Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the year 2000 risks facing the nation, focusing on: (1) the federal government's progress and remaining challenges in correcting its systems; (2) state and local government year 2000 issues; and (3) an overview of the available information on the readiness of key public infrastructure and economic sectors."

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 home-rule municipality may adopt an ordinance requiring residential construction contractors to use the franchisee selected by the city for weekly residential and commercial garbage removal.

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 may build, maintain, or improve city streets that are not integral parts of or connecting links with county roads or state highways.

This report mainly focuses on the Summary of Supreme Court Decisions of Capital Punishment during the 1978-98 Term where the cases reveal distinct characteristics.

A propulsion point design is presented for lifting geological samples from Mars. Vehicle complexity is kept low by choosing a monopropellant single stage. Little new development is needed, as miniature pump fed hydrazine has been demonstrated. Loading the propellant just prior to operation avoids structural, thermal, and safety constraints otherwise imposed by earlier mission phases. hardware mass and engineering effort are thereby diminished. The Mars liftoff mass is 7/8 hydrazine, <5% propulsion hardware, and >3% each for the payload and guidance.

Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos and Dvali have recently proposed that gravity may become strong at energies near 1 TeV thus removing the hierarchy problem. This scenario can be tested in several ways at present and future colliders. In this paper we examine the exchange of towers of Kaluza-Klein gravitons and their influence on the production of pairs of massive gauge bosons in {gamma}{gamma} collisions. These tower exchanges are shown to lead to a new dimension-8 operator that can significant alter the Standard Model expectations for these processes. The role of polarization for both the initial state photons and the final state gauge bosons in improving sensitivity to graviton exchange is emphasized. We find that the discovery reach for graviton tower exchange in the {gamma}{gamma} {r_arrow} W{sup +}W{sup {minus}} channel to be significantly greater than for any other process so far examined.

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In this article we have outlined a formal framework for an abstract approach to music and music composition. The model is formulated in terms of objects that have attributes, obey relationships, and are subject to certain well-defined operations. The motivation for this approach uses traditional terms and concepts of music theory, but the approach itself is formal and uses the language of mathematics. The universal object is an audio wave; partials, sounds, and compositions are special objects, which are placed in a hierarchical order based on time scales. The objects have both static and dynamic attributes. When we realize a composition, we assign values to each of its attributes: a (scalar) value to a static attribute, an envelope and a size to a dynamic attribute. A composition is then a trajectory in the space of aural events, and the complex audio wave is its formal representation. Sounds are fibers in the space of aural events, from which the composer weaves the trajectory of a composition. Each sound object in turn is made up of partials, which are the elementary building blocks of any music composition. The partials evolve on the fastest time scale in the hierarchy of partials, sounds, and …

We report progress on the design of the Next Linear Collider (NLC) Damping Rings complex (DRC) [1]. The purpose of the DRC is to provide 120 Hz, low emittance electron and positron bunch trains to the NLC linacs [2]. It consists of two 1.98 GeV main damping rings, one positron pre-damping ring, two pairs of bunch length and energy compressor systems and interconnecting transport lines. The 2 main damping rings store up to 0.8 amp in 3 trains of 95 bunches each and have normalized extracted beam emittances {gamma}{var_epsilon}{sub x} = 3 {micro}m-rad and {gamma}{var_epsilon}{sub y} = 0.03 {micro}m-rad. The preliminary optical design, performance specifications and tolerances are given in [1]. Key subsystems include (1) the 714 MHz RF system [3], (2) the 60 ns risetime injection/extraction pulsed kicker magnets [4], (3) the 44 m wiggler magnet system, (4) the arc and wiggler vacuum system, (5) the radiation management system, (6) the beam diagnostic instrumentation, (7) special systems used for downstream machine protection and (8) feedback-based stabilization systems. Experience at the SLAC Linear Collider has shown that the NLC damping rings will have a pivotal role in the operation of the high power linacs. The ring dynamics and instabilities will …

Article providing comment on "Margules Equations Applied to PAH Solubilities in Alcohol-Water Mixtures," published in 'Environmental Science & Technology," 1997.

Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

A probabilistic tornado wind hazard model for the continental United States (CONUS) is described. The model incorporates both aleatory (random) and epistemic uncertainties associated with quantifying the tornado wind hazard parameters. The temporal occurrences of tornadoes within the continental United States (CONUS) is assumed to be a Poisson process. A spatial distribution of tornado touchdown locations is developed empirically based on the observed historical events within the CONUS. The hazard model is an aerial probability model that takes into consideration the size and orientation of the facility, the length and width of the tornado damage area (idealized as a rectangle and dependent on the tornado intensity scale), wind speed variation within the damage area, tornado intensity classification errors (i.e.,errors in assigning a Fujita intensity scale based on surveyed damage), and the tornado path direction. Epistemic uncertainties in describing the distributions of the aleatory variables are accounted for by using more than one distribution model to describe aleatory variations. The epistemic uncertainties are based on inputs from a panel of experts. A computer program, TORNADO, has been developed incorporating this model; features of this program are also presented.

Weekly newspaper from Alvin, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Electra, Texas that includes local and regional news along with advertising.

Daily newspaper from Sapulpa, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

The purpose of the research project is to develop high-perfommnce, energy-eflicient retrofits of existing row homes in Baltimore, Maryland. These efficiency enhancements are to optimize building envelope improvements, mechanical equipment improvements and operational improvements to the highest cost-effective level. Furthermore, this project is to investigate and demonstrate the impact of high-performance energy-efficiency retrofit improvements on row homes in the Historic East area of Baltimore. Three homes awaiting renovation are planned to receive building envelope, mechanical system, and electrical system improvements that will improve their energy petiormance. An incremental additional cost ceiling of $4000 for the energy eftlciency improvements, beyond those normally installed, has been set by the project.

Studies at numerous sites have shown high variability in the degradation rates of chlorinated solvents as measured by microcosm studies with ¹⁴C labeled contaminants. The ability of nutrient and carbon additions to stimulate degradation can vary widely. Although some of these variations can be related to the structure of the extant microbial community, the presence of other less refractory contaminants may be critical fctors impacting the rate of chlorocarbon mineralization. Relaatively highe rates of TCE degradation have been observed in the DOE K-25 burial grounds with diverse organic loadings as well as in areas that show evidence for hydrocarbon contamination. Similarly, at other sites where there was TCE in the absence of hydrocarbons or other contaminants, the measured degradation rates have often been found to be very low. At various other sites, the intrasite variability in degradation rates appeared to be related to the presence of hydrocarbon contamination. The highest rates were observed at sites with evidence of hydrocarbons. These observations indicated that the viability of natural attenuation as a remediation option for chlorinated solvents might depend in part on the presence co-contaminants such as hydrocarbons or natural matter.

In today's manufacturing environment, plants, systems, and equipment are being asked to perform at levels not thought possible a decade ago. The intent is to improve process operations and equipment reliability, availability, and maintainability without costly upgrades. Of course these gains must be achieved without impacting operational performance. Downsizing is also taking its toll on operations. Loss of personnel, particularly those who represent the corporate history, is depleting US industries of their valuable experiential base which has been relied on so heavily in the past. These realizations are causing companies to rethink their condition-based maintenance policies by moving away from reacting to equipment problems to taking a proactive approach by anticipating needs based on market and customer requirements. This paper describes a different approach to condition-based maintenance-context-dependent prognostics and health assessment. This diagnostic capability is developed around a context-dependent model that provides a capability to anticipate impending failures and determine machine performance over a protracted period of time. This prognostic capability links operational requirements to an economic performance model. In this context, a system may provide 100% operability with less than 100% functionality. This paradigm is used to facilitate optimal logistic supply and support.

We evaluated artificial neural networks (ANNs) as a technique for assessing changes in soil microbial communities following exposure to metals. We analyzed signature lipid biomarker (SLB) data collected from two soil microcosm experiments using traditional statistical techniques and ANN. Two phases of data analysis were done; pattern recognition and prediction. In general, the ANNs were better able to detect patterns and relationships in the SLB data than were the traditional statistical techniques.

A summary of the present Standard Model Higgs search and measurement of top quark mass at the Tevatron are presented. The sensitivity of the present Higgs search at the Tevatron is limited by statistics to a cross section approximately two orders of magnitude higher than the predicted cross section for standard model Higgs production. With 30 fb{sup -1} of integrated luminosity, the Tevatron offers an unique potential discovery window for the Standard Model Higgs mass up to 130 GeV/c{sup 2} before LHC era. The study of top at the Tevatron has moved from discovery phase to one of characterizing its properties. The combined result of top quark mass is 174.3 {+-} 5.1 GeV/c{sup 2} ({delta}m{sub t} =m{sub t} < 3%).

Mathematical modeling of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) transformation served as a means of predicting possible endpoints of bioremediation, thus allowing evaluation of several of the most common transformation patterns. Correlation between laboratory-observed and predicted endpoint data was, in some cases, as good as 0.98 (perfect correlation = 1.0).

Boolean logic expressions are often derived in safety and reliability analysis. Since the values of the operands are rarely exact, accounting for uncertainty with the tightest justifiable bounds is important. Accurate determination of result bounds is difficult when the inputs have constraints. One example of a constraint is that an uncertain variable that appears multiple times in a Boolean expression must always have the same value, although the value cannot be exactly specified. A solution for this repeated variable problem is demonstrated for two Boolean classes. The classes, termed functions with unate variables (including, but not limited to unate functions), and exclusive-or functions, frequently appear in Boolean equations for uncertain outcomes portrayed by logic trees (event trees and fault trees).

Direct searches for the technicolor particles at the Tevatron collider experiments at {radical}s=1.8 TeV are described. Various color-singlet and color-octet heavy technimeson states are predicted in the recent technicolor models. The topcolor assisted technicolor model predicts new heavy gluon, top-gluon. These new particles, {rho}{sub T}, {omega}{sub T}, {pi}{sub T}, and top-gluon are expected to be produced in high energy p{anti p} collisions if they exist and they are searched in the world highest energy p{anti p} collider experiments, CDF and D0 experiments. In this report, current mass limits for these particles are shown.