Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report focuses on the federal involvement in acquiring human fetal tissue for preclinical research. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) officials reported that the National Institute for Health (NIH) is the only federal agency under the Senate Labor, HHS, and Education Subcommittee's jurisdiction that sponsors research using human fetal tissue. According a GAO survey, 12,116 human fetal tissue samples were acquired during fiscal years 1997 through 1999 for use in NIH-sponsored research. In fiscal year 1999, three fetal tissue suppliers received federal funding. For therapeutic transplantation research, the NIH Revitalization Act requires written statements by the donor, the physician who obtained the tissue, and the researcher receiving the tissue to ensure that the provisions of the law are met. It also requires that all applicable and local laws must be followed. The costs to acquire human fetal tissue were low. Principal investigators reported that quality of tissue and compliance with federal regulations were their primary criteria for choosing a human fetal tissue supplier."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses the Office of the National Drug Control Policy's (ONDCP) contract with Ogilvy & Mather, the lead media campaign contractor for the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. GAO reviewed ONDCP investigations into: (1) the facts and circumstances surrounding actions taken by ONDCP after receiving the allegations that Ogilvy may have over-billed the government, and (2) allegations that Ogilvy had provided services unrelated to the contract and had submitted invoices under the contract for those services. The Director of ONDCP, General Barry McCaffrey, knew about the fraud allegations concerning Ogilvy's billing practices. GAO found that Director McCaffrey had a private meeting with Ogilvy's project director after internal ONDCP discussions of the need for an external audit. However, GAO found no evidence that this meeting affected any decision with respect to an external audit of Ogilvy's contract. GAO also found that Ogilvy did not write congressional testimony for ONDCP employees, which would have gone beyond the scope of its contract with ONDCP. Ogilvy did provide ONDCP with figures, research, and documentation for use in responding to congressional inquiries and testimony. Ogilvy did not provide any services to Director …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses the decisions by the United States to support new or expanded United Nations (U.N.) operations in the following four locations: Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These decisions were made between January 1999 and June 2000. This testimony focuses on: (1) whether GAO had sufficient access to agency records to conduct the study requested by Congress, (2) how Presidential Decision Directive 25 was used in deciding to support new or expanded U.N. operations, and (3) how the executive branch consulted with Congress during the Directive 25 decision process. GAO found that it lacked the full and independent access to agency records needed to complete its work. The intent of Directive 25 is to ensure selective and effective use of peacekeeping as a tool for advancing U.S. interests and to also establish factors to help assess whether U.S. support for an operation is appropriate. GAO found that Directive 25 factors were considered in the initial operation in East Timor, but GAO could not determine whether those factors were considered in other operations. Communications between Congress and the executive branch consisted …

Weekly student newspaper from Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, Texas that includes campus and local news along with advertising.

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Semiweekly newspaper from Seminole, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Semi-weekly newspaper from Clifton, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Stress corrosion crack (SCC) growth rate tests and analytical electron microscopy (AEM) studies were performed over a broad range of environments and heat treatments of Alloy 600. This effort was conducted to correlate bulk environmental conditions such as pH and electrochemical potential (EcP) with the morphology of the SCC crack. Development of a library of AEM morphologies formed by SCC in different environments is an important step in identifying the conditions that lead to SCC in components. Additionally, AEM examination of stress corrosion cracks formed in different environments and microstructures lends insight into the mechanism(s) of stress corrosion cracking. Testing was conducted on compact tension specimens in three environments: a mildly acidic oxidizing environment containing sulfate ions, a caustic environment containing 10% NaOH, and hydrogenated near-neutral buffered water. Additionally, stress corrosion cracking testing of a smooth specimen was conducted in hydrogenated steam. The following heat treatments of Alloy 600 were examined: mill annealed at 980 C (near-neutral water), mill annealed at 1010 C (steam), sensitized (acid and caustic), and mill annealed + healed to homogenize the grain boundary Cr concentration (caustic). Crack growth rate (CGR) testing showed that sensitized Alloy 600 tested in the mildly acidic, oxidizing environment containing sulfate …

CO{sub 2} and O{sub 2} are mutually competitive at the active site of ribulose-1,5-biphosphate (RuBP) carboxylase/oxygenase (Rubisco). Rubisco contains two subunits, each present in eight copies. The 15-kD small subunit is coded by a family of nuclear RbcS genes. Until now, the role of the small subunit in Rubisco structure or catalytic efficiency is not known. Because of other work in eliminating the two RbcS genes in the green algo Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, it is now possible to address questions about the structure-function relationships of the eukaryotic small subunit. There are three specific aims in this project: (1) Alanine scanning mutagenesis is being used to dissect the importance of the {beta}A/{beta}B loop, a feature unique to the eukaryotic small subunit. (2) Random mutagenesis is being used to identify additional residues or regions of the small subunit that are important for holoenzyme assembly and function. (3) Attempts are being made to express foreign small subunits in Chlamydomonas to examine the contribution of small subunits to holoenzyme assembly, catalytic efficiency, and CO{sub 2}/O{sub 2} specificity.

The final goal behind any numerical method is give the smallest wall-clock time for a given final time error or, conversely, the smallest run-time error for a given wall clock time, etc. Here a comparison will be given between adaptive mesh refinement schemes and non-adaptive schemes of higher order. It will be shown that in three dimension calculations that in order for AMR schemes to be competitive that the finest scale must be restricted to an extremely, and unrealistic, small percentage of the computational domain.

We describe the status of a sensitive search for halo axions with masses in the {mu}eV range. A tunable large-volume and low-loss microwave cavity is operated at low temperature in a strong magnetic field. Resonant Primakoff conversion of axions into photons takes place when the cavity frequency is matched to the axion mass. No positive signal has been found so far, and we are able to exclude hadronic axions as the dominant halo component over a significant axion mass range. Future plans for a detector upgrade are outlined.

Weekly newspaper from Mannford, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Semiweekly newspaper from Levelland, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

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The aging of polymeric composite materials, such as filled polydimethylsiloxane foams, through factors such as thermal and mechanical stresses, environment, radiation, and chemical attack can affect the length of time for which a given material can maintain its engineering performance. Iterative interactions and cumulative reactions may result in the material or device reaching a critical age where its properties fail unexpectedly and catastrophically. The mechanical property changes associated with multi-mechanism aging may be subtle, and may not necessarily change linearly as a function of time in service. Since such linear relationships are often used in lifetime predictions, there is a fundamental need to develop and employ spectroscopic methods to investigate the structural and motional changes that occur in these organic-inorganic materials as a result of aging in chemically, thermally, or radioactively harsh environments. We have used multinuclear nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to characterize aging signatures in a series of PDMS based composite materials. Unfortunately, {sup 13}C, {sup 29}Si, and {sup 1}H magic angle spinning NMR spectra remain unchanged with gamma radiation exposure up to 50Mrad. This suggests that the speciation related changes are small and occur at a frequency of less than approximately 1% of the monomer units. As …

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an oral interview with Gaylord Whitlock. Whitlock was born in Mount Vernon, Illinois on 1 July 1917. Upon graduating from high school in 1935, he entered university in Carbondale, Illinois and graduated in 1939. In 1943, he received a commission in the US Navy Naval Reserve and reported to the Naval Training School of Aerological Engineers at UCLA where he received a professional degree in meteorology. He was then ordered to attend the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. While there, he worked on a method of determining shoreline depths an island for military purposes. In October 1944 he was sent to Kodiak, Alaska as a reanalysis officer, where he drew weather maps every six hours. He recounts and episode where he and fifteen others were shipwrecked. Only six survivors were rescued by the Coast Guard. In July 1945, he was assigned to the Chemical Warfare Training Center at Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah. While at this base, he developed a medical condition which led to five months in the naval hospital at Sampson, New York. He was discharged following his release from the hospital.

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

Weekly newspaper from Llano, 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.

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an oral interview with Gaylord Whitlock. Whitlock was born in Mount Vernon, Illinois on 1 July 1917. Upon graduating from high school in 1935, he entered university in Carbondale, Illinois and graduated in 1939. In 1943, he received a commission in the US Navy Naval Reserve and reported to the Naval Training School of Aerological Engineers at UCLA where he received a professional degree in meteorology. He was then ordered to attend the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. While there, he worked on a method of determining shoreline depths an island for military purposes. In October 1944 he was sent to Kodiak, Alaska as a reanalysis officer, where he drew weather maps every six hours. He recounts and episode where he and fifteen others were shipwrecked. Only six survivors were rescued by the Coast Guard. In July 1945, he was assigned to the Chemical Warfare Training Center at Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah. While at this base, he developed a medical condition which led to five months in the naval hospital at Sampson, New York. He was discharged following his release from the hospital.

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

The many motivations for employing agent-based computation in the social sciences are reviewed. It is argued that there exist three distinct uses of agent modeling techniques. One such use--the simplest--is conceptually quite close to traditional simulation in operations research. This use arises when equations can be formulated that completely describe a social process, and these equations are explicitly soluble, either analytically or numerically. In the former case, the agent model is merely a tool for presenting results, while in the latter it is a novel kind of Monte Carlo analysis. A second, more commonplace usage of computational agent models arises when mathematical models can be written down but not completely solved. In this case the agent-based model can shed significant light on the solution structure, illustrate dynamical properties of the model, serve to test the dependence of results on parameters and assumptions, and be a source of counter-examples. Finally, there are important classes of problems for which writing down equations is not a useful activity. In such circumstances, resort to agent-based computational models may be the only way available to explore such processes systematically, and constitute a third distinct usage of such models.