A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed: (1) the Navy's 1997 antisubmarine warfare (ASW) assessment; (2) the role and funding influence of the Navy's recently established Antisubmarine Warfare Requirements Division; and (3) whether the assessment is supported by rigorous analysis of ASW shortfalls and capabilities and establishes priorities among ASW programs, as directed by congressional conferees on the 1997 National Defense Authorization Act."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) decision to allow the use of personal computer-based aviation training devices (PCATD), focusing on: (1) the process and information FAA used in deciding to approve the use of personal computer devices for 10 hours of instrument training; and (2) what is known about the training effectiveness of these devices and their long-term impact on a pilot's ability to fly safely."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Customs Service's efforts to curtail the exportation of stolen vehicles from the United States, focusing on: (1) applicable regulations for exporting used, self-propelled vehicles from the United States; (2) Customs policies and procedures for controlling the export of these vehicles; (3) methods used to illegally export these vehicles; and (4) improvements in operations being considered by Customs."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the: (1) number and dollar value of business assistance loans approved by the Department of Agriculture's Rural Business-Cooperative Service (RBS); (2) federal government's costs associated with the agency's loans; and (3) financial condition of the agency's loan portfolio, including the losses incurred."

Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the Health Care Financing Administration's (HCFA) new rule on Medicaid Program's state allotments for payment of Medicare Part B premiums for qualifying individuals for fiscal year (FY) 1999. GAO noted that: (1) the Social Security Act provides for the Medicaid program to pay all or part of the Medicare Part B premiums for beneficiaries belonging to two specific eligibility groups of low-income Medicare beneficiaries, referred to as qualifying individuals; (2) this notice announces the federal FY 1999 allotments that are available for state agencies to pay Medicare Part B premiums for these two eligibility groups; and (3) HCFA complied with the applicable requirements in promulgating the rule."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the year 2000 problem and its impact on the Global Positioning System (GPS)."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the Department of Education's efforts to ensure that its computer systems supporting critical student financial aid activities will be able to process information reliably through the turn of the century, focusing on: (1) the progress Education has made to date in making its information systems year 2000 compliant; and (2) the future tasks facing the department."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the changes in airfares and service quality since deregulation, focusing on the: (1) changes in airfares and service quality at airports serving Charleston and other communities in South Carolina; and (2) differences in airfares charged to business and leisure passengers travelling to and from Charleston."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of the Treasury's Office of Technical Assistance (OTA) foreign aid program, focusing on: (1) the types of technical assistance OTA advisors have provided to Russia and Romania; (2) oversight by OTA of advisors' activities; (3) advisor qualifications, program cost, fund transfers between the Agency for International Development and the Treasury; and (4) the location of the Treasury's senior advisors to its program."

Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) in conjunction with high order upwind finite difference methods has been used effectively on a variety of problems. In this paper we discuss an implementation of an AMR finite difference method that solves the equations of gas dynamics with two material species in three dimensions. An equation for the evolution of volume fractions augments the gas dynamics system. The material interface is preserved and tracked from the volume fractions using a piecewise linear reconstruction technique. 14 refs., 4 figs.

The following messages were taken from Inter-office Electronic Mail and provide perspective on the DOE FAST site survey. The key issue is that WSRC analytical groups have been unable to state when processes will be operated and what the exact requirements will be for characterizing materials from those processes when they do start. What results is a uncertainty at the site in the actual analytical work load. Although Donnan refers to the original survey data, one update was submitted to the needs requirements in the fall of 90. However that update was not as complete as the one given below. I have identified some of the people using brackets.

The integrity of the SRS reactor tanks is a key factor affecting their suitability for continued service since, unlike the external piping system and components, the tanks are virtually irreplaceable. Cracking in various areas of the process water piping systems has occurred beginning in about 1960 as a result of several degradation mechanisms, chiefly intergranular stress corrosion cracking (IGSCC) and chloride-induced transgranular cracking. The primary objective of this inspection was to determine if the accessible welds and selected portions of base metal in the L Reactor tank wall contain any indications of IGSCC. This inspection included areas in and beyond the weld HAZ, extending out as far as two to three inches from the centerline of the welds, plus selected areas of base metal at the intersection of the main tank vertical and mid-girth welds. No evidence of such degradation was found in any of the areas examined. Further, additional inspections were conducted of areas that had been damaged and repaired during original fabrication, and on a sample of areas containing linear indications observed during the 1986 visual inspection of the tank. No evidence of IGSCC or other service induced degradation was detected in these areas, either. The inspection was …

Models of plasma injection (creation) and charged/neutral atomic physics which are suitable for incorporation into particle simulation codes are described. Both planar and distributed source injection models are considered. Results obtained from planar injection into a collisionless plasma-sheath region are presented. The atomic physics package simulates the charge exchange and impact ionization interactions which occur between charged particles and neutral atoms in a partially-ionized plasma. These models are applicable to a wide range of problems, from plasma processing of materials to transport in the edge region of a tokamak plasma. 18 refs., 6 figs.

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO: (1) provided a listing of its open recommendations to help solve problems in areas it has designated as high risk; (2) provided references to the source and date of the recommendations and the status of agency actions to implement GAO's suggestions; and (3) identified any legislative recommendations that could further assist in fully addressing these high-risk problems."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the total expenditures for the investigations conducted by independent counsels Robert B. Fiske, Jr., and Kenneth W. Starr."

None

The PEP-II High Energy Ring (HER), a 9 GeV electron storage ring, has been in commissioning since spring 1997. Initial beam commissioning activities focused on systems checkout and commissioning and on determining the behavior of the machine systems at high beam currents. This phase culminated with the accumulation of 0.75 A of stored beam-sufficient to achieve design luminosity--in January 1998 after 3.5 months of beam time. Collisions with the 3 GeV positron beam of the Low Energy Ring (LER) were achieved in Summer of 1998. At high beam currents, collective instabilities have been seen. Since then, commissioning activities for the HER have shifted in focus towards characterization of the machine and a rigorous program to understand the machine and the beam dynamics is presently underway.

The scope of this document includes radiation safety considerations used in the design of facilities for the Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Project (YMP). The purpose of the Repository Radiation Shielding Design Guide is to document the approach used in the radiological design of the Mined Geologic Disposal System (MGDS) surface and subsurface facilities for the protection of workers, the public, and the environment. This document is intended to ensure that a common methodology is used by all groups that may be involved with Radiological Design. This document will also assist in ensuring the long term survivability of the information basis used for radiological safety design and will assist in satisfying the documentation requirements of the licensing body, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). This design guide provides referenceable information that is current and maintained under the YMP Quality Assurance (QA) Program. Furthermore, this approach is consistent with maintaining continuity in spite of a changing design environment. This approach also serves to ensure common inter-disciplinary interpretation and application of data.

The goal is, using a very large passive array, to determine the performance limits of a detector. The signal of interest is narrowband with a Gaussian envelope, and the contaminating noise is multivariate Class-A. Two different multivariate models for the Class A family are presented. One of the models is appropriate for array processing applications. The data is spatially dependent and temporally independent. It is shown, in the spatially independent case, that the Chernoff approximation does closely approximate the performance of the optimal detector. It is shown the approximation improves as the number of samples increases. Unfortunately, it is also shown that the Chernoff approximation requires numerical evaluation of a M-dimensional integral. For the application here, M may be as large as 150, ruling out this approach. Two alternative approaches are examined. First, approximating the Class A model by a Gaussian model is shown to result in a poor approximation. Second, the exact likelihood ratio is approximated by a piece-wise function. While the approximation can be done with very good accuracy, the bound must be evaluated numerically. 10 refs., 11 figs.

The progress made during the current grant period (1 January 1988--1 April 1990) in three different areas of research is summarized. The research areas are: (1) oxidatively-induced double carbonylation reactions to form {alpha}-ketoacyl complexes and studies of the reactivity of the resulting compounds, (2) mechanistic studies of the carbonylation of nitroaromatics to form isocyanates, carbamates, and ureas, and (3) studies of the formation and reactivity of unusual metallacycles and alkylidene ligands supported on binuclear iron carbonyl fragments. 18 refs., 5 figs., 1 tab.

Applying the tools of algorithmic information theory, we compare several candidates for an asymptotically machine-independent. absolute measure of the informational or cognitive'' distance between discrete objects x and y. The maximum of the conditional Kolmogorov complexities max[l brace]K(y[vert bar]z) K(m[vert bar]y)[r brace], is shown to be optimal, in the sense of being minimal within an additive constant among semicomputable, symmetric, positive semidefinite functions of z and y satisfying a reasonable normalization condition and obeying the triangle intequality. The optimal metric, in turn, differs by at most an additive logarithmic term from the size of the smallest program for a universal reversible computer to transform x into y. This program functions in a 'catalytic'' capacity, being retained in the computer before, during, and after the computation. Similarly, the sum of the conditional complexities. K(y[vert bar]x) + K(x[vert bar]y), is shown to be equal within a logarithmic term to the minimal amount Of information flowing out and in during a reversible computation in which the program is not retained. Finally. using the physical theory of reversible computation, it is shown that the simple difference K(x) - K(y) is an appropriate (ie universal, antisymmetric, and transitive) measure of the amount of thermodynamic work …

This report the following: How to use the ace program ; Introduction to the ace program; Online command; Define a macro file; Macro commands; Counters and MCA; Counters usage; Counters database; Feedback Counter Database; MCA functions and macro command; X window Interclient Communication; and How to get around in UNIX

This document summarizes progress made on the research of high beta and second region transport and stability. In the area second stability region studies we report on an investigation of the possibility of second region access in the center of TFTR supershots.'' The instabilities found may coincide with experimental observation. Significant progress has been made on the resistive stability properties of high beta poloidal supershot'' discharges. For these studies profiles were taken from the TRANSP transport analysis code which analyzes experimental data. Invoking flattening of the pressure profile on mode rational surfaces causes tearing modes to persist into the experimental range of interest. Further, the experimental observation of the modes seems to be consistent with the predictions of the MHD model. In addition, code development in several areas has proceeded.

MARKAL-MACRO is an experiment in model linkage. This new tool is intended as an improvement over existing methods for energy policy assessment. It is designed specifically for estimating the costs and analyzing alternative technologies and policies proposed for reducing environmental risks such as global climate change or regional air pollution. The greenhouse gas debate illustrates the usefulness of linked energy-economy models. A central issue is the coupling between economic growth, the level of energy demands, and the evolution of an energy system to supply these demands. The debate is often connected with alternative modeling approaches. The competing philosophies may be labeled [open quotes]top-down macroeconomic[close quotes] and [open quotes]bottom-up engineering[close quotes] perspectives. Do macroeconomic models, with their descriptions of effects within the total economy but few technical details on the energy system, tend to overestimate future energy demands Conversely, do engineering models, ignoring feedbacks to the general economy and non-technical market factors but containing rich descriptions of technology options, tend to take too optimistic a view of conservation and the use of renewable energy sources Or is the principal difference that the engineering models ignore new sources of energy demands, and that the macroeconomic models ignore saturation effects for old categories …