A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In January 2001, the congressionally chartered Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization--known as the Space Commission--reported that the Department of Defense (DOD) lacked the senior-level focus and accountability to provide guidance and oversight for national security space operations. Congress mandated that GAO provide an assessment of DOD's actions to implement the Space Commission's recommendations. Thus, GAO (1) updated its June 2002 assessment of DOD's actions to address the Space Commission's recommendations, (2) ascertained progress in addressing other long- term management concerns, and (3) assessed the extent to which DOD has developed a results-oriented management framework for space activities."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Telework--work done at a location other than a traditional office--has gained widespread attention over the past decade as a human capital flexibility offering various potential benefits to employers, employees, and society. Using such flexibilities as management tools can help the federal government address its human capital challenges. GAO did this study in response to a congressional request to assess the federal government's progress in implementing telework programs and to determine what else can be done to give federal employees the ability to telework under appropriate circumstances."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Two types of nonprofit organizations, cooperating associations and friends groups, provide substantial support to the national parks. GAO was asked to report on (1) the number of park units supported by nonprofits and the amount of their contributions, (2) the revenue-generating activities of nonprofits and how they compete with park concessioners, (3) factors that contribute to competition between nonprofits and for-profit concessioners, and (4) how park managers are held accountable for meeting goals for nonprofit financial support."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Effective controls over information systems are essential to ensuring the protection of financial and personnel information and the security and reliability of bank examination data maintained bythe Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). As part of GAO's 2002 financial statement audits of the three FDIC funds, we assessed (1) the corporation's progress in addressing computer security weaknesses found in GAO's 2001 audit, and (2) the effectiveness of FDIC's controls."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The National Strategy for Homeland Security calls for preventing the entry of foreign terrorists into our country and using all legal means to identify; halt; and, where appropriate, prosecute or bring immigration or other civil charges against terrorists in the United States. GAO reported in October 2002 that the Department of State had revoked visas of certain persons after it learned they might be suspected terrorists, raising concerns that some of these individuals may have entered the United States before or after State's action. Congressional requesters asked GAO to (1) identify the policies and procedures of State, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that govern their respective visa revocation actions and (2) determine the effectiveness of the process."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Restoration of the South Florida ecosystem is a significant federal and state priority, requiring the development and use of extensive scientific information. GAO was asked to report on the funds spent on scientific activities for restoration, the gaps that exist in scientific information, and the extent to which scientific activities are being coordinated."

A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Supporting democracy abroad is a major U.S. foreign policy objective. To better understand how this assistance has been implemented in Latin America, GAO was asked to review programs in six countries--Bolivia, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Peru--that have been of particular importance to U.S. interests in Central and South America. Between fiscal years 1992 and 2002, U.S. agencies have funded more than $580 million in democracy-related programs in these countries. This report discusses the impact of and factors affecting this assistance and the overarching management issues that have affected program planning and implementation."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Data sharing can be a valuable tool for federal agencies in determining applicants' eligibility for benefit and loan programs. Congress has authorized the Department of Education, among others, to have limited access to federal taxpayer information collected by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Likewise, IRS is able to use personal information collected by outside sources to better ensure that taxpayers are meeting their tax obligations. GAO was asked to determine whether Education uses taxpayer information to verify information provided by student aid applicants, and the benefits of increasing data verification activities, and whether IRS uses personal information maintained by Education to ensure that taxpayers meet their tax obligations, and the benefits of increasing these activities."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) spends more than $1.7 billion each year to move and store over 600,000 household goods shipments when relocating military personnel. It conducted and evaluated several pilot program studies aimed at fixing its problem-plagued program and, in 2002, issued a report to Congress with three recommendations. The 1997 Defense Appropriations Act Conference Report directed GAO to validate the results achieved by the pilot programs. In response, GAO examined the extent to which DOD's recommendations to Congress (1) offer solutions to long-standing problems in the current program and (2) are supported by the evaluation's findings and should be implemented. GAO also assessed the soundness of methodologies used by DOD to develop cost estimates to implement the recommendations."

The modeling of the flow in a wood pulp digester is but one component of the investigation of the corrosion of digesters. This report describes the development of a Near-Wall-Model (NWM) that is intended to couple with a CFD model that determines the flow, heat, and chemical species transport and reaction within the bulk flow of a digester. Lubrication theory approximations were chosen from which to develop a model that could determine the flow conditions within a thin layer near the vessel wall using information from the interior conditions provided by a CFD calculation of the complete digester. The other conditions will be determined by coupled solutions of the wood chip, heat, and chemical species transport and chemical reactions. The NWM was to couple with a digester performance code in an iterative fashion to provide more detailed information about the conditions within the NW region. Process Simulations, Ltd (PSL) is developing the digester performance code. This more detailed (and perhaps more accurate) information from the NWM was to provide an estimate of the conditions that could aggravate the corrosion at the wall. It is intended that this combined tool (NWM-PSL) could be used to understand conditions at/near the wall in …

Mentions the trade barriers and trade relations between the United States and Australia. Gives a short summary on Australia's economy over the past few years and provides some history and statistics on trade between the two countries and how to further boost economic ties.

This report details the information related to country-of-origin information on fresh fruits and vegetables, red meats, seafood, and peanuts. The contents include the background, meat, and poultry inspection provisions, history of Congressional Action for the implementation

Set from rules and customs, the Senate takes up ways to give more flexibility to the floor agenda.

This report discusses U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, or Republic of China (ROC), including policy issues for Congress and legislation. The Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), P.L. 96-8, has governed U.S. arms sales to Taiwan since 1979, when the United States recognized the People’s Republic of China (PRC) instead of the ROC. There are two other relevant elements of the “one China” policy: the August 17, 1982 U.S.-PRC Joint Communique and the “Six Assurances” made to Taiwan.

This report documents research that was done during a ten week internship in the Sapphire research group at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory during the Summer of 2003. The goal of the study was to develop an algorithm that is capable of isolating (segmenting) moving objects in low resolution video sequences. This capability is currently being developed by the Sapphire research group as the first stage in a longer term video data mining project. This report gives a chronological account of what ideas were tried in developing the algorithm and what was learned from each attempt. The final version of the algorithm, which is described in detail, gives good results and is fast.

Neptunium, because of its long half life, is an element of long-term interest to the Yucca Mountain repository. The fate of neptunium under repository settings is unknown. This report provides a review and new interpretation of past tests on commercial spent nuclear fuel and experimental evidence on the fate of neptunium. Tests on commercial spent nuclear fuel preformed previously at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) used a bathtub setup by immersing spent fuel in either deionized water or a groundwater typical of those at Yucca Mountain. The main goal of the tests was to determine the different concentrations of radionuclides in solution with different types of cladding defects. Neptunium was not the focus of these tests, nor were the tests designed to study neptunium. Drip tests performed at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) are unsaturated tests that drip water at different rates on spent fuel. Relatively new tests at ANL examine the corrosion of Np-doped U3O8 in humid air at various temperatures. This review concludes that all tests reported here have analytical problems (i.e., relatively high detection limits for Np) and have been configured such that they limit the ability to interpret the available neptunium data. Past tests on spent nuclear …

Single chain FV constructs of anti-ganglioside GD2 antibodies for radioimaging

The Transportation Routing Analysis Geographic Information System (TRAGIS) model is used to calculate highway, rail, or waterway routes within the United States. TRAGIS is a client-server application with the user interface and map data files residing on the user's personal computer and the routing engine and network data files on a network server. The user's manual provides documentation on installation and the use of the many features of the model.

With the aid of a DOE grant (No. DE-FC26-01NT41050), Stolar Research Corporation (Stolar) developed the Horizon Sensor (HS) to distinguish between the different layers of a coal seam. Mounted on mining machine cutter drums, HS units can detect or sense the horizon between the coal seam and the roof and floor rock, providing the opportunity to accurately mine the section of the seam most desired. HS also enables accurate cutting of minimum height if that is the operator's objective. Often when cutting is done out-of-seam, the head-positioning function facilitates a fixed mining height to minimize dilution. With this technology, miners can still be at a remote location, yet cut only the clean coal, resulting in a much more efficient overall process. The objectives of this project were to demonstrate the feasibility of horizon sensing on mining machines and demonstrate that Horizon Sensing can allow coal to be cut cleaner and more efficiently. Stolar's primary goal was to develop the Horizon Sensor (HS) into an enabling technology for full or partial automation or ''agile mining''. This technical innovation (R&D 100 Award Winner) is quickly demonstrating improvements in productivity and miner safety at several prominent coal mines in the United States. In …

This model and analysis report develops, validates, and implements a conceptual model for heat transfer in and around a ventilated emplacement drift. This conceptual model includes thermal radiation between the waste package and the drift wall, convection from the waste package and drift wall surfaces into the flowing air, and conduction in the surrounding host rock. These heat transfer processes are coupled and vary both temporally and spatially, so numerical and analytical methods are used to implement the mathematical equations which describe the conceptual model. These numerical and analytical methods predict the transient response of the system, at the drift scale, in terms of spatially varying temperatures and ventilation efficiencies. The ventilation efficiency describes the effectiveness of the ventilation process in removing radionuclide decay heat from the drift environment. An alternative conceptual model is also developed which evaluates the influence of water and water vapor mass transport on the ventilation efficiency. These effects are described using analytical methods which bound the contribution of latent heat to the system, quantify the effects of varying degrees of host rock saturation (and hence host rock thermal conductivity) on the ventilation efficiency, and evaluate the effects of vapor and enhanced vapor diffusion on the …

Energy Information Systems (EIS) for buildings are becoming widespread in the U.S., with more companies offering EIS products every year. As a result, customers are often overwhelmed by the quickly expanding portfolio of EIS feature and application options, which have not been clearly identified for consumers. The object of this report is to provide a technical overview of currently available EIS products. In particular, this report focuses on web-based EIS products for large commercial buildings, which allow data access and control capabilities over the Internet. EIS products combine software, data acquisition hardware, and communication systems to collect, analyze and display building information to aid commercial building energy managers, facility managers, financial managers and electric utilities in reducing energy use and costs in buildings. Data types commonly processed by EIS include energy consumption data; building characteristics; building system data, such as heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) and lighting data; weather data; energy price signals; and energy demand-response event information. This project involved an extensive review of research and trade literature to understand the motivation for EIS technology development. This study also gathered information on currently commercialized EIS. This review is not an exhaustive analysis of all EIS products; rather, it is …

Duct leakage in forced-air distribution systems has been recognized for years as a major source of energy losses in residential buildings. Unfortunately, the distribution of leakage across homes is far from uniform, and measuring duct leakage under normal operating conditions has proven to be difficult. Recently, two new methods for estimating duct leakage at normal operating conditions have been devised. These are called the nulling test and the Delta-Q test. Small exploratory studies have been done to evaluate these tests, but previously no large-scale study on a broad variety of homes has been performed to determine the accuracy of these new methods in the field against an independent benchmark of leakage. This sort of study is important because it is difficult in a laboratory setting to replicate the range of leakage types found in real homes. This report presents the results of a study on 51 homes to evaluate these new methods relative to an independent benchmark and a method that is currently used. An evaluation of the benchmark procedure found that it worked very well for supply-side leakage measurements, but not as well on the return side. The nulling test was found to perform well, as long as wind …

MicroCoating Technologies, Inc., investigated the use of the Combustion Chemical Vapor Deposition (CCVD) process to deposit oxygen or sintering barrier coatings for thermal barrier coating (TBC) applications. In addition, it looked at the use of its nanopowders by the NanoSpray process for developing smoothing layers on TBCs. Testing and analysis of coated substrates included heat treatments, scanning electron microscopy, x-ray diffraction and profilometry. Coatings on TBC-coated superalloy coupons were tested by an outside collaborator. Results from the investigations indicated that the thin film coatings were not well-suited as barrier layers on the rough bond coat or TBC. Subsequent investigations considered smoothing layers on the TBC, as suggested by the collaborator, using nanopowder-based coatings. Smoothing of substrate surfaces by 50% was observed by profilometry.

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. In this quarterly report, we present a preliminary comparison of the carbon sequestration benefits for two forest types used to convert abandoned grasslands for carbon sequestration. Annual mixed hardwood benefits, based on total stand carbon volume present at the end of a given year, range from a minimum of $0/ton of carbon to a maximum of $5.26/ton of carbon (low prices). White pine benefits based on carbon volume range from a minimum of $0/ton of carbon to a maximum of $18.61/ton of carbon (high prices). The higher maximum white pine carbon payment can primarily be attributed to the fact that the shorter rotation means that payments for white pine carbon are being made on far less cumulative carbon tonnage than for that of the long-rotation hardwoods. Therefore, the payment per ton of white pine carbon needs to be higher than that of the hardwoods in order to render the conversion to white pine profitable by the end of a rotation. These carbon …