A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "More small businesses are turning to subcontracting as a way to participate in the federal government's $250 billion procurement program. DOD, accounting for about two-thirds of federal procurements, has a critical role in providing opportunities to small businesses through subcontracting programs such as the Test Program for Negotiation of Comprehensive Small Business Subcontracting Plans (Test Program). In addition, Congress raised concerns about the potential for small businesses to lose opportunities to firms performing work outside of the United States. GAO was asked to review (1) DOD's assessment of the Test Program's effectiveness, (2) the performance of contractors participating in the Test Program, (3) the Defense Contract Management Agency's (DCMA) oversight of contractors' small business subcontracting efforts, and (4) the extent and reasons contractors are subcontracting with businesses performing outside the U.S."

The quadratic function approaching method (QFAM) is introduced for magnetotelluric sounding (MT) data inversion. The method takes the advantage of that quadratic function has single extreme value, which avoids leading to an inversion solution for local minimum and ensures the solution for global minimization of an objective function. The method does not need calculation of sensitivity matrix and not require a strict initial earth model. Examples for synthetic data and field measurement data indicate that the proposed inversion method is effective.

We review the phase diagram of nitrogen in a wide pressure and temperature range. Recent optical and x-ray diffraction studies at pressures up to 300 GPa and temperatures in excess of 1000 K have provided a wealth of information on the transformation of molecular nitrogen to a nonmolecular (polymeric) semiconducting and two new molecular phases. These newly found phases have very large stability (metastability) range. Moreover, two new molecular phases have considerably different orientational order from the previously known phases. In the iota phase (unlike most of other known molecular phases), N{sub 2} molecules are orientationally equivalent. The nitrogen molecules in the theta phase might be associated into larger aggregates, which is in line with theoretical predictions on polyatomic nitrogen.

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether the City of Fort Worth must assume the full cost of continuing health insurance and other benefits for its fire fighters and police called to military police, and whether the City must allow its employees to donate to the military leave-time account account their accrued paid leave would expire if not used before the end of the year (RQ-0121-GA)

This project consists of two activities. Task A, Simulations and Measurements, combines all the material model development and associated numerical work with the materials-oriented experimental activities. The goal of this effort is to provide an improved understanding of dynamic material properties and to provide accurate numerical representations of those properties for use in analysis codes. Task B, ALE3D Development, involves general development activities in the ALE3D code with the focus of improving simulation capabilities for problems of mutual interest to DoD and DOE. Emphasis is on problems involving multi-phase flow, blast loading of structures and system safety/vulnerability studies.

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The phase diagrams of Ce, Th, and Pu metals have been studied by means of density-functional theory (DFT). In addition to these metals, the phase stability of Ce-Th and Pu-Am alloys has been also investigated from first-principles calculations. Equation-of-state (EOS) for Ce, Th, and the Ce-Th alloys has been calculated up to 1 Mbar pressure in good comparison to experimental data. Present calculations shows that the Ce-Th alloys adopt a body-centeredtetragonal (bct) structure upon hydrostatic compression that is in excellent agreement with measurements. The ambient pressure phase diagram of Pu is shown to be very poorly described by traditional DFT but rather well modeled when including magnetic interactions. In particular, the anomalous {var_sigma} phase of Pu is shown to be stabilized by magnetic disorder at elevated temperatures. The Pu-Am system has also been studied in a similar fashion and it is shown that this system, for about 25% Am content, becomes antiferromagnetic below about 400 K that corroborate the recent discovery of a Curie-Weiss behavior in this system.

Email from Nancy Russell to board of Texas Stonewall Democrats on April 5, 2004, discussing April 17 meeting in Austin.

This report introduces the adverse effect wage rate (AEWR) and the concerns out of which it grew, from the perspective of labor policy (not of immigration policy). American agricultural employers have long utilized foreign workers on a temporary basis, regarding them as an important manpower resource. Often employed at low wages and under adverse conditions, such alien workers, some argue, may compete unfairly with U.S. workers. To mitigate any "adverse effect" for the domestic workforce, a system of wage floors was developed that applies, variously, both to alien and citizen workers.

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Video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story.

Fracture mechanics methodologies for flaw stability analysis of a storage tank were compared in terms of the maximum stable through-wall flaw sizes or ''instability lengths.'' The comparison was made at a full range of stress loading at a specific set of mechanical properties of A285 carbon steel and with the actual tank configuration. The two general methodologies, the J-integral-tearing modulus (J-T) and the failure assessment diagram (FAD), and their specific estimation schemes were evaluated. A finite element analysis of a flawed tank was also performed for validating the J estimation scheme with curvature correction and for constructing the finite element-based FAD. The calculated instability crack lengths show that the J-T methodology that uses an estimated scheme, and the material-specific FAD, most closely approximate the result calculated with finite element analysis for the stress range that bounds those expected at the highest fill levels in the storage tanks. The results from the other FAD methods show instability lengths less than the J-T results over this range.

On October 30-31, 2003 over 60 scientists gathered at ANL to discuss potential science that could be done with a fully operational user facility dedicated to delivering widely tunable, short pulse, high peak power vacuum ultraviolet light. The charge given to the workshop by J. Murray Gibson, ANL Associate Lab Director for the Advanced Photon Source, included the following two points: (1) What are the scientifically important experiments that can only be done with the proposed ALFF facility? (2) Are the combined ALFF characteristics of pulse energy, tunability, pulse length, and coherence sufficiently unique to justify establishing a user facility at this time? To fulfill this two-point charge, special emphasis was placed by the workshop committee on two goals. First, scientists were invited who work in areas where the lack of powerful, tunable VUV is a limitation to speak about their current research and to speculate on the science that would be uniquely possible with the ALFF. Second, while many of the same scientists have expertise in using lasers and other VUV sources, it was considered crucial to invite scientists explicitly working on the development of tabletop VUV systems. In addition to addressing the second charge question, the purpose of …

Typically, large scientific datasets (order of terabytes) are generated at large computational centers, and stored on mass storage systems. However, large subsets of the data need to be moved to facilities available to application scientists for analysis. File replication of thousands of files is a tedious, error prone, but extremely important task in scientific applications. The automation of the file replication task requires automatic space acquisition and reuse, and monitoring the progress of staging thousands of files from the source mass storage system, transferring them over the network, archiving them at the target mass storage system or disk systems, and recovering from transient system failures. We have developed a robust replication system, called DataMover, which is now in regular use in High-Energy-Physics and Climate modeling experiments. Only a single command is necessary to request multi-file replication or the replication of an entire directory. A web-based tool was developed to dynamically monitor the progress of the multi-file replication process.

In the next decades, oil exploration by majors and independents will increasingly be in remote, inaccessible areas, or in areas where there has been extensive shallow exploration but deeper exploration potential may remain; areas where the collection of data is expensive, difficult, or even impossible, and where the most efficient use of existing data can drive the economics of the target. The ability to read hydrocarbon chemistry in terms of subsurface migration processes by relating it to the evolution of the basin and fluid migration is perhaps the single technological capability that could most improve our ability to explore effectively because it would allow us to use a vast store of existing or easily collected chemical data to determine the major migration pathways in a basin and to determine if there is deep exploration potential. To this end a the DOE funded a joint effort between California Institute of Technology, Cornell University, and GeoGroup Inc. to assemble a representative set of maturity and maturation kinetic models and develop an advanced basin model able to predict the chemistry of hydrocarbons in a basin from this input data. The four year project is now completed and has produced set of public domain …

Argonne National Laboratory's efforts toward researching, proposing and then building a high-energy proton accelerator have been discussed in a handful of studies. In the main, these have concentrated on the intense maneuvering amongst politicians, universities, government agencies, outside corporations, and laboratory officials to obtain (or block) approval and/or funds or to establish who would have control over budgets and research programs. These ''top-down'' studies are very important but they can also serve to divorce such proceedings from the individuals actually involved in the ground-level research which physically served to create theories, designs, machines, and experiments. This can lead to a skewed picture, on the one hand, of a lack of effect that so-called scientific and technological factors exert and, on the other hand, of the apparent separation of the so-called social or political from the concrete practice of doing physics. An exception to this approach can be found in the proceedings of a conference on ''History of the ZGS'' held at Argonne at the time of the Zero Gradient Synchrotron's decommissioning in 1979. These accounts insert the individuals quite literally as they are, for the most part, personal reminiscences of those who took part in these efforts on the ground …

We provide a framework for preconditioning nonlinear 3D electromagnetic inverse scattering problems using nonlinear conjugate gradient (NLCG) and limited memory (LM) quasi-Newton methods. Key to our approach is the use of an approximate adjoint method that allows for an economical approximation of the Hessian that is updated at each inversion iteration. Using this approximate Hessian as a preconditoner, we show that the preconditioned NLCG iteration converges significantly faster than the non-preconditioned iteration, as well as converging to a data misfit level below that observed for the non-preconditioned method. Similar conclusions are also observed for the LM iteration; preconditioned with the approximate Hessian, the LM iteration converges faster than the non-preconditioned version. At this time, however, we see little difference between the convergence performance of the preconditioned LM scheme and the preconditioned NLCG scheme. A possible reason for this outcome is the behavior of the line search within the LM iteration. It was anticipated that, near convergence, a step size of one would be approached, but what was observed, instead, were step lengths that were nowhere near one. We provide some insights into the reasons for this behavior and suggest further research that may improve the performance of the LM methods.

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

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We consider the possibility that supernovae which form hyper-accreting black holes might be responsible for synthesis of r-process elements with mass A {approx}< 130. Calculations are presented which show that these elements are naturally synthesized in neutron-rich magnetically-dominated bubbles born in the inner regions of a black hole accretion disk. Simple considerations suggest that the total mass ejected in the form of these bubbles is about that needed to account for the entire galactic inventory of the 2nd-peak r-process elements. We also argue that if collapsars are responsible for, e.g., Ag synthesis, then Ag abundances should be correlated with Sc and/or Zn abundances in metal-poor stars.

From Summary: "This report discusses significant legislative provisions in the two principal bills that are likely to be the subject of congressional discussion in the coming weeks and months to reauthorize federal highway, highway safety, and transit programs."

Recent 2{omega} laser propagation and stimulated Raman backscatter (SRS) experiments performed on the Helen laser have been analyzed using the radiation-hydrodynamics code hydra. These experiments utilized two diagnostics sensitive to the hydrodynamics of gasbag targets: a fast x-ray framing camera (FXI) and an SRS streak spectrometer. With a newly implemented nonlocal thermal transport model, hydra is able to reproduce many features seen in the FXI images and the SRS streak spectra. Experimental and simulated side-on FXI images suggest that propagation can be explained by classical laser absorption and the resulting hydrodynamics. Synthetic SRS spectra generated from the hydra results reproduce the details of the experimental SRS streak spectra. Most features in the synthetic spectra can be explained solely by axial density and temperature gradients. The total SRS backscatter increases with initial gasbag fill density up to {approx} 0.08 times the critical density, then decreases. Images from a near-backscatter camera (NBI) show that severe beam spray is not responsible for the trend in total backscatter. Filamentation does not appear to be a significant factor in gasbag hydrodynamics. The simulation and analysis techniques established here can be used in upcoming experimental campaigns on the Omega laser facility and the National Ignition Facility.

This report presents information on the history of federal regulation of the cable television industry and background information on cable rates and other cable industry issues.