Aerial refueling aircraft are key to military air operations. The U.S. tanker fleet is numerous and effective, but old. Modernizing or replacing the current fleet of tankers presents the Department of Defense (DOD) with difficult choices in terms of desired capabilities, force structure, and budget. The Air Force’s proposal to lease 100 Boeing 767 aircraft to replace it’s KC-135E fleet is controversial.

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

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

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

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

This report contains background information and issues of broadband internet access.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Both the government and the private sector are increasingly using "data mining"--that is, the application of database technology and techniques (such as statistical analysis and modeling) to uncover hidden patterns and subtle relationships in data and to infer rules that allow for the prediction of future results. As has been widely reported, many federal data mining efforts involve the use of personal information that is mined from databases maintained by public as well as private sector organizations. GAO was asked to survey data mining systems and activities in federal agencies. Specifically, GAO was asked to identify planned and operational federal data mining efforts and describe their characteristics."

On the basis of the observation that conserved positions in transcription factor binding sites are often clustered together, we propose a simple extension to the model-based motif discovery methods. We assign position-specific prior distributions to the frequency parameters of the model, penalizing deviations from a specified conservation profile. Examples with both simulated and real data show that this extension helps discover motifs as the data become noisier or when there is a competing false motif.

This study assessed chemical treatment options for decomposing the tetraphenylborate in High Level Waste (HLW) Tank 48H. Tank 48H, located at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, SC, contains approximately one million liters of HLW. The tetraphenylborate slurry represents legacy material from commissioning of an In Tank Precipitation process to separate radioactive cesium and actinides from the non radioactive chemicals. During early operations, the process encountered an unplanned chemical reaction that catalytically decomposed the excess tetraphenylborate producing benzene. Subsequent research indicated that personnel could not control the operations within the existing equipment to both meet the desired treatment rate for the waste and maintain the benzene concentration within allowable concentrations. Since then, the Department of Energy selected an alternate treatment process for handling high-level waste at the site. However, the site must destroy the tetraphenylborate before returning the tank to HLW service. The research focuses on identifying treatments to decompose tetraphenylborate to the maximum extent feasible, with a preference for decomposition methods that produce carbon dioxide rather than benzene. A number of experiments examined whether the use of oxidants, catalysts or acids proved effective in decomposing the tetraphenylborate. Additional experiments developed an understanding of the solid, liquid and gas decomposition …

Modern force microscopy techniques allow researchers to use mechanical forces to probe interactions between biomolecules. However, such measurements often happen in non-equilibrium regime, which precludes straightforward extraction of the equilibrium energy information. Here we use the work averaging method based on Jarzynski equality to reconstruct the equilibrium interaction potential from the unbinding of a complementary 14-mer DNA duplex from the results of non-equilibrium single-molecule measurements. The reconstructed potential reproduces most of the features of the DNA stretching transition, previously observed only in equilibrium stretching of long DNA sequences. We also compare the reconstructed potential with the thermodynamic parameters of DNA duplex unbinding and show that the reconstruction accurately predicts duplex melting enthalpy.

This is a discussion of the physical measurements, sizes, distances and magnetic fields of the Hyperon Spectrometer Magnet and its components. Some we get from construction drawings (like the target dimensions) and others from measurements in differing coordinate systems. Included also are the properties of the hyperon productions targets used in E781.

The effect of disposing of low-level waste in a much larger trench than the slit trenches analyzed in the revised performance assessment for the E-Area low-level waste facility is evaluated. The conclusion of the evaluation is that such disposal is bounded by the performance assessment if two restrictions are imposed. These restrictions are: the radionuclide inventory limits for slit trench disposal derived from the revised performance assessment, rather than the radionuclide concentration or package limits, are applied to the larger trench. For stabilized waste radionuclide concentration or package limits derived from the inventory limits for these wasteforms calculated in the performance assessment and the volumetric waste capacity of the entire MegaTrench may be used if this waste fills a large-enough segment of the trench to provide structural support for the closure cap, as assumed in the performance assessment and the stabilized waste is segregated from the unstabilized waste by emplacing the stabilized waste along the edge of the trench and separating the stabilized waste from the unstabilized waste by a minimum of two feet of soil or other material with similar hydraulic properties.

Daily newspaper from Chickasha, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Funeral program for Dorothy Christian, born November 29, 1920. The funeral was held May 4, 2004 at St. Paul United Methodist Church, officiated by Rev. Terrence K. Hayes. Funeral arrangements were made through Lewis Funeral Home and she was buried in Meadowlawn Memorial Park in San Antonio, Texas

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This report discusses the relationship between the U.S. and Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is becoming an important power in Central Asia by virtue of its large territory, ample natural resources, and strategic location. However, it faces political, ethnic, economic, and environmental challenges to its stability and integrity. After the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, Kazakhstan granted overflight rights for U.S.-led coalition actions in Afghanistan, and in 2003 provided some troops for post-conflict rebuilding in Iraq.

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Letter regarding the separation of the armed services and veterans affairs dinner from the national convention.

The effort in this project has been in 3 distinct directions. (1) First, we focused on development of minature microfabricated micro-coil NMR detectors with maximum Signal-to-Noise (SNR) ratio. (2) Secondly, we focused on design of minature micro-coil NMR detectors that have minimal effect on the NMR spectrum distortions. (3) Lastly we focused on the development of a permanent magnet capable of generating fields on the order of 1 Tesla with better than 10 ppm uniformity.

This paper presents a method for solving Poisson's equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions on an irregular bounded three-dimensional region. The method uses a nodal-point discretization and adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) on Cartesian grids, and the AMR multigrid solver of Almgren. The discrete Laplacian operator at internal boundaries comes from either linear or quadratic (Shortley-Weller) extrapolation, and the two methods are compared. It is shown that either way, solution error is second order in the mesh spacing. Error in the gradient of the solution is first order with linear extrapolation, but second order with Shortley-Weller. Examples are given with comparison with the exact solution. The method is also applied to a heavy-ion fusion accelerator problem, showing the advantage of adaptivity.

Management of surface water quality is often complicated by interactions between surface water and groundwater. Traditional Land-Surface Models (LSM) used for numerical weather prediction, climate projection, and as inputs to water management decision support systems, do not treat the LSM lower boundary in a fully process-based fashion. LSMs have evolved from a leaky bucket to more sophisticated land surface water and energy budget models that typically have a so-called basement term to depict the bottom model layer exchange with deeper aquifers. Nevertheless, the LSM lower boundary is often assumed zero flux or the soil moisture content is set to a constant value; an approach that while mass conservative, ignores processes that can alter surface fluxes, runoff, and water quantity and quality. Conversely, groundwater models (GWM) for saturated and unsaturated water flow, while addressing important features such as subsurface heterogeneity and three-dimensional flow, often have overly simplified upper boundary conditions that ignore soil heating, runoff, snow and root-zone uptake. In the present study, a state-of-the-art LSM (CLM) and a variably-saturated GWM (ParFlow) have been coupled as a single column model. A set of simulations based on synthetic data and data from the Project for Intercomparison of Landsurface Parameterization Schemes (PILPS), version …

Tri-weekly student newspaper from Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

Interview with Dr. Charles A. LeMaistre, beginning with the story about how he met his wife, Joyce Trapp LeMaistre. This story intermingles with his early career that lead him to his role as Chancellor at the University of Texas in Austin. Dr. LeMaistre offers insight into the effect desegregation had on the University of Texas campus and M. D. Anderson’s faculty diversity. He recounts how he was offered the presidential position at M. D. Anderson, the transition in administrative procedures, and growth of the institution. Dr. LeMaistre shares his wife’s personal fight with cancer and uses it as an example of how effective the institution’s policies and procedures. Dr. LeMaistre’s modesty in his administrative accomplishments shine a light on the high regard he had for his team and institutional family. The interview concludes with Dr. LeMaistre crediting members of the University Cancer Foundation Board of Visitors and donors.

Daily newspaper from Perry, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.