Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Each year, Congress appropriates billions of dollars to pay and support U.S. military personnel at home and overseas. In fiscal year 2003, military personnel (MILPERS) appropriations amounted to more than $109 billion. Once the funds are appropriated, the military services are responsible for ensuring that the funds are properly obligated and disbursed. Their end-of-the-fiscal-year review is critical to the next year's budget formulation process because the services use the obligations for the most recent fiscal year completed as a point of reference in developing their new budgets, and Congress uses this information as a point of comparison in its review of the new budget requests. In our prior work for the House and Senate appropriation and authorization committees, reviewing the services' budget justifications, we found that although the services were conducting annual reviews and certifications, the services did not review transactions by matching obligations to individual disbursements in all of the years that disbursements can occur, as required by the Department of Defense (DOD) Financial Management Regulation. We also found that the services disbursed some obligations for purposes other than those reported in their budget submission, but their …

This report discusses the political state of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which under new leadership upon the November 2, 2004 death of its president, Shaykh Zayid bin Sultan al-Nuhayyan, has undergone a smooth transition, but it remains weak militarily and surrounded by several powerful and ambitious neighbors. Political reform has been minimal, but its relatively open economy and borders, particularly in the emirate of Dubai, have caused problems in proliferation, terrorism, and human trafficking. The United States has announced it will open negotiations with UAE on a free trade agreement (FTA).

Siloxanes have a wide variety of applications throughout the aerospace industry which take advantage of their exceptional insulating and adhesive properties and general resilience. They also offer a wide range of tailorable engineering properties with changes in composition and filler content. They are, however, subject to degradation in radiatively and thermally harsh environments. We are using solid state nuclear magnetic resonance techniques to investigate changes in network and interfacial structure in siloxane elastomers and their correlations to changes in engineering performance in a series of degraded materials. NMR parameters such as transverse ( T{sub 2}) relaxation times, cross relaxation rates, and residual dipolar coupling constants provide excellent probes of changes crosslink density and motional dynamics of the polymers caused by multi-mechanism degradation. The results of NMR studies on aged siloxanes are being used in conjunction with other mechanical tests to provide insight into component failure and degradation kinetics necessary for preliminary lifetime assessments of these materials as well as into the structure-property relationships of the polymers. NMR and MRI results obtained both from high resolution NMR spectrometers as well as low resolution benchtop NMR screening tools will be presented.

This report includes information regarding U.S. relations with Libya as well as other Libyan foreign relations and government.

A complete list of Texas Daily Newspaper Associations members and their terms, if available, that they have served as board officers or directors. The list begins in 1985 and go until 2005.

We present the status and initial images of a positrontomograph for prostate imaging that centers a patient between a pair ofexternal curved detector banks (ellipse: 45 cm minor, 70 cm major axis).The distance between detector banks adjusts to allow patient access andto position the detectors as closely as possible for maximum sensitivitywith patients of various sizes. Each bank is composed of two axial rowsof 20 CTI PET Systems HR+ block detectors for a total of 80 modules inthe camera. Compared to an ECAT HR PET system operating in 3D mode, ourcamera uses about one-quarter the number of detectors and hasapproximately the same sensitivity for a central point source, becauseour detectors are close to the patient. The individual detectors areangled in the plane to point towards the prostate to minimize resolutiondegradation in that region. The detectors are read out by modified CTIdata acquisition electronics. We have completed construction of thegantry and electronics, have developed detector calibration and dataacquisition software, and are taking coincidence data. We demonstratethat we can clearly visualize a "prostate" in a simple phantom.Reconstructed images of two phantoms are shown.

Letter from Sherry Tanksley to Larcine Bland inviting Bland to the annual volunteer appreciation celebration hosted by the Black Academy of Arts and Letters on December 4, 2004.

Since 1996, excess CO{sub 2} from the Sleipner natural gas field has been sequestered and injected underground into a porous saline aquifer 1000 m below the seafloor. In 2002, we carried out a high precision micro-gravity survey on the seafloor in order to monitor the injected CO{sub 2}. A repeatability of 5 {micro}Gal in the station averages was observed. This is considerably better than pre-survey expectations. These data will serve as the baseline for time-lapse gravity monitoring of the Sleipner CO{sub 2} injection site. A repeat survey has been scheduled for the summer of 2005. This report covers 3/18/04 to 9/19/04. During this time, we participated in several CO{sub 2} sequestration-related meetings and conferences. On March 29, 2004, we participated in the 2004 Carbon Sequestration Project Review Meeting for the Department of Energy in Pittsburgh, PA. During the week of May 2, 2004, we attended and presented at the Third Annual Conference on Carbon Capture and Sequestration in Alexandria, VA. Finally, during the week of August 8, 2004, we took part in the U.S.-Norway, CO{sub 2} Summer School in Santa Fe, NM. Additional modeling was also completed, examining the seismic velocity pushdown estimates from the gravity models and the expected …

During periods of drought when surface water supplies are severely limited, wildland forest fires tend to become more frequent and often can grow into major fires that threaten valuable timber, real estate, and even human lives. Fire-fighting crews are critically dependent upon accurate and timely weather data to help ensure that individuals are not inadvertently exposed to dangerous conditions and to enhance normal fire-fighting activities. To that end, the use of an eye-safe, portable lidar for remote wildland fire and smoke detection is described.

Electrochemical noise (EN) probes were deployed in two continuous kraft digesters at a variety of locations representative of corrosion throughout the vessels. Current and potential noise, the temperature at each probe location, and the value of up to 60 process parameters (flow rates, liquor chemistry, etc.) were monitored continuously during each experiment. The results indicate that changes in furnish composition and process upsets were invariably associated with concurrent substantial changes in EN activity throughout the vessels. Post-test evaluation of the mild steel electrode materials in both vessels confirmed general corrosion of a magnitude consistent with historical trends in the respective vessels as well as values qualitatively (and semi-quantitatively) related to EN current sums for each electrode pair. Stainless steel electrodes representing 309LSi and 312 overlay repairs exhibited zero wastage corrosion--as did the actual overlays--but the EN data indicated periodic redox activity on the stainless steel that varied with time and position within the vessel. Little or no correlation between EN probe activity and other operational variables was observed in either vessel. Additional details for each digester experiment are summarized.

We are conducting a collaborative research program on two tokamaks, HT-7 and EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, formerly HT-7U), with the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIPP) located in Hefei, PRC. The work that we planned for this year included conducting transport experiments on HT-7, completing plans for expansion of the HT-7 diagnostic set, and reaching an agreement on how UT-FRC can best participate in experiments on HT-7U. These goals were accomplished as summarized in the next section. Note that the experimental portion of the work is still underway. The experimental campaign for HT-7 began just a few weeks before this report was compiled.

The overall purpose of this project is to evaluate the biological and economic feasibility of restoring high-quality forests on mined land, and to measure carbon sequestration and wood production benefits that would be achieved from forest restoration procedures. We are currently estimating the acreage of lands in VA, WV, KY, OH, and PA mined under SMCRA and reclaimed to non-forested post-mining land uses that are not currently under active management, and therefore can be considered as available for carbon sequestration. To determine actual sequestration under different forest management scenarios, a field study was installed as a 3 x 3 factorial in a random complete block design with three replications at each of three locations, Ohio, West Virginia, and Virginia. The treatments included three forest types (white pine, hybrid poplar, mixed hardwood) and three silvicultural regimes (competition control, competition control plus tillage, competition control plus tillage plus fertilization). Each individual treatment plot is 0.5 acres. Each block of nine plots requires 4.5 acres, and the complete installation at each site requires 13.5 acres. The plots at all three locations have been installed and the plot corners marked with PVC stakes. GPS coordinates of each plot have been collected. Tree survival, height …

This project supports the development of software using terascale computers to carry out molecular simulations of protein function and macromolecular interactions. We are building on the existing CHARMM and Amber simulation packages, adapting them in novel ways to massively parallel architectures and high-performance CPUs. Three principal avenues being pursued are: (1) Improvements in load-balancing and communication for large-scale particle-mesh Ewald (PME) simulations of solvated biomolecules. (2) Modern techniques for accelerating convergence of sampling of configuration space offer promise for further exploitation of massively parallel architectures. These methods include parallel tempering and ''lambda dynamics'' procedures that connect multiple, synchronized results from PME simulations like those described in part [1]. (3) The implementation of efficient and scalable algorithms that move towards lower-resolution models in ways that can be carefully calibrated against atomic-level solvated simulations.

It's not exactly Russian roulette, but scheduling October events outdoors is not risk-free, even in usually sunny California. An overflow crowd of more than 400 registered users, ALS staff, and vendors enjoyed a full indoor program featuring science highlights and workshops spread over two and a half days from October 18 to October 20. However, a major storm, heralding the onset of the San Francisco Bay Area rainy season, posed a few weather challenges for the events on the ALS patio.

This a brief summary of the federal criminal status implicated by conducting illegal gambling using the Internet. It also discusses some of the constitutional issues associated with prosecuting illegal Internet gambling.

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

Block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) uses a mesh structure built up out of locally-uniform rectangular grids. In the BoxLib parallel framework used by the Raptor code, each processor operates on one or more of these grids at each refinement level. The decomposition of the mesh into grids and the distribution of these grids among processors may change every few timesteps as a calculation proceeds. Finer grids use smaller timesteps than coarser grids, requiring additional work to keep the system synchronized and ensure conservation between different refinement levels. In a paper for NECDC 2002 I presented preliminary results on implementation of parallel transport sweeps on the AMR mesh, conjugate gradient acceleration, accuracy of the AMR solution, and scalar speedup of the AMR algorithm compared to a uniform fully-refined mesh. This paper continues with a more in-depth examination of the parallel scaling properties of the scheme, both in single-level and multi-level calculations. Both sweeping and setup costs are considered. The algorithm scales with acceptable performance to several hundred processors. Trends suggest, however, that this is the limit for efficient calculations with traditional transport sweeps, and that modifications to the sweep algorithm will be increasingly needed as job sizes in the thousands of …

A concept being developed for high current electron beams may have application to HEDP and is described here. It involves the use of planar Blumlein stacks placed inside an induction cell. The output end of the Blumlein stack is applied across a high gradient insulator (HGI). These insulators have been used successfully in the presence of kilo Ampere-level electron beam currents for tens of nanoseconds at gradients of 20 MV/meter.

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Superconducting Gamma-ray microcalorimeters operated at temperatures around {approx}0.1 K offer an order of magnitude improvement in energy resolution over conventional high-purity Germanium spectrometers. The calorimeters consist of a {approx}1 mm{sup 3} superconducting or insulating absorber and a sensitive thermistor, which are weakly coupled to a cold bath. Gamma-ray capture increases the absorber temperature in proportion to the Gamma-ray energy, this is measured by the thermistor, and both subsequently cool back down to the base temperature through the weak link. We are developing ultra-high-resolution Gamma-ray spectrometers based on Sn absorbers and superconducting Mo/Cu multilayer thermistors for nuclear non-proliferation applications. They have achieved an energy resolution between 60 and 90 eV for Gamma-rays up to 100 keV. We also build two-stage adiabatic demagnetization refrigerators for user-friendly detector operation at 0.1 K. We present recent results on the performance of single pixel Gamma-ray spectrometers, and discuss the design of a large detector array for increased sensitivity.

Each major party in the House has a leadership hierarchy. This report summarizes the election, duties, and responsibilities of the Speaker of the House, the majority and minority leaders, and the whips and whip system.

This report summarizes the focus of U.S.-Egyptian relations in terms of security policy and maintaining the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace-treaty. Moreover, the report suggests the importance of sustaining the relationship to protect U.S. interests, but also the cost of the relationship that is displayed in the $2 billion in economic and military assistance the U.S. provides Egypt with annually.

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