TeV. These data gave rise to a variety of important B physics measurements. Most importantly B mass, lifetime and mixing measurements, the observation of the last missing meson, the B{sub c}, and a measurement of the CP violation parameter sin 2{beta}. The highlights of those results are described and a perspective for the upcoming Run II period is given.

The total costs and impacts of expanding energy use in China will depend, in part, on a number of important factors, an understanding of which is vital for China's policy-makers. These issues include the additional environmental and public health impacts associated with energy use, the economic costs of infrastructure expansion to meet growing energy needs, and the potential role that renewable energy technologies could play if pushed hard in China's energy future. This short report summarizes major trends and issues in each of these three areas.

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