Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "We evaluated fiscal year 2002 activity affecting distributions to the Unemployment Trust Fund (UTF)."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "We evaluated fiscal year 2002 activity affecting distributors to the Airport and Airway Trust Fund (AATF)."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies, Committee on Appropriations, and the Ranking Minority Member, House Subcommittee on Legislative, Committee on Appropriations, requested that we review the Library's Special Events Gift Fund. As agreed, we focused on the Library's analysis supporting its June 2000 decision to increase suggested room contributions associated with the Great Hall effective January 2001, and key policies, procedures, and controls associated with holding the approximately 120 fiscal year 2001 special events that were accounted for in the Gift Fund. Specifically, we agreed to (1) review and comment on the analysis behind the Library's January 2001 increase in the suggested room contributions from outside sponsors of events held in the Great Hall of the Jefferson Building; (2) identify key policies and procedures applicable to requesting, approving, and planning those special events accounted for through the Gift Fund and determine whether the Library is following those policies and procedures; and (3) identify key accounting and control policies and procedures over receipts, expenditures, and the fund balance of the Gift Fund and determine whether the Library is following those policies and procedures."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "We evaluated fiscal year 2002 activity affecting distributions to the Highway Trust Fund (HTF)."

This report is the second of a series of studies to evaluate research and development (R&D) projects funded by the Automotive Lightweighting Materials (ALM) Program of the Office of Advanced Automotive Technologies (OAAT) of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The objectives of the program evaluation are to assess short-run outputs and long-run outcomes that may be attributable to the ALM R&D projects. The ALM program focuses on the development and validation of advanced technologies that significantly reduce automotive vehicle body and chassis weight without compromising other attributes such as safety, performance, recyclability, and cost. Funded projects range from fundamental materials science research to applied research in production environments. Collaborators on these projects include national laboratories, universities, and private sector firms, such as leading automobile manufacturers and their suppliers. Three ALM R&D projects were chosen for this evaluation: Design and Product Optimization for Cast Light Metals, Durability of Lightweight Composite Structures, and Rapid Tooling for Functional Prototyping of Metal Mold Processes. These projects were chosen because they have already been completed. The first project resulted in development of a comprehensive cast light metal property database, an automotive application design guide, computerized predictive models, process monitoring sensors, and quality assurance methods. …

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas Senate and House of Representatives relating to granting the legislature permission to adjourn for more than three days during the period beginning on Thursday, January 16, 2003, and ending on Tuesday, January 21, 2003.

The Constitution of the United States makes no specific allowance for any one of the co-equal branches to have access to information held by the others and contains no provision expressly establishing a procedure for, or a right of, public access to government information. Nonetheless, Congress has legislated various public access laws. These include two records access statutes — the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act — and two meetings access statutes — the Federal Advisory Committee Act and the Government in the Sunshine Act. This report provides background on the issue of government transparency and examines relevant litigation.

The Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has entered into an interagency agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under which Argonne National Laboratory provides technical assistance for hazardous waste site characterization and remediation for the CCC/USDA. Carbon tetrachloride is the contaminant of primary concern at sites in Kansas where former CCC/USDA grain storage facilities were located. Argonne applies its QuickSite(reg sign) Expedited Site Characterization (ESC) approach to these former facilities. The QuickSite environmental site characterization methodology is Argonne's proprietary implementation of the ESC process (ASTM 1998). Argonne has used this approach at several former CCC/USDA facilities in Kansas, including Agenda, Agra, Everest, and Frankfort. The Argonne ESC approach revolves around a multidisciplinary, team-oriented approach to problem solving. The basic features and steps of the QuickSite methodology are as follows: (1) A team of scientists with diverse expertise and strong field experience is required to make the process work. The Argonne team is composed of geologists, geochemists, geophysicists, hydrogeologists, chemists, biologists, engineers, computer scientists, health and safety personnel, and regulatory staff, as well as technical support staff. Most of the staff scientists are at the Ph.D. level; each has on average, more than 15 …

The term ''Distributed energy resources'' or DER refers to a variety of compact, mostly self-contained power-generating technologies that can be combined with energy management and storage systems and used to improve the operation of the electricity distribution system, whether or not those technologies are connected to an electricity grid. Implementing DER can be as simple as installing a small electric generator to provide backup power at an electricity consumer's site. Or it can be a more complex system, highly integrated with the electricity grid and consisting of electricity generation, energy storage, and power management systems. DER devices provide opportunities for greater local control of electricity delivery and consumption. They also enable more efficient utilization of waste heat in combined cooling, heating and power (CHP) applications--boosting efficiency and lowering emissions. CHP systems can provide electricity, heat and hot water for industrial processes, space heating and cooling, refrigeration, and humidity control to improve indoor air quality. DER technologies are playing an increasingly important role in the nation's energy portfolio. They can be used to meet base load power, peaking power, backup power, remote power, power quality, as well as cooling and heating needs. DER systems, ranging in size and capacity from a …

Caching techniques have been used to improve the performance gap of storage hierarchies in computing systems. In data intensive applications that access large data files over wide area network environment, such as a data grid,caching mechanism can significantly improve the data access performance under appropriate workloads. In a data grid, it is envisioned that local disk storage resources retain or cache the data files being used by local application. Under a workload of shared access and high locality of reference, the performance of the caching techniques depends heavily on the replacement policies being used. A replacement policy effectively determines which set of objects must be evicted when space is needed. Unlike cache replacement policies in virtual memory paging or database buffering, developing an optimal replacement policy for data grids is complicated by the fact that the file objects being cached have varying sizes and varying transfer and processing costs that vary with time. We present an accurate model for evaluating various replacement policies and propose a new replacement algorithm referred to as ''Least Cost Beneficial based on K backward references (LCB-K).'' Using this modeling technique, we compare LCB-K with various replacement policies such as Least Frequently Used (LFU), Least Recently …

A theoretical study is reported of the transition between the ground state ({sup 1}A{sub g}) and the lowest triplet state (1{sup 3}B{sub 1u}) of ethylene based on the diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) variant of the quantum Monte Carlo method. Using DMC trial functions constructed from Hartree-Fock, complete active space self-consistent field and multi-configuration self-consistent field wave functions, we have computed the atomization energy and the heat of formation of both states, and adiabatic and vertical energy differences between these states using both all-electron and effective core potential DMC. The ground state atomization energy and heat of formation are found to agree with experiment to within the error bounds of the computation and experiment. Predictions by DMC of the triplet state atomization energy and heat of formation are presented. The adiabatic singlet-triplet energy difference is found to differ by 5 kcal/mol from the value obtained in a recent photodissociation experiment.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory Refinery Yield Model has been used to study the refining cost, investment, and operating impacts of specifications for reformulated diesel fuel (RFD) produced in refineries of the U.S. Midwest in summer of year 2010. The study evaluates different diesel fuel reformulation investment pathways. The study also determines whether there are refinery economic benefits for producing an emissions reduction RFD (with flexibility for individual property values) compared to a vehicle performance RFD (with inflexible recipe values for individual properties). Results show that refining costs are lower with early notice of requirements for RFD. While advanced desulfurization technologies (with low hydrogen consumption and little effect on cetane quality and aromatics content) reduce the cost of ultra low sulfur diesel fuel, these technologies contribute to the increased costs of a delayed notice investment pathway compared to an early notice investment pathway for diesel fuel reformulation. With challenging RFD specifications, there is little refining benefit from producing emissions reduction RFD compared to vehicle performance RFD. As specifications become tighter, processing becomes more difficult, blendstock choices become more limited, and refinery benefits vanish for emissions reduction relative to vehicle performance specifications. Conversely, the emissions reduction specifications show increasing refinery benefits …

We submitted a progress report covering the first year of work on this grant on October 10, 2000. Though originally envisioned as a three-year grant, this work was not, in fact, funded after the first year. Thus, we hereby submit a report that is basically the same as the report submitted on October 10, 2000. In the first year of this project we prepared the groundwork for moving to automatic discovery, secure access to data servers, applications and controls, and migration to object approaches to data storage. We built and installed the secure Apache web server. It can be accessed at https://fusion.txcorp.com. We are able to configure this web server so that access is limited to a set of persons based on their Public Key Infrastructure certificates. Secondly, we developed signed applets for the National Transport Code Collaboration Demonstration Code, as are needed for secure access to the data and physics servers being developed by that project. Signed applets assure the user that the applet is the official version, and so it will not corrupt their machine. The also assure the server that the commands that come over are from a valid applet. In addition we began working with the …

The NuTeV collaboration has performed precision measurements of the ratio of neutral current to charged current cross-sections in high rate, high energy neutrino and anti-neutrino beams on a dense, primarily steel, target. The separate neutrino and anti-neutrino beams, high statistics, and improved control of other experimental systematics, allow the determination of electroweak parameters with significantly greater precision than past {nu}N scattering experiments. Our null hypothesis test of the standard model prediction measures sin{sup 2} {theta}{sub W}{sup (on-shell)} = 0.2277 {+-} 0.0013(stat) {+-} 0.0009(syst), a value which is 3.0{sigma} above the prediction. We discuss possible explanations for and implications of this discrepancy.

We propose that neutrino-proton elastic scattering, {nu} + p {yields} {nu} + p, can be used for the detection of supernova neutrinos. Though the proton recoil kinetic energy spectrum is soft, with T{sub p} {approx_equal} 2E{sub {nu}}{sup 2}/M{sub p}, and the scintillation light output from slow, heavily ionizing protons is quenched, the yield above a realistic threshold is nearly as large as that from {bar {nu}}{sub e} + p {yields} e{sup +} + n. In addition, the measured proton spectrum is related to the incident neutrino spectrum, which solves a long-standing problem of how to separately measure the total energy release and temperature of {nu}{sub {mu}}, {nu}{sub {tau}}, {bar {nu}}{sub {mu}}, and {bar {nu}}{sub {tau}}. The ability to detect this signal would give detectors like KamLAND and Borexino a crucial and unique role in the quest to detect supernova neutrinos.

This report discusses federal, state, and local government funding for faith-based organizations (FBOs) to provide services to needy citizens. It provides an overview of several selected issues including the effectiveness of FBOs, their accountability for results, and the working relationship that FBOs have at various levels of government.

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This report discusses policy developments from 2001 through 2002 related to China-U.S. Relations in the 107th Congress. It also points out the Key Events in Bilateral Relations and Human Rights in U.S.-China Relations.

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A new method of processing multivariate response data to extract chemical information has been developed. Sensor array response patterns are transformed into a vector containing values for solvation parameter descriptors of the detected vapor's properties. These results can be obtained by using a method similar to classical least squares, and equations have been derived for mass-transducing sensors or volume-transducing sensors. Polymer-coated acoustic wave devices are an example of mass-transducing sensors. However, some acoustic wave sensors, such as polymer-coated surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices give responses resulting from both mass-loading and decreases in modulus. The latter effect can be modeled as a volume effect. In this paper we derive solutions for obtaining descriptor values from arrays of mass-plus-volume-transducing sensors. Simulations were performed to investigate the effectiveness of these solutions and to compare them with solutions for purely mass-transducing sensor arrays. It is concluded that this new method of processing sensor array data can be applied to SAW sensor arrays even when the modulus changes contribute to the responses. The simulations show that good estimations of vapor descriptors can be obtained by using a closed form estimation approach that is similar to the closed form solution for purely mass-transducing sensor arrays. Estimations …

This report focuses on democratic and republican party procedures related to committee assignment process in the U.S. Senate.

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Tangled magnetic field lines are common in laboratory and space plasmas, but determining the geometrical structure of magnetic fields in the presence of plasma is a difficult and still unresolved problem. To address this open question we developed and tested a new technique for measuring the magnetic field-line topology in magnetically confined plasmas. Our field-line tracing diagnostic (FLIRT) uses a high-power, short-pulse laser to launch a burst of energetic ({approx}100 keV) electrons from a target passing through the plasma. These electrons then generally follow magnetic-field lines until they strike a solid surface, where a burst of x-rays is produced. The field-line connection length can be determined from the time delay between the laser pulse and the burst of x-rays. The topology of the field lines can be inferred by measuring the connection length as a function of initial target location inside the plasma. Measuring the spatial distribution of x-ray production provides further information on the field topology, including the effects of magnetic field fluctuations and stochasticity. The goals of this experiment were to test the appropriate x-ray detectors; measure the background x-ray emission in a spheromak plasma; measure the energetic electron production by a short-pulse, high-power laser; make preliminary measurements …

The final report for Phase 1 of this research effort (ORNL/SUB/94-SV004/1) concluded that a significant market opportunity would exist for active desiccant systems if it could be demonstrated that they can remove a significant proportion of common airborne contaminants while simultaneously performing the primary function of dehumidifying a stream of outdoor air or recirculated building air. If the engineering community begins to follow the intent of ASHRAE Standard 62, now part of all major building codes, the outdoor air in many major cities may need to be pre-cleaned before it is introduced into occupied spaces. Common air contaminant cosorption capability would provide a solution to three important aspects of the ASHRAE 62-89 standard that have yet to be effectively addressed by heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) equipment manufacturers: (1) The ASHRAE standard defines acceptable outdoor air quality. If the outdoor air contains unacceptable levels of certain common outdoor air contaminants (e.g., sulfur dioxide, ozone), then the standard requires that these contaminants be removed from the outdoor air stream to reach compliance with the acceptable outdoor air quality guidelines. (2) Some engineers prefer to apply a filtration or prescriptive approach rather than a ventilation approach to solving indoor air quality problems. …