Document issued by the Open Records Division at the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an informal interpretation of Texas law related to a series of written requests for access to all memoranda, letters, reports, directives, e-mail, telephone message slips, etc to the Denton County Judge Kirk Wilson.

Document issued by the Open Records Division at the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an informal interpretation of Texas law related to whether the Tarrant County Sheriff's Department must release offense reports related to pending litigation.

Booklet with charts detailing accidents involving school buses for calendar year 1999.

The authors have studied the importance of chemical processes for the stability of CdTe solar cells, in particular, diffusion in the ohmic contact/absorber junction regions. Both whole cells and test systems containing only the ohmic contact and the absorber are used. They found several experimental methods to be useable tools to follow the effects of impurity diffusion on the CdTe grain boundaries, grain bulk, and surface. In addition, they have explored alternative contacting schemes. The first year of activities led to the following tentative conclusions: Grain boundaries in CdTe/CdS cells are NOT fully passivated and are expected to be electrically active; There appears to be fast ionic diffusion in the vicinity of the Cu/HgTe/graphite back-contact, possibly enhanced by grain boundary diffusion; The macroscopic response to stress is different for cells with identical back-contact, but from different manufacturers. Different factors and/or different reactions to identical factors are possibly at work here; and Ni-P appears to be a promising back-contact material.

The threat of terrorist vehicle bombs has become evident in the past few years. The explosive power that can be generated by a ''home made'' bomb carried by a standard van or moderate size truck can generate sufficient blast overpressures to cause major damage or catastrophic collapse to building structures. There are a number of means available to help prevent a successful terrorist attack on a facility. One measure consists of the gathering of intelligence that can be used to thwart an attack before it takes place. The design and retrofit of structures and structural systems which can resist blast loadings and protect occupants is another area which is currently receiving a great deal of attention by the security community. Another measure, which can be used to protect many existing facilities, is to restrict access to the facility. This option consists of keeping unauthorized vehicles as far as possible from the facility so that if a vehicle bomb does approach the facility, the distance at which the bomb is detonated will result in significant reduction in the overpressures by the time the blast wave reaches the protected structure. This paper describes a simple and efficient vehicle barrier concept that can …

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This report provides Hazardous materials transportation safety - federal program and legislative issues.

Among the civil service retirement issues addressed in bills introduced thus far in the 106th Congress are the correction of retirement coverage errors for federal employees assigned to the wrong retirement system; immediate eligibility for federal employees to participate in the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP); improved portability of pension benefits; and repeal of the temporary increase in employee retirement contributions that was mandated by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Other bills would expand TSP eligibility to include members of the armed services; improve pension coverage for temporary and part-time federal employees; and designate several categories of federal employees as law enforcement officers for purposes of determining their retirement benefits.

This report describes the mandatory retirement provisions for certain “non-dual-status” military technicians contained in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000 (P.L. 106-65), discusses the stated rationale behind the policy, and quantifies the impact it will likely have on individual technicians.

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This report discusses contribution of technological advancement to economic growth and productivity increases. Because technology can contribute to economic growth and productivity increases, congressional interest has focused on how to augment private-sector technological development.

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