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: Refund of taxes on travel trailers (RQ-0148-GA).

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 a standard felony judgement from should contain the name and address of a crime victim (RQ-0167-GA)

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 article XVI, section 67(a)(2) of the Texas Constitution would preclude retired City of Houston employees from receiving benefits from both the existing pension system and a separate retirement system that the City is contemplating establishing under section 810.001 of the Government Code (RQ-1072-GA)

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 an attorney appointed county attorney pro tem is disqualified from acting as criminal defense counsel in an adjoining county under Code of Criminal Procedure article 2.08 (RQ-0190-GA)

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; Time of taking office of a person elected to the office of the sheriff as a successor to an individual who was appointed to fill a vancancy in that office (RQ-0257-GA)

This report explores the growth of DE into a significant component of the modern post secondary education landscape and then examines a number of issues involved in the debate surrounding HEA reauthorization.

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In this paper we discuss the experimental signatures of the new form of nuclear matter--the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) in particle production at RHIC. We show that predictions for particle production in p(d)A and AA collisions derived from these properties are in agreement with data collected at RHIC.

We report on 2D near-field imaging experiments of the 11.9-nm Sn X-ray laser that were performed with a set of novel Mo/Y multilayer mirrors having reflectivities of up to {approx}45% at normal and at 45 incidence. Second-moment analysis of the X-ray laser emission was used to determine values of the X-ray beam propagation factor M{sup 2} for a range of irradiation parameters. The results reveal a reduction of M{sup 2} with increasing prepulse amplitude. The spatial size of the output is a factor of {approx}2 smaller than previously measured for the 14.7-nm Pd X-ray laser, while the distance of the X-ray emission with respect to the target surface remains roughly the same.

The primary focus of this issue brief is legislative action with respect to abortion. However, discussion of those legislative proposals necessarily involves a brief discussion of the leading U.S. Supreme Court decisions concerning a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate her pregnancy. For a more detailed discussion of the relevant case law, see CRS Report 95-724, Abortion Law Development: A Brief Overview.

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As Kraft pulp mills move toward minimum impact manufacturing, one of the most difficult challenges is the development of strategies for dealing effectively with buildup, carryover, and recovery of cationic and anionic non-process elements (NPEs). Even at low concentrations, NPEs present a serious concern due to scaling and other reactions caused by Ca, Mg, Mn, Fe, Cu, phosphates, silicates, and aluminates. The drivers behind NPE removal include environmental regulatory issues (e.g., Mn), scale formation, reduced bleaching efficiency, and corrosion. Before closure can be achieved in the bleach cycle, methods must be developed for efficient and cost-effective removal of NPEs from bleach filtrate streams. To be commercially viable, a highly selective, high-capacity, and regenerable media must be developed. In addition, limited prefiltration and high resistance to attrition of exchange material will significantly reduce costs, which is key to widespread commercial application. This project accurately determined the chemical composition of a Weyerhauser bleach plant effluent in the Eop, D0, and D1 stages. Due to environmental regulatory concerns, Mn was the principal target of this study. Mn was found to be present in these samples in the range of 0.16 to 3.97 ppm. The Mn was found to be in the divalent oxidation …

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As part of an effort to migrate the National Nuclear Data Center (NNDC) databases to a relational platform, a new web interface has been developed for the dissemination of the nuclear structure datasets stored in the Evaluated Nuclear Structure Data File and Experimental Unevaluated Nuclear Data List.

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This report summarizes by what measures the Constitution requires Congress to determine its own pay, the annual payment adjustment procedure, changes in pay over time since 1789, and related legislation.

This report provides Head Start issues on the 108th congress, a federal program that has provided comprehensive early childhood development services to low-income children since 1965.

The usual approach to deal with noise present in many real-world optimization problems is to take an arbitrary number of samples of the objective function and use the sample average as an estimate of the true objective value. The number of samples is typically chosen arbitrarily and remains constant for the entire optimization process. This paper studies an adaptive sampling technique that varies the number of samples based on the uncertainty of deciding between two individuals. Experiments demonstrate the effect of adaptive sampling on the final solution quality reached by a genetic algorithm and the computational cost required to find the solution. The results suggest that the adaptive technique can effectively eliminate the need to set the sample size a priori, but in many cases it requires high computational costs.

For several decades, the Nuclear Science References database has been maintained as a tool for data evaluators and for the wider pure and applied research community. This contribution will describe the database and recent developments in web-based access.

Stray electrons can arise in positive-ion accelerators for heavy ion fusion or other applications as a result of ionization of ambient gas or gas released from walls due to halo-ion impact, or as a result of secondary- electron emission. We summarize the distinguishing features of electron cloud issues in heavy-ion-fusion accelerators and a plan for developing a self-consistent simulation capability for heavy-ion beams and electron clouds. We also present results from several ingredients in this capability: (1) We calculate the electron cloud produced by electron desorption from computed beam-ion loss, which illustrates the importance of retaining ion reflection at the walls. (2) We simulate of the effect of specified electron cloud distributions on ion beam dynamics. We consider here electron distributions with axially varying density, centroid location, or radial shape, and examine both random and sinusoidally varying perturbations. We find that amplitude variations are most effective in spoiling ion beam quality, though for sinusoidal variations which match the natural ion beam centroid oscillation or breathing mode frequencies, the centroid and shape perturbations can also have significant impact. We identify an instability associated with a resonance between the beam-envelope ''breathing'' mode and the electron perturbation. We estimate its growth rate, which …

QR and LU factorizations for dense matrices are important linear algebra computations that are widely used in scientific applications. To efficiently perform these computations on modern computers, the factorization algorithms need to be blocked when operating on large matrices to effectively exploit the deep cache hierarchy prevalent in today's computer memory systems. Because both QR (based on Householder transformations) and LU factorization algorithms contain complex loop structures, few compilers can fully automate the blocking of these algorithms. Though linear algebra libraries such as LAPACK provides manually blocked implementations of these algorithms, by automatically generating blocked versions of the computations, more benefit can be gained such as automatic adaptation of different blocking strategies. This paper demonstrates how to apply an aggressive loop transformation technique, dependence hoisting, to produce efficient blockings for both QR and LU with partial pivoting. We present different blocking strategies that can be generated by our optimizer and compare the performance of auto-blocked versions with manually tuned versions in LAPACK, both using reference BLAS, ATLAS BLAS and native BLAS specially tuned for the underlying machine architectures.

The objective of this paper is to introduce the process and philosophies used to develop LLNL methodology for performing nonnuclear safety bases. Our former approach needed revision in order to implement the new Work Smart Standard (WSS), 'Safety Basis Requirements for Nonnuclear Facilities at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Site Specific Standard' (UCRL-ID-150214), approved in 2003 and revised January, 2004. This work relates directly to the following workshop theme: 'Improvements in Chemical, Biological, and Non-nuclear Safety analysis.' A requirements document, Environmental Safety and Health Manual, Document 3.1 provides safety bases methodology 'how-to' for LLNL personnel. This methodology document had to undergo a major revision, and essentially was completely re-written, since the nonnuclear requirements underwent a major change due to the new standard. The new methodology was based on a graded approach respective to risk level for each hazard type and facility classification. The development process included input from a cross-section of representatives of LLNL organizations at every step in the process. The initial methodology was tested in a pilot project that resulted in completed safety basis analyses and documentation for a major facility at LLNL. Feedback from the pilot was used to refine the methodology. The new methodology promotes a graded …

This report discusses issues regarding stem cell research. With certain restrictions, the President has announced that federal funds may be used to conduct research on human embryonic stem cells. Federal research is limited to "the more than 60" existing stem cell lines that were derived (1) with the informed consent of the donors; (2) from excess embryos created solely for reproductive purposes; and (3) without any financial inducements to the donors. No federal funds will be used for the derivation or use of stem cell lines derived from newly destroyed embryos; the creation of any human embryos for research purposes; or cloning of human embryos for any purposes.