Newsletter of the Texas Agricultural Extension Service discussing topics related to economic aspects of raising dairy cows, dairy production, and managing dairy operations.

Summary sheet describing the findings of an internal audit by the Texas Department of Health regarding the purchasing of phones without proper approval, including findings and recommendations.

Periodic paper series discussing information about occupational training, labor markets, and related information in Texas.

Periodic paper series discussing information about occupational training, labor markets, and related information in Texas.

Monthly report documenting contracts for road construction and maintentance in Texas, organized by county and district. It includes information about each project including contractor, dates, costs, and other relevant data.

Monthly report documenting contracts for road construction and maintentance in Texas, organized by county and district. It includes information about each project including contractor, dates, costs, and other relevant data.

Monthly report documenting contracts for road construction and maintentance in Texas, organized by county and district. It includes information about each project including contractor, dates, costs, and other relevant data.

Monthly report documenting contracts for road construction and maintentance in Texas, organized by county and district. It includes information about each project including contractor, dates, costs, and other relevant data.

Monthly report documenting contracts for road construction and maintentance in Texas, organized by county and district. It includes information about each project including contractor, dates, costs, and other relevant data.

Monthly report documenting contracts for road construction and maintentance in Texas, organized by county and district. It includes information about each project including contractor, dates, costs, and other relevant data.

Solar systems prove to be the environmentally and economically sound choice for heating water in U.S. Navy housing at Moanalua Terrace in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Hawaii is a perfect environment for solar water heating,'' according to Alan Ikeda, a Housing Management Specialist with the Pacific Naval Facility Engineering Command Housing Department in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. ''The sun shines most of the time, we don't have to worry about freezing, the state offers a 35% solar tax credit, and our local utility supports the purchase and installation of solar systems with generous rebates.'' The Hawaiian Electric Company's (HECO's) $1,500 per unit rebate for solar water heaters installed on new construction helped persuade the Navy to take advantage of Hawaii's solar resource and install solar water heaters on family housing units. At Moanalua Terrace, the Navy had demolished 752 units of family housing, which they are rebuilding in four phases. Designers decided to use the opportunity to give the solar systems a try. When the 100 homes in Phase I were built, money was not available for solar water heaters. However, Ikeda subsequently secured a $130,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) to retrofit the …

Using data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 79 pb{sup -1}, D0 has searched for events containing multiple jets and large missing transverse energy in p{bar p} collisions at {radical}s = 1.8 TeV at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. Observing no significant excess beyond what is expected from the standard model, they set limits on the masses of squarks and gluinos and on the model parameters m{sub 0} and m{sub 1/2}, in the framework of the minimal low-energy supergravity models of supersymmetry. For tan {beta} = 2 and A{sub 0} = 0, with {mu} < 0, they exclude all models with m{sub q} {approx} < 250 GeV/c{sup 2}. For models with equal squark and gluino masses, they exclude m < 260 GeV/c{sup 2}.

An RF photo-injector was installed at Fermilab between January and June 97. The photo-injector produced its first beam on 4 June 97. This report provides a brief description of the accelerator and a summary of the experiments carried out through December '97.

This issue has articles from a diverse range of subjects pertaining to execution of experiments on the National Ignition Facility. The first article looks at the issue of operability of the NIF target chamber from the perspective of emissions of target debris and shrapnel. Damage to chamber optics by such target emissions directly or through seeding of laser damage is likely to be a major driver for NIF operating costs. It is essential that we are able to minimize the impact of such debris. This article reviews our current understanding of target-generated debris and shrapnel and recommends limits on total target and shrapnel mass for NIF target designs. The second article reviews experiment designs and diagnostic techniques that can be used for x-ray radiography in laser-plasma experiments. Techniques that have been used successfully at Nova and other laser facilities are described, and the problems with scaling them to the much higher energy plasmas of NIF are discussed. These problems include greater stand-off of diagnostics at NIF as well as higher energy requirements in the beams used to heat the backlighting plasma. Alternate diagnostic techniques that are applicable to NIF are described along with the results of tests at OMEGA. The …

The ACE program furthered the national security interests of the US by promoting technical approaches to the implementation and verification of arms control treaties that the international community embraces. The Cox Committee report suggests that uncontrolled interactions were taking place between US and Chinese nuclear weapons scientists in the course of the ACE program. On the contrary, elaborate controls were in place at the very beginning and remained in place to control the interactions and protect US national security information. The ACE program payoff to national security was just beginning and its suspension, resulting from the Cox reports allegations, is a setback to US-China progress on arms control.

On 12 June 1998, the Atmospheric Release Advisory Capability (ARAC) learned from news reports about the accidental release of cesium-137 from a steel mill near Algeciras, Spain. We used the U.S. Navy Operational Global Atmospheric Prediction System (NOGAPS) gridded data for meteorological input into our diagnostic models. To better resolve near-release location and coastal meteorological conditions, we blended four days of WMO surface and upper air observations with the gridded data. Our calculations showed the plume initially traveled eastward over the Mediterranean Sea, turned northward into central Europe, and was split by the Alps. We determined the timing and amount of cesium released by fitting our modeled air concentrations to the available set of measurements. Accuracy statistics from a small set of ratios of measured to computed air concentrations paired in space and time were similar to those achieved from larger data sets in previous ARAC model evaluation studies on the continental scale.

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Bursts of coherent radiation are observed from the NSLS VUV ring near a wavelength of 7 mm. The bursts occur when the electron beam current (I) exceeds a threshold value (I{sub th}), which itself varies with ring operating conditions. Beyond threshold, the average intensity of the emission is found to increase as (I-I{sub th}){sup 2}. With other parameters held nearly constant, the threshold current value is found to increase quadratically with synchrotron frequency, indicating a linear dependence on momentum compaction. It is believed that the coherent emission is a consequence of micro-bunching of the electron beam due to the microwave instability.

This work describes the analysis of pion-electron scattering data of the fix-trage-experiment SELEX at Fermilab with special respects to the pion charge radius. At an average rate of 150 Hz, 215 million candidates for pion-electron elastic scattering were recorded during the fix target run until September 1997. A sample of 24,000 pion-electron scattering events was extracted in the course of several data strips. Monte Carlo studies gave detailed knowledge of acceptance, which is important due to special trigger conditions. Systematics were studied and the pion mean square charge radius was determined.

Under the auspices of a US DOE-JAPAN Memorandum of Understanding JAERI and LLNL agreed to develop and evaluate a prototype information exchange protocol for nuclear accident emergency situations. This project received some interest from the US DOS and FEMA as it fits nicely under the umbrella of the G-7's GEMINI (Global Emergency Management Information Network Initiative) project. Because of LLNL/ARAC and JAERV WSPEEDI interest in nuclear accident consequence assessment and hazard prediction on all scales, to include global, we were happy to participate. Subsequent to the Spring 1997 RODOS-ARAC Workshop a Memorandum of Agreement was developed to enhance mutual collaboration on matters of emergency systems development. In the summer of 1998 the project leaders of RODOS, WSPEEDI and ARAC met at FZK and agreed to join in a triangular collaboration on the development and demonstration of an emergency information exchange protocol. JAERI and FZK are engaged in developing a formal cooperation agreement. The purpose of this project is to evaluate the prototype information protocol application for technical feasibility and mutual benefit through simulated (real) event; quick exchange of atmospheric modeling products and environmental data during emergencies, distribution of predicted results to other countries having no prediction capabilities, and utilization of …

This newsletter is prepared for the NARUC Subcommittee on Renewable Energy to promote information sharing on state-level renewable electric activities. It is sponsored by the Office of Power Technologies of the U.S. Department of Energy.

As part of the lightning protection plan at the Pantex plant, coupling measurements were made by LLNL to determine the transfer functions of the work areas (cell or bay). From these measured transfer functions the susceptibility of the cell to a lightning strike can be determined, and the appropriate mitigating measures put into effect. The transfer functions are determined by injecting a current on the outside of the cell and measuring the electric field inside. The ratio of electric field to the injected current over a broad frequency range is the transfer function. During one of our tests a comparison of LLNL and SNLA instrumentation was done. The major difference in the systems was that the SNLA system used batteries for power and a fiber optic link to decouple the antenna from the receiver. LLNL used AC power and a cable for the antenna connection. The comparison showed a discrepancy between LLNL and SNLA results. The source of this error was unwanted signal (noise) coupling into the local AC power source from the injected current. Since this source was used to power the equipment, the noise was fed directly to the electric field measuring antenna, causing errors in the measurement. …

The SPRED spectrometer was photometrically calibrated by using the FTU tokamak plasma and the Grazing Incidence Time Resolving Spectrometer (GRITS) from the Johns Hopkins University [Stratton, Nucl. Fusion, Vol. 24, No. 6, pp. 767-777, 1984]. The photometric calibration of the GRITS spectrometer was transferred to the SPRED [Fonck, R.J., Applied Optics, Vol. 21, No. 12, p. 2115 (1982)] by directly comparing the intensity of bright lines emitted from the FTU tokamak plasma that were simultaneously measured by both spectrometers. The GRITS spectrometer ({lambda} = 10 - 360 {angstrom}; {Delta}{lambda} {approx} 0.7 {angstrom}) was photometrically calibrated in the 50 - 360 {angstrom} spectral range at the SURF II synchrotron light source at NIST in Gaithersburg MD in August 1997. The calibration of each SPRED grating was performed separately. These gratings covered the short wavelengths: 100 - 300 {angstrom}({Delta}{lambda} - 1.4 {angstrom}) and the long wavelengths: 200 - 1800 {angstrom} ({Delta}{lambda} {approx} 7 {angstrom}). This calibration should be accurate until the microchannel plate of the SPRED is exposed to atmospheric pressure. This calibration is similar to the one obtained by Stratton [Stratton, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 57 (8), pp. 204,3 August 1986].

Nineteen ninety-eight has been a transition year for Engineering, as we have moved from our traditional focus on thrust areas to a more focused approach with research centers. These five new centers of excellence collectively comprise Engineering's Science and Technology program. This publication summarizes our formative year under this new structure. Let me start by talking about the differences between a thrust area and a research center. The thrust area is more informal, combining an important technology with programmatic priorities. In contrast, a research center is directly linked to an Engineering core technology. It is the purer model, for it is more enduring yet has the scope to be able to adapt quickly to evolving programmatic priorities. To put it another way, the mission of a thrust area was often to grow the programs in conjunction with a technology, whereas the task of a research center is to vigorously grow our core technologies. By cultivating each core technology, we in turn enable long-term growth of new programs.