Three major dairy policy issues captured the attention of the 106th Congress, and are expected to remain issues of concern to the 107th Congress-- federal financial assistance for dairy farmers; implementation by USDA of changes to federal farm milk pricing regulations; and regional debates over the market effects of dairy compacts.

One of the most difficult issues of constitutional law concerns the extent to which the establishment of religion clause of the First Amendment imposes constraints on the provision of public aid to private sectarian schools. This report gives a brief overview of the evolution of the Court’s interpretation of the establishment clause in this area and itemizes the categories of aid that have been addressed by the Court and held to be constitutionally permissible or impermissible, both at the elementary and secondary school level and at the college level.

Currently, in most parts of the United States, timepieces are moved forward one hour in the spring and back one hour in the fall to provide an extended daylight period during the summer months. This is known as Daylight Saving Time (DST). Much debate and many changes led to this present practice. This report provides a brief history of the issues surrounding DST, an outline of the legislation that created and modified it, and a list of references to more discussions.

Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO published an exposure draft on government programs and functions that GAO has identified as "high risk" because of their greater vulnerabilities to waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement."

Other written product issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) new rule on the assessment and collection of regulatory fees for fiscal year (FY) 2000. GAO noted that: (1) the rule revises the regulatory fee schedule to bring it into compliance with the amount of such fees Congress has required FCC to collect for FY 2000; (2) the amount to be recovered is $185,754,000, or almost 7.67 percent more than was required for FY 1999; (3) the purpose of the fees is to recover the costs of regulation in the areas of enforcement, policy and rulemaking, international and user information activities; and (4) FCC complied with applicable requirements in promulgating the rule."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO reviewed the Immigration and Naturalization Service's (INS) development of an enterprise architecture, focusing on the: (1) status of INS' efforts; and (2) effectiveness of INS' structures and processes for managing this development effort."

Guidance issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This publication has been superseded by GAO-01-371G, Guaranteed Loan System Requirements: Checklist for Reviewing Systems Under the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act, March 2001. GAO published a checklist that reflects the Joint Financial Management Improvement Program's (JFMIP) revised Guaranteed Loan System Requirements (March 2000) to assist: (1) agencies in implementing and monitoring their guaranteed loan systems; and (2) managers and auditors in reviewing their guaranteed loan systems to determine if they substantially comply with the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act."

An article, written by David Brooks for The Weekly Standard, about a recent lunch get-together for gay and lesbian Republicans. It also focuses on Charles C. Francis and his role in Republican circles.

None

None

None

None

Studies of the influences of temperature, hydrostatic pressure, dc biasing field and frequency on the dielectric constant ({epsilon}{prime}) and loss (tan {delta}) of single crystal [pb (Zn{sub 1/3}Nb{sub 2/3})O{sub 3}]{sub 0.905} (PbTiO{sub 3}){sub 0.095}, or PZN-9.5PT for short, have provided a detailed view of the ferroelectric (FE) response and phase transitions of this technologically important material. While at 1 bar, the crystal exhibits on cooling a cubic-to-tetragonal FE transition followed by a second transition to a rhombohedral phase, pressure induces a FE-to-relaxer crossover, the relaxer phase becoming the ground state at pressures {ge}5 kbar. Analogy with earlier results suggests that this crossover is a common feature of compositionally-disordered soft mode ferroelectrics and can be understood in terms of a decrease in the correlation length among polar domains with increasing pressure. Application of a dc biasing electric field at 1 bar strengthens FE correlations, and can at high pressure re-stabilize the FE response. The pressure-temperature-electric field phase diagram was established. In the absence of dc bias the tetragonal phase vanishes at high pressure, the crystal exhibiting classic relaxor behavior. The dynamics of dipolar motion and the strong deviation from Curie-Weiss behavior of the susceptibility in the high temperature cubic phase are …

None

While several arguments can be proposed against the existence of particles with energy in excess of (3--5) x 10{sup 19} eV in the cosmic ray spectrum, these particles are actually observed and their origin seeks for an explanation. After a description of the problems encountered in explaining these ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) in the context of astrophysical sources, the authors review the so-called Top-Down (TD) Models, in which UHECRs are the result of the decay of very massive unstable particles, possibly created in the Early Universe. Particular emphasis will be given to the signatures of the TD models, likely to be accessible to upcoming experiments like Auger.

The Transportation Surety Center, 6300, has been conducting continuing research into and development of information systems for the Configurable Transportation Security and Information Management System (CTSS) project, an Object-Oriented Framework approach that uses Component-Based Software Development to facilitate rapid deployment of new systems while improving software cost containment, development reliability, compatibility, and extensibility. The direction has been to develop a Fleet Management System (FMS) framework using object-oriented technology. The goal for the current development is to provide a software and hardware environment that will demonstrate and support object-oriented development commonly in the FMS Central Command Center and Vehicle domains.

None

The authors presents the status of searches for large extra spacetime dimensions and technicolor at the Fermilab Tevatron. The author emphasizes recent D0 limits on graviton-mediated exchange processes, and CDF searches for new b{anti b} resonances and third-generation leptoquarks.

In this paper we review the present picture of km halo in proton linacs. Space-charge forces acting in mismatched beams have been identified as a major cause of beam-halo. We present a definition of halo based on a ratio of moments of the distribution of the beam coordinates. We find from our initial studies that for halo detined in this way, a beam can have rms emittance growth without halo growth, but halo growth is always accompanied by rms emittance growth. We describe the beam-halo experiment that is in preparation at Los Alamos, which will address questions about the beam profiles, maximum particle amplitudes, and rms emittance growth associated with the halo.

This report provides (1) an overview of all tracer testing conducted in the Culebra Dolomite Member of the Rustler Formation at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WPP) site, (2) a detailed description of the important information about the 1995-96 tracer tests and the current interpretations of the data, and (3) a summary of the knowledge gained to date through tracer testing in the Culebra. Tracer tests have been used to identify transport processes occurring within the Culebra and quantify relevant parameters for use in performance assessment of the WIPP. The data, especially those from the tests performed in 1995-96, provide valuable insight into transport processes within the Culebra. Interpretations of the tracer tests in combination with geologic information, hydraulic-test information, and laboratory studies have resulted in a greatly improved conceptual model of transport processes within the Culebra. At locations where the transmissivity of the Culebra is low (< 4 x 10{sup -6} m{sup 2}/s), we conceptualize the Culebra as a single-porosity medium in which advection occurs largely through the primary porosity of the dolomite matrix. At locations where the transmissivity of the Culebra is high (> 4 x 10{sup -6} m{sup 2}/s), we conceptualize the Culebra as a heterogeneous, layered, …

Environmental restoration and waste management (ER and WM) challenges in the United States Department of Energy (DOE), and around the world, involve radiation or other hazards which will necessitate the use of remote operations to protect human workers from dangerous exposures. Remote operations carry the implication of greater costs since remote work systems are inherently less productive than contact human work due to the inefficiencies/complexities of teleoperation. To reduce costs and improve quality, much attention has been focused on methods to improve the productivity of combined human operator/remote equipment systems; the achievements to date are modest at best. The most promising avenue in the near term is to supplement conventional remote work systems with robotic planning and control techniques borrowed from manufacturing and other domains where robotic automation has been used. Practical combinations of teleoperation and robotic control will yield telerobotic work systems that outperform currently available remote equipment. It is believed that practical telerobotic systems may increase remote work efficiencies significantly. Increases of 30% to 50% have been conservatively estimated for typical remote operations. It is important to recognize that the basic hardware and software features of most modern remote manipulation systems can readily accommodate the functionality required for …

The DIII-D Thomson system measures electron density and temperature with eight pulsed ND:YAG lasers along three paths through the plasma vessel. The components of the Thomson system are absolutely calibrated so the measurements can be combined into a single profile from a normalized plasma radius ({rho}) of about 0.1 to the edge of the plasma. A monochromator calibration and opto-electronic calibration measure the detectors' absolute sensitivity to background and pulsed light. A Rayleigh scattering calibration and transmission calibrations measure the transmission of light to the detectors. The calibration systems are being upgraded to reduce the effect of systematic errors on the temperature and density measurements. The systematic errors can be checked by a comparison of overlapping channels and estimated from fits to the profiles. The contributions of the systematic uncertainties relative to the statistical uncertainties of the measurement are discussed through simulations and experimental data.

QCD and QED exhibit an infinite set of three-point Green's functions that contain only OZI rule violating contributions, and (for QCD) are subleading in the large N{sub c} expansion. We prove that the QCD amplitude for a neutral hybrid {l_brace}1,3,5. . .{r_brace}{+-} exotic current to create {eta}{pi}{sup 0} only comes from OZI rule violating contributions under certain conditions, and is subleading in N{sub c}.

This document describes the problem domain and functional requirements of the SIENA framework. The software requirements and system architecture of SIENA are specified in separate documents (called SIENA Software Requirement Specification and SIENA Software Architecture, respectively). While currently this version of the document describes the problems and captures the requirements within the Analysis domain (concentrating on finite element models), it is our intention to subsequent y expand this document to describe problems and capture requirements from the Design and Manufacturing domains. In addition, SIENA is designed to be extendible to support and integrate elements from the other domains (see SIENA Software Architecture document).