Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the Social Security Administration's (SSA) new rule on the effective date of application for Supplemental Security Income benefits. GAO noted that: (1) the rule implements section 204 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which changes the date a social security application is effective so that the earliest month for which benefits can be paid is the month following the month in which the application is filed; (2) previously, benefits were prorated for the month in which the application was filed; (3) the rule makes changes concerning emergency advance payments, interim assistance reimbursements, and in the definition of eligible spouse; and (4) SSA complied with applicable requirements in promulgating the rule."

A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the status of the Department of Energy's (DOE) Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), focusing on: (1) whether the program is meeting its key milestones and whether hardware and software developments are adequate to date; (2) whether the program is within its projected budget; and (3) what key technical risks the program faces."

A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the issues associated with individual social security accounts, focusing on how such accounts could affect: (1) private capital and annuities markets as well as national savings; (2) potential returns and risks to individuals; and (3) the disclosure and educational efforts needed to inform the public about such a program."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO provided information on the reliability of the Department of Defense's (DOD) depot inventory records, focusing on: (1) DOD's procedures for verifying the accuracy of its perpetual inventory records; and (2) the internal controls over the Defense Logistics Agency's (DLA) physical inventory process to determine whether they provide a reliable, accurate measure of the perpetual inventory records."

A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO provided information on the factors affecting families' costs for disability-related services, focusing on: (1) the disability-related expenses incurred by families of children on Supplemental Security Income (SSI) that are not covered by federal, state, and local programs serving children with disabilities and the factors that influence the level of such costs; and (2) factors affecting families' receipt of disability-related services from programs."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the impact of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 on the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Program, focusing on the Social Security Administration's (SSA) progress in: (1) redetermining the eligibility of children already receiving benefits against the law's new eligibility criteria; (2) implementing the law's requirements for ongoing continuing disability reviews (CDR) and the related treatment provision; and (3) revising the interim final regulations to implement the law's eligibility criteria and the medical listings for childhood impairments, which are used to determine whether a child is disabled."

This Determination of Importance Evaluation (DIE) applies to the Subsurface Exploratory Studies Facility (ESF), encompassing the Topopah Spring (TS) Loop from Station 0+00 meters (m) at the North Portal to breakthrough at the South Portal (approximately 78+77 m), the Enhanced Characterization of the Repository Block (ECRB) East-West Cross Drift Starter Tunnel (to approximate ECRB Station 0+26 m), and ancillary test and operation support areas in the TS Loop. This evaluation applies to the construction, operation, and maintenance of these excavations. A more detailed description of these items is provided in Section 6.0. Testing activities are not evaluated in this DIE. Certain construction activities with respect to testing activities are evaluated; but the testing activities themselves are not evaluated. The DIE for ESF Subsurface Testing Activities (BAJ3000000-01717-2200-00011 Rev 01) (CRWMS M&O 1998a) evaluates Subsurface ESF Testing activities. The construction, operation, and maintenance of the TS Loop niches and alcove slot cuts is evaluated herein and is also discussed in CRWMS M&O 1998a. The construction, operation, and maintenance of the Busted Butte subsurface test area in support of the Unsaturated Zone (UZ) Transport Test is evaluated in CRWMS M&O 1998a. Potential test-to-test interference and the waste isolation impacts of testing activities are …

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A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Air Transportation Oversight System (ATOS), focusing on: (1) to what extent ATOS addresses past concerns about FAA's aviation safety inspections; (2) what factors, if any, surfaced during the implementation of ATOS that could impede its success; and (3) what FAA is doing to address any factors that could impede the success of ATOS."

IN THIS PAPER, RESULTS FROM IMPEDANCE MEASUREMENTS ON THE RHIC INJECTION KICKERS ARE REPORTED. THE KICKER IS CONFIGURED AS A ''C'' CROSS SECTION MAGNET WITH INTERLEAVED FERRITE AND HIGH-PERMITTIVITY DIELECTRIC SECTIONS TO ACHIEVE A TRAVELLING WAVE STRUCTURE. THE IMPEDANCE WAS MEASURED USING THE WIRE METHOD, AND ACCURATE RESULTS ARE OBTAINED BY INTERPRETING THE FORWARD SCATTERING COEFFICIENT VIA THE LONG-FORMULA. THE FOUR KICKERS WITH THEIR CERAMIC BEAM TUBES CONTRIBUE AT Z/N-0.22 OMEGA/RING IN THE INTERESTING FREQUENCY RANGE FROM 0.1 TO 1 BHZ, AND LESS ABOVE.

In this study we characterize electronic effects in short-period ({approx}20 {angstrom}) metallic multilayer films in which 40% of the atoms are at an interface using near-edge (L{sub 3,2}) x-ray absorption. This study investigates Cu/TM where TM = Cr, MO, W, Ta, Re. These immiscible elemental pairs are ideal to study as they form no compounds and exhibit terminal solid solubility. An interest in the charge transfer between elements in alloys and compounds has led to studies using x-ray absorption as described above. Near edge x-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS), a technique used for analyzing x-ray absorption near the absorption edge of the element, is especially suited to study the amount of unoccupied states in the conduction band of a metal. The d-metals spectra show large peaks at the absorption edges called ''white lines.'' These are due to the unoccupied d-states just above the Fermi level in these metals. A study of the white lines in the 3d metals show that as the d-band is increasingly occupied the white lines decrease in intensity. Starting with Ti (3d{sup 2} 4s{sup 2}), which has an almost empty d-band and shows strong white lines, the white-line intensities decrease across the Periodic Chart to Cu …

Vibrational spectroscopic and electrochemical techniques are among the most useful tools for the elucidation of corrosion-passivation phenomena in metals. The former can provide information on the structure and composition of corrosion films ''in situ'' in aqueous solution environments, while thermodynamic and kinetic information may be obtained using electrochemical techniques. In this paper, we demonstrate the application of Laser Raman Scattering (LRS) and Synchrotrons Far Infrared Reflectance Spectroscopy (SFIRS), coupled with electrochemical methods, for the determination of the structure and composition of surface films on nickel and copper in aqueous solution environment. The corrosion film on nickel has been found to consist of NiO and Ni(OH){sub 2} in the passive region of potential and NiOOH in the transpassive region. The film on copper consists of Cu{sub 2}O, CUO and Cu(OH){sub 2}. We also show for the first time that SFIRS can be used to obtain information on the adsorption of ions on a metal surface with sub-monolayer sensitivity. Adsorption of Cl{sup {minus}}, Br{sup {minus}}, SO{sup {minus}2}, and PO{sub 4}{sup {minus}3} was found to occur at gold electrodes in perchloric acid solution. We also observed that when two different ions are present in solution, the more strongly adsorbed ion determined the corrosion …

In the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne, the demand for resources on the Onyx 2 exceeds the resources available for consumption. To distribute these scarce resources effectively, we need a scheduling and resource management package with multiple capabilities. In particular, it must accept standard interactive user logins, allow batch jobs, backfill the system based on available resources, and permit system activities such as accounting to proceed without interruption. The package must include a mechanism to treat the graphic pipes as a schedulable resource. Also required is the ability to create advance reservations, offer dedicated system modes for large resource runs and benchmarking, and track the resources consumed for each job run. Furthermore, our users want to be able to obtain repeatable timing results on job runs. And, of course, package costs must be carefully considered. We explored several options, including NQE and various third-party products, before settling on the PBS scheduler.

Results are presented for fabrication and test of a WR10 waveguide window, for use in ultra-high vacuum at 91.4 GHz. Low-power bench measurements are compared with analytic and simulation results. Operation at approximately equal to 4-kW peak power, duty factor 10{sup {minus}6} and 10{sup {minus}9}-scale vacuum is noted.

Laboratory measurements of the electrical resistivity of rocks and synthetic rocks with confining pressures up to 100 bars and temperatures between 20 and 211 C were performed to further investigate how the pore-size distribution and capillarity affects boiling in porous media. Similar to previous measurements on samples from The Geysers, CA, we observed a gradual increase in resistivity when pore pressure was decreased below the phase-boundary pressure of free water, an indication that boiling is controlled not only by temperature and pressure, but also by pore size distribution. Other important phenomena observed were strong resistance fluctuations during boiling that may be chaotic, and salt deposition that caused sample cracking. If confirmed in further experiments, these results may lead to a new geophysical diagnostic for locating boiling in high permeability areas of geothermal reservoirs and for methods of permeability alteration.

An effective two-body nuclear interaction is presented which is a sum of terms separable in coordinate space. Calculations are made using this interaction of some doubly closed-shell spherical nuclei using many-body perturbation theory with the Hartree-Fock state as a reference state. It is demonstrated that the interaction gives good bulk properties in finite nuclei.

There are many physical characterization approaches which evaluate a limited set of structural elements in multilayers: they study a single interface; they study a single layer of material; they study a very small sample of a multilayer. On a broader basis, the interference phenomena on which the performance of x-ray optic multilayers is based integrates over the full area/volume of the multilayer illuminated. In order to gain understanding of the impact of imperfections on multilayer performance it is necessary to develop an experimental approach that provides detailed information about the effects of interfaces in the multilayer obtained when the multilayer is being applied in a manner directly related to application. Additionally, it is also of interest to determine the breadth of application of any such experimental approach to the general study of interfaces in solids. The primary goal in this research was to develop an experimental methodology to quantitatively characterize both the physical and electronic characteristics of interfaces in multilayer structures. The approach was to fabricate multilayers from three elements so that one monolayer or less thick ''marker layers'' were selectively deposited on a given set interfaces in the multilayer. These ''marker layers'' could then interrogated by scattering and fluorescence …

We present a robust, model-independent technique for measuring changes in the dynamics underlying nonlinear time-serial data. We define indicators of dynamical change by comparing distribution functions on the attractor via L{sub 1}-distance and X{sup 2} statistics. We apply the measures to scalp EEG data with the objective of capturing the transition between non-seizure and epileptic brain activity in a timely, accurate, and non-invasive manner. We find a clear superiority of the new metrics in comparison to traditional nonlinear measures as discriminators of dynamical change.

The Oak Ridge Y-12 plant has implemented a methodology for characterizing parts and assemblies based on their as-measured condition. Complete solid models of each part in an assembly are created to represent these measurements. The models produced can be analyzed for mass properties, relative shape variations, interference checking, and optimal mating between components. This report describes the methodology used to take a relatively sparse set of measured inspection points and generate a representative fully analytical solid model.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is developing a prototype 850-nm FMCW lidar system for mapping tissue damage in burn cases for the US Army Medical Research and Material Command. The laser system will provide a 3D-image map of the burn and surrounding area and provide tissue damage assessment.

This report addresses Legislative Branch Appropriations for FY2000 passed on June 10, 1999.

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

Photograph of the historic Tucker Tower, in the Lake Murray State Park.