This report discusses the steps that the Senate must take, and one more step that it may take, as it arranges to send a bill to conference committee.

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This report discusses the beginning steps in the Senate's legislative procedure. Ideas and recommendations for legislation may come from private sources, like ordinary citizens or interest groups; executive branch agencies and the White House; states and localities; and, of course, from individual Senators, committees and other Senate work groups, and party and chamber leaders. Any or all of these entities may also participate in drafting legislation (resolutions as well as bills).

The Senate adopted ad hoc procedures in approving committee operating budgets. With the Senate divided 51-48-1 at the beginning of the 108th Congress, Senate Democrats argued for a proportional allocation of committee staff between the parties. On January 15, after a week-long delay in the appointment of Senate committees, a unanimous consent agreement was reached providing for the proportional allocation of staff and office space between the parties on each committee, with a separate provision for each committee chair to control up to 10% of the committee budget to employ administrative staff serving both parties.

This report discusses the information related to gun control legislation. The contents include Gun-related statistics, federal regulation of firearms, possible issues in the 108th Congress

Congressional Research Service (CRS) report entailing information about current legislation in regards to school choice. Topics include, legislation, proposals in the 108th Congress, tax subsidies, block grants, etc..

This report provides information about the Federal Tax Benefits for Families' K-12 Education Expenses in the Context of School Choice. Some believe that comprehensive school reform is needed to improve the quality of secondary and elementary education.

Clean air issues were discussed at length in the 107th Congress, but legislation was not enacted, leaving the same issues for possible consideration in the 108th. The most prominent air quality issues discussed in this report are; the controversy over EPA’s proposed changes to the New Source Review (NSR) requirements, Clear Skies / Multi-Pollutant Legislation, gasoline additive MTBE, Conformity of Transportation Plans and SIPs Deadlines for Achieving the Ozone Air Quality Standard.

This report discusses the background of COOP planning, discusses elements of an effective COOP plan, and reviews the current policies governing COOP planning in the executive branch. The final two sections address issues and policy questions, including, among other matters, the status of agency preparedness, maintaining COOP preparedness, congressional committee oversight of COOP activity, and funding for contingency planning.

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This report mainly focuses on The Gender Wage Gap and Pay Equity. Women's participation in the labor market has undergone considerable change in the last few decades. The majority of today's married women have forsaken the traditional role of full time child care givers for the dual role of unpaid homemakers.

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

Funeral program for Grace Marguerite Pleasant, born August 18, 1913 and died April 21, 2003. The funeral was held at St. Paul United Methodist Church, officiated by Terrance K. Hayes.

Article on enthalpies of vaporization of organic and organometallic compounds, 1880-2002.

Recital presented at the UNT College of Music Main Auditorium in partial fulfillment of the Master of Music (MM) degree.

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Annually, over a billion tons of soil erodes from the nation's cropland, and thousands of other acres, including wetlands, are converted to new cropland. Soil erosion reduces the land's productivity and impairs water quality; drained wetlands reduce flood control. Under the 1985 Food Security Act, farmers risk losing federal farm payments if they do not apply conservation practices to reduce erosion or if they drain wetlands. Concerns about soil erosion and wetlands conversions continue, however, as do concerns about the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service's implementation of these provisions. GAO reviewed field offices' and headquarters' implementation and enforcement of the 1985 act's conservation compliance provisions."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Recent news articles in over 30 states describe the difficulty many parents have in accessing mental health services for their children, and some parents choose to place their children in the child welfare or juvenile justice systems in order to obtain the services they need. GAO was asked to determine: (1) the number and characteristics of children voluntarily placed in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems to receive mental health services, (2) the factors that influence such placements, and (3) promising state and local practices that may reduce the need for child welfare and juvenile justice placements."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "In 1998, the Transportation Equity Act for the 21St Century funded a series of highway safety programs. These safety programs, administered by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), increased funding to the states to improve highway safety through activities designed to encourage, among other things, the use of seat belts and child passenger seats and to prevent drinking and driving. The states implement these activities through a "performance-based" approach under which they establish highway safety goals and initiate projects to help reach those goals. NHTSA reviews the goals and provides oversight to the state highway safety programs. GAO was asked to provide trend data on highway safety, determine how much highway safety funding was provided and how the states used the funds, and review NHTSA's oversight of highway safety programs."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report responds to certain requirements of the Haitain Refugee Immigration Fairness Act of 1998 that authorized certain Haitian nationals and their dependents to apply to adjust their status to legal permanent residence. Section 902(k) of the act requires the Comptroller General to report every 6 months on the number of Haitian nationals who have applied and been approved to adjust their status to legal permanent residence. The reports are to contain a breakdown of the number of Haitians who applied and the number who were approved as asylum applicants, parolees, children without parents, orphaned children, or abandoned children; or as the eligible dependents of these applicants, including spouses, children, and unmarried sons or daughters. Reports are to be provided until all applications have been finally adjudicated."

An autogenous GTAW closure weld was developed for the Department of Energy's (DOE) primary container for the storage of plutonium-bearing materials. The occurrence of porosity at the tie-in point of the closure weld was investigated. The primary cause of the porosity was linked to the geometry at the root of the closure weld joint. This paper describes the mechanistic model that was developed to describe and predict the porosity.

Caching techniques have been used widely to improve the performance gaps of storage hierarchies in computing systems. Little is known about the impact of policies on the response times of jobs that access and process very large files in data grids particularly when data and computations on the data have to be co-located on the same host. In data intensive applications that access large data files over wide area network environment, such as data-grids, the combination of policies for job servicing (or scheduling), caching and cache replacement can significantly impact the performance of grid jobs. We present some preliminary results of a simulation study that combines an admission policy with a cache replacement policy when servicing jobs submitted to a storage resource manager. The results show that, in comparison to a first come first serve policy, the response times of jobs are significantly improved, for practical limits of disk cache sizes, when the jobs that are back-logged to access the same files are taken into consideration in scheduling the next file to be retrieved into the disk cache. Not only are the response times of jobs improved, but also the metric measures for caching policies, such as the hit ratio …

Because of two 3{sigma} anomalies, the Standard Model (SM) fit of the precision electroweak data has a poor confidence level, CL = 0.02. Since both anomalies involve challenging systematic issues, it might appear that the SM could still be valid if the anomalies resulted from underestimated systematic error. Indeed the CL of the global fit could then increase to 0.71, but that fit predicts a small Higgs boson mass, m{sub H} = 45 GeV, that is inconsistent at 95% CL with the lower limit, m{sub H} > 114 GeV, established by direct searches. The data then favor new physics whether the anomalous measurements are excluded from the fit or not, and the Higgs boson mass cannot be predicted until the new physics is understood. Some measure of statistical fluctuation would be needed to maintain the validity of the SM. New physics is favored, but the SM is not definitively excluded.

Soil and storm water discharges from the Department of Energy Kansas City Plant (KCP) contain polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) resulting from past spills and discharges. KCP has implemented a range of actions to mitigate the soil contamination and to reduce the measured PCB releases.

OAK A271 Hydroacoustic Studies Using HydroCAM - Station-centric Integration of Models and Observations Quarterly Report No. 2 January 2003 - March 2003. BBN's work from January through March of 2003 was focused on data collection, data analysis and software development. We continued our efforts to collect ground truth hydroacoustic data from sub-sea earthquakes in the Indian Ocean. These data are recorded on the International Monitoring System stations at Diego Garcia and Cape Leeuwin. The software development effort spanned two areas. Fixing problems and making small improvements to HydroCAM based on meetings at AFTAC in September 2002. We have also begun development of the software that will integrate local high-resolution bathymetry into lower-resolution global bathymetry for acoustic path predictions in HydroCAM. We hope that this will improve HydroCAM's ability to predict acoustic blockage. Unfortunately, due to corporate travel restrictions stemming from the war with Iraq, BBN will not be able to participate in the International Hydroacoustics Meeting in Hobart, Tasmania in May. However, we plan to provide Phil Harben with material to present and we plan to participate in the annual Seismic Research Review in Arizona this September.