On July 22, 2004, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, known as the 9/11 Commission, issued its final report, detailing the events up to and including the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks upon the United States. The 9/11 Commission recommended that the Senate adopt rules requiring hearings and votes to confirm or reject national security nominees within 30 days of their submission at the start of each new presidential administration. Implementing the commission's proposal would involve imposing new restrictions on both the power of committee chairs to control the agenda of their committees and the rights of Senators to delay or block nominations through holds and extended debate. This report discusses in detail this proposal, how it could be implemented, and the potential effects of its implementation.

Prior to and during the design of the APS's Access Control Interlock System (ACIS), an effort was made to insure that the design complied with the relevant DOE and ANL requirements as well as those set forth in other recognized documents then in circulation. A paragraph-by-paragraph listing of the requirements (in some cases, recommended practices) and the corresponding ACIS design features was compiled for use by the review committees then in place. This tabulation was incorporated in the APS Safety Analysis Document (SAD) as Appendix A. With the evolutionary changes that have occurred to the APS and to the documents referenced, some of the details of these compliances have evolved as well. It has been decided to maintain the SAD as a ''living'' document, editing it in close time proximity to the evolving APS. Since Appendix A depicted the ACIS's original design compliance to an also-evolving set of documents, it was decided to remove Appendix A but to retain it as a reference document. This LS Note now contains that set of original design compliances. As the APS and the ACIS continue to evolve, the changes made will be subject to internal review and approval and will always be subject …

Evaluation of the fabrication processes involved in the manufacture of waste containers is important as these processes can have an effect on the metallurgical structure of an alloy. Since material properties such as strength, toughness, aging kinetics and corrosion resistance are all dependent on the microstructure, it is important that prototypes be built and evaluated for processing effects on the performance of the material. Of particular importance are welds, which have an as-cast microstructure with chemical segregation and precipitation of complex phases resulting from the welding process. The work presented in this report focuses on the effects of processes such as solution annealing, stress mitigation, and welding on the kinetics of precipitation and corrosion properties. For a waste package lifetime of thousands of years, it is impossible to test directly in the laboratory the behavior of Alloy 22 under expected repository conditions. The changes that may occur in these materials must be accelerated. For phase-stability studies this is achieved by accelerating the phase transformations by increasing test temperatures above those anticipated in the proposed repository. For these reasons, Alloy 22 characterization specimens are currently being aged at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Aging Facilities for times from 1 hour to …

The federal government has a long history of providing credit assistance to farmers by issuing direct loans and guarantees, and creating rural lending institutions. These institutions include the Farm Credit System (FCS), which is a network of borrower-owned lending institutions operating as a government-sponsored enterprise, and the Farm Service Agency (FSA) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which makes or guarantees loans to farmers who cannot qualify at other lenders. When loans cannot be repaid, special bankruptcy provisions help family farmers reorganize debts and continue farming (P.L. 109-8 made Chapter 12 permanent and expanded eligibility). S. 238 and H.R. 399 (the Rural Economic Investment Act) would exempt commercial banks from paying taxes on profits from farm real estate loans, thus providing similar benefits as to the Farm Credit System.

During the week of December 18, 2005, both the House and Senate approved the conference agreement on the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (H.Rept. 109-362, S. 1932), which includes net reductions of $2.7 billion over five years for USDA mandatory programs. Included in the agreement is a $1.7 billion reduction in farm commodity support programs, a $934 million reduction in conservation spending, a $620 million reduction in a mandatory research program, and $419 million cut in rural development programs, as scored by CBO over a five-year period (FY2006-2010). The measure also includes a two-year extension of a dairy income support program, at an estimated cost of $998 million. No reductions to food stamp spending were included in the conference agreement.

This report provides an overview of Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spending on HIV/AIDS (human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome) as well as budget numbers for other federal government programs targeting HIV/AIDS.

This report considers the future of the U.S. tanker fleet for aerial refueling.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Dating back to 1997, numerous reports have highlighted the need for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to better control the growth in its Air Traffic Services operating costs, which account for about $6.5 billion or over 80 percent of FAA's total annual operating costs. In February 2004, FAA established the Air Traffic Organization (ATO) to take over its entire Air Traffic operations and established cost control as a major focus. GAO was asked to determine: (1) What is ATO's financial outlook for its operations? (2) To what extent is ATO taking actions to control its operating costs? (3) What are some options ATO should consider in developing its cost control strategy?"

This report consists of american bankers association v. lockyer: Whether California’s Financial Information Privacy Law Has Been Preempted by the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions (FACT) Act.

The major objective of this study was to identify and analyze signal transduction factors that function with the CR4 receptor kinase. We pursued this analysis in Arabidopsis. Analysis of other members of the ACR4 related receptor (CRR) family produced biochemical evidence consistent with some of them functioning in ACR4 signal transduction. Yeast 2-hybrid identified six proteins that interact with the cytoplasmic domain of ACR4, representing putative downstream signal transduction components. The interactions for all 6 proteins were verified by in vitro pull down assays. Five of the interacting proteins were phosphorylated by ACR4. We also identified candidate interactors with the extracellular TNFR domain. We hypothesize this may be the ligand binding domain for ACR4. In one approach, yeast 2-hybrid was again used and five candidate proteins identified. Nine additional candidates were identified in a genome wide scan of Arabidopsis amino acid sequences that threaded onto the TNF structure.

This procedure is written as general guidance for the measurement of elemental isotopic composition by plasma-source inorganic mass spectrometry. Analytical methods for uranium and plutonium are given as examples.

This chapter describes procedures for the collection and analysis of samples of various matrices for the purpose of determining the presence of chemical agents in a civilian setting. This appendix is intended to provide the reader with sufficient information to make informed decisions about the sampling and analysis process and to suggest analytical strategies that might be implemented by the scientists performing sampling and analysis. This appendix is not intended to be used as a standard operating procedure to provide detailed instructions as to how trained scientists should handle samples. Chemical agents can be classified by their physical and chemical properties. Table 1 lists the chemical agents considered by this report. In selecting sampling and analysis methods, we have considered procedures proposed by the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and peer-reviewed scientific literature. EPA analytical methods are good resources describing issues of quality assurance with respect to chain-of-custody, sample handling, and quality control requirements.

This document is the first of two volumes describing the ATF2 project. The present volume discusses the technical justification for ATF2 and presents a design description. Since the International Committee for Future Accelerator (ICFA) decision on the choice of technology, a world-wide collaboration on the design of the International Linear Collider (ILC) has rapidly progressed [1]. The formation of the Global Design Effort (GDE) will accelerate the work towards a final design. An important technical challenge is obviously the high gradient acceleration but what is similarly challenging is the collision of extremely small beams of a few nanometer size. The latter challenge has three distinct issues: creating small emittance beams, preserving the emittance during acceleration and transport, and focusing the beams to nanometers. Most studies have been done using computer simulations but many issues still remain that require experimental verification. Accelerator Test Facility (ATF) at KEK was built to create small emittance beams, and succeeded in obtaining an emittance that almost satisfies the ILC requirements [2]. In this proposal we present a project, ATF2, which addresses the focusing of the beam into a nanometer spot. The ATF2 project will extend the extraction beamline of the ATF with an ILC-type final …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is developing a new passenger prescreening program, known as Secure Flight. Under the Secure Flight program, TSA plans to take over, from commercial airlines, the responsibility for comparing identifying information of domestic airline passengers against information on known or suspected terrorists. TSA is also considering using commercial data as part of Secure Flight if the data are shown, through testing, to improve the results of these comparisons. In the 2005 Homeland Security Appropriations Act, Congress mandated that, prior to testing the use of commercial data for Secure Flight, TSA develop measures to assess the impacts of using commercial data on aviation security, and that GAO review the measures. In response to that mandate, we reviewed TSA's measures for commercial data testing and briefed congressional staff on January 11, 2005, on our findings. This report documents the results of our review, which we presented in that briefing."

The Defense Base Realignment and Closure Act of 1990 and the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949 provide the basic framework for the transfer and disposal of military installations closed during the base realignment and closure (BRAC) process. This report provides an overview of the various authorities available under the current law and describes the planning process for the redevelopment of BRAC properties.

The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) program has been the most controversial nuclear weapon program in Congress for the last several years. Supporters argue that it is needed to attack hard and deeply buried targets (such as leadership bunkers) in countries of concern, thereby deterring or defeating challenges from such nations; critics assert that RNEP would lower the threshold for use of nuclear weapons and prompt other nations to develop nuclear weapons to deter U.S. attack. This report presents a brief technical background on RNEP, then discusses the history of RNEP in Congress and the Administration for the FY2005 and FY2006 budget cycles.

Adequate path calibrations are crucial for improving the accuracy of seismic event location and origin time, size, and mechanism, as required for CTBT monitoring. There is considerable information on structure in broadband seismograms that is currently not fully utilized. The limitations have been largely theoretical. the development and application to solid earth problems of powerful numerical techniques, such as the Spectral Element Method (SEM), has opened a new era, and theoretically, it should be possible to compute the complete predicted wavefield accurately without any restrictions on the strength or spatial extent of heterogeneity. This approach requires considerable computational power, which is currently not fully reachable in practice. We propose an approach which relies on a cascade of increasingly accurate theoretical approximations for the computation of the seismic wavefield to develop a model of regional structure for the area of Eurasia located between longitudes of 30 and 150 degrees E, and latitudes of -10 to 60 degrees North. The selected area is particularly suitable for the purpose of this experiment, as it is highly heterogeneous, presenting a challenge for calibration purposes, but it is well surrounded by earthquake sources and, even though they are sparsely distributed, a significant number of high …

Adequate path calibrations are crucial for improving the accuracy of seismic event location and origin time, size, and mechanism, as required for CTBT monitoring. There is considerable information on structure in broadband seismograms that is currently not fully utilized. The limitations have been largely theoretical. the development and application to solid earth problems of powerful numerical techniques, such as the Spectral Element Method (SEM), has opened a new era, and theoretically, it should be possible to compute the complete predicted wavefield accurately without any restrictions on the strength or spatial extent of heterogeneity. This approach requires considerable computational power, which is currently not fully reachable in practice. We propose an approach which relies on a cascade of increasingly accurate theoretical approximations for the computation of the seismic wavefield to develop a model of regional structure for the area of Eurasia located between longitudes of 30 and 150 degrees E, and latitudes of -10 to 60 degrees North. The selected area is particularly suitable for the purpose of this experiment, as it is highly heterogeneous, presenting a challenge for calibration purposes, but it is well surrounded by earthquake sources and, even though they are sparsely distributed, a significant number of high …

Common Internet services can be reliably distinguished based solely upon the locations of clusters in traffic-based features (ratios of inbound to outbound packets, ratios of packets to payloads, etc.) This capability has value in revealing the nature of ''hidden'' (tunneled) services and in detecting anomalous changes to known services. We provide measures of session capture volumes sufficient to make confidence-level assertions regarding ''unknown'' services, and outline a throughput system for providing alarms for service anomalies.

This report discuses the responsibilities of the office and process for appointment of the Chief Justice of the United States.

Hydrocarbon synthesis from photocatalytic reactions of CO{sub 2} and H{sub 2}O over various catalysts has been studied by UV-visible light. The quantum efficiencies suggest that Pd/TiO{sub 2} sol gel exhibits the highest activity for hydrocarbon synthesis from photocatalytic reactions. The in situ IR was able to monitor the adsorbed hydrocarbon species. The UV-visible, IR spectroscopy and XRD techniques were used to characterize the catalysts to obtain the information of properties of the process and catalyst before/after reaction. The UV-visible spectroscopy provides the information about the surface band gap energy of each catalyst. In situ UV-visible studies reveals that TiO{sub 2}-supported catalysts require the higher energy (i.e. shorter wavelength) to pass through the water-thin film deposited on the surface to activate the photocatalytic reaction. XRD data show there is changes in the crystal structure of TiO{sub 2} sol gel from photon energy during photo reaction. Studies on photocatalytic oxidation of methylene blue show that the photocatalytic oxidation rate is significantly higher than the photocatalytic reduction rate on TiO{sub 2} based catalysts. The information from this study can lead to a better understanding of the nature of the catalysts and photoreaction processes, which might provide the information to develop better catalysts and …

This report is designed to assist congressional policymakers to understand and apply broad based objective criteria when evaluating progress in the nation’s efforts to combat terrorism. It is not intended to define specific, in-depth, metrics for measuring progress against terrorism.

This report contains information on the general structure of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate committee structure, types of committees, and subcommittees.

Grid convergence is often assumed as a given during computational analyses involving discretization of an assumed continuum process. In practical use of finite difference and finite element analyses, perfect grid convergence is rarely achieved or assured, and this fact must be addressed to make statements about model validation or the use of models in risk analysis. We have previously provided a 4-step quantitative implementation for a quantitative V&V process. One of the steps in the 4-step process is that of Solution Verification. Solution Verification is the process of assuring that a model approximating a physical reality with a discretized continuum (e.g. finite element) code converges in each discretized domain to a converged answer on the quantity of subsequent validation interest. The modeling reality is that often we are modeling a problem with a discretized code because it is neither continuous spatially (e.g. contact and impact) nor smooth in relevant physics (e.g. shocks, melting, etc). The typical result is a non-monotonic convergence plot that can lead to spurious conclusions about the order of convergence, and a lack of means to estimate residual solution verification error or uncertainty at confidence. We compare ten techniques for grid convergence assessment, each formulated to enable …