This report provides a concise historical account of the dispute, summarizes the subsidy and injury evidence, and discusses the current issues and events regarding lumber imports from Canada.

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Under provisions of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA, P.L. 107-16, enacted June 7, 2001), the estate tax is scheduled to be repealed in 2010 but reinstated in 2011. All tax cut provisions of EGTRRA are scheduled to sunset on December 31, 2010. This report tracks actions in the 108th Congress to permanently repeal the estate tax or to retain but alter the tax.

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Congressional Research Service (CRS) report entailing information about the E-rate program and controversies in regards to telecommunications discounts for schools and libraries. Topics include, recent developments, scope and funding, program status, etc.

Ensemble concert presented at the UNT College of Music Concert Hall.

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Small communities have long faced challenges in obtaining or retaining the commercial air service they desire. These challenges are increasing as many U.S. airlines try to stem unprecedented financial losses through numerous cost-cutting measures, including reducing or eliminating service in some markets, often small communities. Congress will be considering whether to reauthorize its federal assistance programs for small communities. GAO was asked to describe the kinds of efforts that states and local communities have taken to enhance air service at small communities; federal programs for enhancing air service to small communities; and issues regarding the type and extent of federal assistance to enhance air service to small communities."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This letter is to highlight internal control advice we offered in our December 2002 decision to four certifying officers of the Department of Transportation (DOT). Their July 24, 2002 letter had requested a Comptroller General decision related to certifying payroll payments. Pursuant to 31 U.S.C. 3529, the four certifying officers asked us whether the method of approving an employee's time and attendance (T&A) information in the T&A system, to which the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is transitioning, meets the requirements of Title 6 of GAO's Policy and Procedures Manual for Guidance of Federal Agencies."

Coupled modeling of subsurface multiphase fluid and heat flow, solute transport and chemical reactions can be used for the assessment of acid mine drainage remediation, waste disposal sites, hydrothermal convection, contaminant transport, and groundwater quality. We have developed a comprehensive numerical simulator, TOUGHREACT, which considers non-isothermal multi-component chemical transport in both liquid and gas phases. A wide range of subsurface thermo-physical-chemical processes is considered under various thermohydrological and geochemical conditions of pressure, temperature, water saturation, and ionic strength. The code can be applied to one-, two- or three-dimensional porous and fractured media with physical and chemical heterogeneity.

Staff of Brookhaven National Laboratory, Columbia University, IBM and the RIKEN BNL Research Center organized a one-day workshop held on February 28, 2003 at Brookhaven to promote the following goals: (1) To explore areas other than QCD applications where the QCDOC and BlueGene/L machines can be applied to good advantage, (2) To identify areas where collaboration among the sponsoring institutions can be fruitful, and (3) To expose scientists to the emerging software architecture. This workshop grew out of an informal visit last fall by BNL staff to the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center that resulted in a continuing dialog among participants on issues common to these two related supercomputers. The workshop was divided into three sessions, addressing the hardware and software status of each system, prospective applications, and future directions.

As Grid permeates modern computing, Grid solutions continue to emerge and take shape. The actual Grid development projects continue to provide higher-level services that evolve in functionality and operate with application-level concepts which are often specific to the virtual organizations that use them. Physically, however, grids are comprised of sites whose resources are diverse and seldom project readily onto a grid's set of concepts. In practice, this also creates problems for site administrators who actually instantiate grid services. In this paper, we present a flexible, uniform framework to configure a grid site and its facilities, and otherwise describe the resources and services it offers. We start from a site configuration and instantiate services for resource advertisement, monitoring and data handling; we also apply our framework to hosting environment creation. We use our ideas in the Information Management part of the SAM-Grid project, a grid system which will deliver petabyte-scale data to the hundreds of users. Our users are High Energy Physics experimenters who are scattered worldwide across dozens of institutions and always use facilities that are shared with other experiments as well as other grids. Our implementation represents information in the XML format and includes tools written in XQuery and …

The application of forensic science techniques to electrical equipment failure investigation has not been widely documented in the engineering world. This paper is intended to share an example of using material characterization techniques to support an initial cause determination of an electrical component failure event. The resulting conclusion supported the initial cause determination and ruled out the possibility of design deficiencies. Thus, the qualification testing of the equipment was allowed to continue to successful completion.

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 nonradioactive 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 products.

This paper describes tomographic capabilities for the Nuclear Materials Identification System (NMIS). The tomographic capabilities add weapons component spatial and material properties information that result in a more detailed item signature (template) and provide more information for physical attributes analyses. The Nuclear Materials Identification System (NMIS) is used routinely to confirm the identity of HEU components in sealed containers. It does this through a radiation signature acquired by shining a {sup 252}Cf source through the container and measuring the radiation at four detectors stacked vertically on the other side. This measurement gives a gamma and neutron radiation transmission profile of the weapons component, mixed with the radiation production due to the induced fissions in the fissile materials. This information is sufficient to match an "unknown" weapons component signature to a template signature from a reference item when measuring under controlled conditions. Tomography measures the interior of an item by making transmission measurements from all angles around the item, whereas NMIS makes the measurements from a single angle. Figure 1 is a standard example of tomographic reconstruction, the Shepp-Logan human brain phantom. The measured quantity is attenuation so high values (white) are highly attenuating areas.

We present a simple analytical solution for one dimensional steady heat transfer with convection and conduction through a multi-layer system such as a vadose zone. We assume that each layer is homogeneous and has a constant thermal diffusivity. The mass/heat flow direction is perpendicular to the layers, and the mass flow rate is a constant. The analytical solution presented in this study also assumes constant known temperatures at the two boundaries of the system. Although the analytical solution gives the temperature as a function of a few parameters, we focus on the inverse application to estimate the percolation rate to high degree of accuracy (e.g., to mm/y). In some other cases the solution may also be helpful in characterizing potential lateral flow along layer divides.

OAK-B135 Results obtained during this funding period: (1) Phylogenetic footprinting of AG regulatory sequences Sequences necessary and sufficient for AGAMOUS (AG) expression in the center of Arabidopsis flowers are located in the second intron, which is about 3 kb in size. This intron contains binding sites for two transcription factors, LEAFY (LFY) and WUSCHEL (WUS), which are direct activators of AG. We used the new method of phylogenetic shadowing to identify new regulatory elements. Among 29 Brassicaceae, several other motifs, but not the LFY and WUS binding sites previously identified, are largely invariant. Using reporter gene analyses, we tested six of these motifs and found that they are all functionally important for activity of AG regulatory sequences in A. thaliana. (2) Repression of AG by MADS box genes A candidate for repressing AG in the shoot apical meristem has been the MADS box gene FUL, since it is expressed in the shoot apical meristem and since an activated version (FUL:VP16) leads to ectopic AG expression in the shoot apical meristem. However, there is no ectopic AG expression in full single mutants. We therefore started to generate VP16 fusions of several other MADS box genes expressed in the shoot apical meristem, …

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This report contains a summary of the assistance to firefighters program, also known as the FIRE Act grant program.

Weekly newspaper from Emory, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

The trans-polyproline (PII) oligomers (Figure 1) are unusually rigid peptide structures which have been extensively studied by our group for peptide mediated intramolecular electron transfer (ET) at long distances. We have previously studied ET across a series of metal ion donor (D) acceptor (A) oligoproline peptides with different distances, driving forces and reorganizational energies. The majority of these experiments involve generating the ET intermediate using pulse radiolysis methods, although more recently photochemical methods are also used. Results of these studies showed that ET across peptides can vary by more than twelve orders of magnitude. Using ruthenium bipyridine donors, ET reaction rate constants across several proline residues (n = 4 - 9) occurred in the millisecond (ms) to {micro}s timescale, thus limiting the proline peptide conformational motions to only minor changes (far smaller than the large changes that occur on the ms to sec timescale, such as trans to cis proline isomerization). The present report describes our large data base of experimental results for D-peptide-A complexes in terms of a model where the involvement of both superexchange and hopping (hole and electron) mechanisms account for the long range ET rate constants observed. Our data shows that the change from superexchange to …

We present a systematic investigation on the formation of the highly mismatched alloy GaN{sub x}As{sub 1-x} using N{sup +}-implantation followed by a combination of pulsed laser melting and rapid thermal annealing. Thin films of GaN{sub x}As{sub 1-x} with x as high as 0.016 and an activation efficiency of the implanted N up to 50% have been synthesized with structural and optical properties comparable to films grown by epitaxial deposition techniques with similar substitutional N content. The effects of N{sup +} implantation dose, laser energy fluence and rapid thermal annealing temperature on the N incorporation as well as optical and structural properties of the GaN{sub x}As{sub 1-x} films are discussed.