Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "For 2001 through the third quarter of 2003, the U.S. airline industry reported operating losses of $20.7 billion. A number of factors--including the economic slowdown, a shift in business travel buying behavior, and the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks--contributed to these losses by reducing passenger and cargo volumes and depressing fares. To improve their financial position, many airlines cut costs by various means, notably by reducing labor expenditures and by decreasing capacity through cutting flight frequencies, using smaller aircraft, or eliminating service to some communities. Carriers have also reduced some airfares to encourage travel. Despite these efforts, several airlines filed for bankruptcy protection. It remains to be seen when the industry will emerge from this downturn. In response to the industry's financial condition, Congress has provided several forms of financial relief. In September 2001, Congress passed the Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act, which authorized payments of up to $4.5 billion in pretax cash assistance to reimburse air carriers for losses incurred as a direct result of the 4-day government shut-down of air traffic and incremental losses stemming from the terrorist attacks and also …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "From 1994 to 2003, the use of government purchase cards exploded from $1 billion to $16 billion. Most purchase card transactions are for small purchases, less than $2,500. While agencies estimate that using purchase cards saves hundreds of millions of dollars in administrative costs, the rapid growth of the purchase card presents opportunities for agencies to negotiate discounts with major vendors, thereby better leveraging agencies' buying power. To discover whether agencies were doing this, we examined program management and cardholder practices at the Departments of Agriculture, Army, Navy, Air Force, Interior, Justice, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs. GAO also examined why agencies may not have explored these opportunities."

Weekly newspaper from Dallas, Texas that includes local, state, and national news and advertising of interest to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community.

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, if a county commissioners court invalidly set the county sheriff’s salary at an amount higher than the increased proposed salary listed in the published notice, the county may pay the sheriff only the salary he received in the previous budget year (RQ-0108-GA)

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 Texas A&M University System is authorized to administer charitable remainder trusts (RQ-0110-GA)

Big computers are icons: symbols of the culture, and of the larger computing infrastructure that exists at Lawrence Livermore. Through the collective effort of Laboratory personnel, they enable scientific discovery and engineering development on an unprecedented scale. For more than three decades, the Computation Directorate has supplied the big computers that enable the science necessary for Laboratory missions and programs. Livermore supercomputing is uniquely mission driven. The high-fidelity weapon simulation capabilities essential to the Stockpile Stewardship Program compel major advances in weapons codes and science, compute power, and computational infrastructure. Computation's activities align with this vital mission of the Department of Energy. Increasingly, non-weapons Laboratory programs also rely on computer simulation. World-class achievements have been accomplished by LLNL specialists working in multi-disciplinary research and development teams. In these teams, Computation personnel employ a wide array of skills, from desktop support expertise, to complex applications development, to advanced research. Computation's skilled professionals make the Directorate the success that it has become. These individuals know the importance of the work they do and the many ways it contributes to Laboratory missions. They make appropriate and timely decisions that move the entire organization forward. They make Computation a leader in helping LLNL achieve …

Newspaper article about the Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS charitable runway show.

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

Aluminum can promote formation or dissolution of networks in hydroxide solid solutions. When present in large amounts it will act as a network former increasing both the viscosity and the surface tension of melts. This translates into poor free flow properties that affect pour rate of glass production in the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF). To mitigate this situation, DWPF operations limit the amount of aluminum contained in sludge. This study investigated the leaching of aluminum compounds from archived sludge samples. The conclusions found boehmite present as the predominant aluminum compound in sludge from two tanks. We did not identify an aluminum compound in sludge from the third tank. We did not detect any amorphous aluminum hydroxide in the samples. The amount of goethite measured 4.2 percentage weight while hematite measured 3.7 percentage weight in Tank 11H sludge. The recommended recipe for removing gibbsite in sludge proved inefficient for digesting boehmite, removing less than 50 per cent of the compound within 48 hours. The recipe did remove boehmite when the test ran for 10 days (i.e., 7 more days than the recommended baseline leaching period). Additions of fluoride and phosphate to Tank 12H archived sludge did not improve the aluminum …

Much evidence has been presented in favor of and against the existence of two distinct populations of quasars, radio-loud and radio-quiet. The SDSS differs from earlier optically selected quasar surveys in the large number of quasars and the targeting of FIRST radio source counterparts as quasar candidates. This allows a qualitatively different approach of constructing a series of samples at different redshifts which are volume-limited with respect to both radio and optical luminosity. This technique avoids any biases from the strong evolution of quasar counts with redshift and potential redshift-dependent selection effects. We find that optical and radio luminosities of quasars detected in both SDSS and FIRST are not well correlated within each redshift shell, although the fraction of radio detections among optically selected quasars remains roughly constant at 10% for z {le} 3.2. The distribution in the luminosity-luminosity plane does not appear to be strongly bimodal. The optical luminosity function is marginally flatter at higher radio luminosities.

The Australian Greenhouse Office contracted with the Collaborative Labeling and Appliance Standards Program (CLASP) for LBNL to compare US and Australian approaches to analyzing costs and benefits of minimum energy performance standards (MEPS). This report compares the approaches for three types of products: household refrigerators and freezers, small electric storage water heaters, and commercial/industrial air conditioners. This report presents the findings of similarities and differences between the approaches of the two countries and suggests changes to consider in the approach taken in Australia. The purpose of the Australian program is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while the US program is intended to increase energy efficiency; each program is thus subject to specific constraints. The market and policy contexts are different, with the USA producing most of its own products and conducting pioneering engineering-economic studies to identify maximum energy efficiency levels that are technologically feasible and economically justified. In contrast, Australia imports a large share of its products and adopts MEPS already in place elsewhere. With these differences in circumstances, Australia's analysis approach could be expected to have less analytical detail and still result in MEPS levels that are appropriate for their policy and market context. In practice, the analysis required …

We present preliminary results for the D{sub s} meson spectrum and decay constants in unquenched lattice QCD. Simulations are carried out with 2 + 1 dynamical quarks using gauge configurations generated by the MILC collaboration. We use the ''asqtad'' a{sup 2} improved staggered action for the light quarks, and the clover heavy quark action with the Fermilab interpretation. We compare our spectrum results with the newly discovered 0{sup +} and 1{sup +} states in the D{sub s} system.

Hysteresis in the relation between water saturation and matric potential is generally regarded as a basic aspect of unsaturated porous media. However, the nature of an upper length scale limit for saturation hysteresis has not been previously addressed. Since hysteresis depends on whether or not capillary rise occurs at the grain scale, this criterion was used to predict required combinations of grain size, surface tension, fluid-fluid density differences, and acceleration in monodisperse systems. The Haines number (Ha), composed of the aforementioned variables, is proposed as a dimensionless number useful for separating hysteretic (Ha < 15) versus nonhysteretic (Ha > 15) behavior. Vanishing of hysteresis was predicted to occur for grain sizes greater than 10.4 +- 0.5 mm, for water-air systems under the acceleration of ordinary gravity, based on Miller-Miller scaling and Haines' original model for hysteresis. Disappearance of hysteresis was tested through measurements of drainage and wetting curves of sands and gravels and occurs between grain sizes of 10 and 14 mm (standard conditions). The influence of surface tension was tested through measurements of moisture retention in 7 mm gravel, without and with a surfactant (sodium dodecylbenzenesulfonate (SDBS)). The ordinary water system (Ha = 7) exhibited hysteresis, while the SDBS …

The sensitivity of the yield strength of a 70 ksi HSLA steel to changes in processing variables was investigated using a laboratory hot-rolling mill. Along with a detailed examination of the hot-rolled microstructures, auxiliary experiments were conducted to determine how the decomposition of the austenite phase and the occurrence of ultra-fine precipitate formation could account for the yield strength variability. A set of guidelines was recommended for the reduction of the yield strength variability.

Maximum likelihood fits to data can be done using binned data (histograms) and unbinned data. With binned data, one gets not only the fitted parameters but also a measure of the goodness of fit. With unbinned data, currently, the fitted parameters are obtained but no measure of goodness of fit is available. This remains, to date, an unsolved problem in statistics. Using Bayes' theorem and likelihood ratios, they provide a method by which both the fitted quantities and a measure of the goodness of fit are obtained for unbinned likelihood fits, as well as errors in the fitted quantities. The quantity, conventionally interpreted as a Bayesian prior, is seen in this scheme to be a number not a distribution, that is determined from data.

We investigate computationally two recent mathematical findings involving unusual behavior of solutions of the Young-Laplace capillary equation in cylindrical tubes of particular sections. The first concerns a configuration for which smoothing of the boundary curve at a sharp corner leads from existence to non-existence of a solution over the container section in zero gravity. The second describes a discontinuous behavior of relative rise height in nesting tubes placed vertically in an infinite reservoir. The numerical results support and quantify the mathematical predictions.

Newspaper from Rose State College in Midwest City, Oklahoma that includes national, local, and campus news along with advertising.

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

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

Daily student newspaper from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

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The discovery that ultra-intense laser pulses (I > 10{sup 18} W/cm{sup 2}) can produce short pulse, high energy proton beams has renewed interest in the fundamental mechanisms that govern particle acceleration from laser-solid interactions. Experiments have shown that protons present as hydrocarbon contaminants on laser targets can be accelerated up to energies > 50 MeV. Different theoretical models that explain the observed results have been proposed. One model describes a front-surface acceleration mechanism based on the ponderomotive potential of the laser pulse. At high intensities (I > 10{sup 18} W/cm{sup 2}), the quiver energy of an electron oscillating in the electric field of the laser pulse exceeds the electron rest mass, requiring the consideration of relativistic effects. The relativistically correct ponderomotive potential is given by U{sub p} = ([1 + I{lambda}{sup 2}/1.3 x 10{sup 18}]{sup 1/2} - 1) m{sub o}c{sup 2}, where I{lambda}{sup 2} is the irradiance in W{micro}m{sup 2}/cm{sup 2} and m{sub o}c{sup 2} is the electron rest mass.At laser irradiance of I{lambda}{sup 2} {approx} 10{sup 20} W{micro}m{sup 2}/cm{sup 2}, the ponderomotive potential can be of order several MeV. A few recent experiments--discussed in Chapter 3 of this thesis--consider this ponderomotive potential sufficiently strong to accelerate protons from the …

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The effects of residual polishing slurry on the surface topology of highly-polished, Nd-doped metaphosphate laser glasses are reported. Glass samples were pitched polished using cerium oxide or zirconium oxide slurry at different pHs and then washed by different methods that allowed varying amounts of residual slurry to ''dry'' on the surface. Upon re-washing with water, some of the samples showed surface haze (scatter), which scaled with the amount of residual slurry. Profilometry measurements showed that the haze is the result of shallow surface pits (100 nm - 20 {micro}m wide x {approx}15 nm deep). Chemical analyses of material removed during rewashing, confirmed the removal of glass components as well as the preferential removal of modifier ions (e.g. K{sup 1+} and Mg{sup 2+}). The surface pits appear to result from reaction of the glass with condensed liquid at the slurry particle-glass interface that produces water-soluble phosphate products that dissolves away with subsequent water contact. Aggressive washing, to remove residual slurry immediately following polishing, can minimize surface haze on phosphate glasses. It is desirable to eliminate haze from glass used in high-peak-power lasers, since it can cause scatter-induced optical modulation that can cause damage to downstream optics.