Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Oceans Act of 2000 established the Commission on Ocean Policy (Commission) to make recommendations for a coordinated and comprehensive national ocean policy. The Commission is required to prepare and submit to the Congress and the President a final report of its findings and recommendations, which is scheduled for September 2003. The Oceans Act also requires the President to biennially submit a report to the Congress listing all federal programs related to ocean and coastal activities, including current and future funding levels for each program identified, which the Commission can use in its work."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The recent emergence of software-defined radio technology offers the potential to address key communications shortfalls and significantly improve military capabilities. The Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) program was initiated in 1997 to develop and apply this technology and to bring together separate service-led programs into a joint software-defined radio development effort. JTRS radios are intended to interoperate with existing radio systems and provide the war fighter with additional communications capability to access maps and other visual data, communicate via voice and video with other units and levels of command, and obtain information directly from battlefield sensors. As such, the JTRS program is considered a major transformational effort for the military and is expected to enable information superiority, network-centric warfare as well as modernization efforts, such as the Army's Future Combat Systems. Although total program costs have yet to be determined, the Army's effort to acquire and field close to half of the estimated 250,000 JTRS radios that are needed is expected to cost $14.4 billion. Congress asked us to review the JTRS program to determine if there are either management or technical challenges and risks that could jeopardize …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Since 1999, GAO has designated Forest Service's financial management as a high-risk area because of internal control and accounting weaknesses that have been identified by the Inspector General and GAO. Given these known risks and the hundreds of millions of dollars in credit card purchases made by the agency each year, GAO was asked to review the Forest Service's fiscal year 2001 purchase card transactions to determine whether (1) existing internal controls were designed to provide reasonable assurance that improper purchases would be prevented or detected, (2) purchases were made in accordance with established policies and procedures, and (3) purchases were made for a reasonable cost and reflected a legitimate government need."

Annual highway fuel taxes are collected by the Treasury Department and placed in the Highway Trust Fund (HTF). There is, however, no direct connection between the taxes collected by the Treasury Department and the gallons of on-highway fuel use, which can lead to a discrepancy between these totals. This study was conducted to determine how much of a discrepancy exists between the total fuel usages estimated based on highway revenue funds as reported by the Treasury Department and the total fuel usages used in the apportionment of the HTF to the States. The analysis was conducted using data from Highway Statistics Tables MF-27 and FE-9 for the years 1991-2001. It was found that the overall discrepancy is relatively small, mostly within 5% difference. The amount of the discrepancy varies from year to year and varies among the three fuel types (gasoline, gasohol, special fuels). Several potential explanations for these discrepancies were identified, including issues on data, tax measurement, gallon measurement, HTF receipts, and timing. Data anomalies caused by outside forces, such as deferment of tax payments from one fiscal year to the next, can skew fuel tax data. Fuel tax evasion can lead to differences between actual fuel use and …

Under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Energy/National Energy Technology Laboratory, a multi-disciplinary team led by the Advanced Power and Energy Program of the University of California at Irvine is defining the system engineering issues associated with the integration of key components and subsystems into power plant systems that meet performance and emission goals of the Vision 21 program. The study efforts have narrowed down the myriad of fuel processing, power generation, and emission control technologies to selected scenarios that identify those combinations having the potential to achieve the Vision 21 program goals of high efficiency and minimized environmental impact while using fossil fuels. The technology levels considered are based on projected technical and manufacturing advances being made in industry and on advances identified in current and future government supported research. Included in these advanced systems are solid oxide fuel cells and advanced cycle gas turbines. The results of this investigation will serve as a guide for the U. S. Department of Energy in identifying the research areas and technologies that warrant further support.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory performed a study of experience credit for professional engineering licensure for the Department of Energy's Industrial Assessment Center (IAC) Program. One of the study's goals was to determine how state licensure boards grant experience credit for engineering licensure, particularly in regards to IAC experience and experience prior to graduation. Another goal involved passing IAC information to state licensure boards to allow the boards to become familiar with the program and determine if they would grant credit to IAC graduates. The National Council of Examiners for Engineers and Surveyors (NCEES) has adopted a document, the ''Model Law''. This document empowers states to create state engineering boards and oversee engineering licensure. The board can also interpret and adopt rules and regulations. The Model Law also gives a general ''process'' for engineering licensure, the ''Model Law Engineer''. The Model Law Engineer requires that an applicant for professional licensure, or professional engineering (PE) licensure, obtain a combination of formal education and professional experience and successfully complete the fundamentals of engineering (FE) and PE exams. The Model Law states that a PE applicant must obtain four years of ''acceptable'' engineering experience after graduation to be allowed to sit for the PE …

Recent measurements of the infrared (IR) absorption coefficient of CH and CD capsules differ significantly from earlier estimated values from thin flat samples. The optimum wavelength for IR enhanced layering of DT and D{sub 2} ice layers inside of a NIF scale hohlraum depends on the relative ice and capsule absorption coefficients. This update of a previous memo shows the maximum ice heating with IR as a function of ice and capsule absorption instead of at discrete wavelengths. Also discussed is the leverage of other parameters, such as the IR absorption of the hohlraum wall and thermal conductivities of the support rods and exchange gas. The most likely capsule and ice absorption values limit the IR heating to between 2-7 Q{sub DT}. We find most leverage of the IR heating comes from increasing the ice to capsule absorption ratio. As before, this is the conduction only limit to IR, with convection potentially playing a large role.

Under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Energy/National Energy Technology Laboratory, a multi-disciplinary team led by the Advanced Power and Energy Program of the University of California at Irvine is defining the system engineering issues associated with the integration of key components and subsystems into power plant systems that meet performance and emission goals of the Vision 21 program. The study efforts have narrowed down the myriad of fuel processing, power generation, and emission control technologies to selected scenarios that identify those combinations having the potential to achieve the Vision 21 program goals of high efficiency and minimized environmental impact while using fossil fuels. The technology levels considered are based on projected technical and manufacturing advances being made in industry and on advances identified in current and future government supported research. Included in these advanced systems are solid oxide fuel cells and advanced cycle gas turbines. The results of this investigation will serve as a guide for the U. S. Department of Energy in identifying the research areas and technologies that warrant further support.

This best practices guide for residential HVAC system retrofits is aimed at contractors who want guidance on delivering energy efficient, cost effective and innovative products. It has been developed around the idea of having packages of changes to the building HVAC system and building envelope that are climate and house construction dependent. These packages include materials, procedures and equipment and are designed to remove some of the guesswork from a builder, contractor, installer or homeowner decisions about how best to carry out HVAC changes. The packages are not meant to be taken as rigid requirements--instead they are systems engineered guidelines that form the basis for energy efficient retrofits. Similar approaches have been taken previously for new construction to develop extremely energy efficient homes that are comfortable safe and durable, and often cost less than standard construction. This is best epitomized by the Building America program whose partners have built thousands of residences throughout the U.S. using these principles. The differences between retrofitting and new construction tend to limit the changes one can make to a building, so these packages rely on relatively simple and non-intrusive technologies and techniques. The retrofits also focus on changes to a building that will give …

We report on the production experience of the D0 experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron, using the SAM data handling system with a variety of computing hardware configurations, batch systems, and mass storage strategies. We have stored more than 300 TB of data in the Fermilab Enstore mass storage system. We deliver data through this system at an average rate of more than 2 TB/day to analysis programs, with a substantial multiplication factor in the consumed data through intelligent cache management. We handle more than 1.7 Million files in this system and provide data delivery to user jobs at Fermilab on four types of systems: a reconstruction farm, a large SMP system, a Linux batch cluster, and a Linux desktop cluster. In addition, we import simulation data generated at 6 sites worldwide, and deliver data to jobs at many more sites. We describe the scope of the data handling deployment worldwide, the operational experience with this system, and the feedback of that experience.

The expansion of pure electron plasmas due to collisions with background neutral gas atoms in the Electron Diffusion Gauge (EDG) experiment device is observed. Measurements of plasma expansion with the new, phosphor-screen density diagnostic suggest that the expansion rates measured previously were observed during the plasma's relaxation to quasi-thermal-equilibrium, making it even more remarkable that they scale classically with pressure. Measurements of the on-axis, parallel plasma temperature evolution support the conclusion.

Besides the Tevatron Electron Lens (TEL) runs as a R and D project for Tevatron Beam-Beam Compensation, it is used daily as a Beam Abort Gap Cleaner for collider operations. It can also be served as beam exciter for beam dynamics measurements and slow proton or antiproton bunch remover. This report describes all these applications and observations.

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

Funeral program for Joyce Anita Rich-Clay, born May 30, 1926 and died August 5, 2003. The funeral was held August 11, 2003 at St. Paul United Methodist Church, officiated by Rev. Terrence K. Hayes. The funeral arrangements were made through Lewis Funeral Home.

In plasma or rarified gas physics, collisions are rare but non-ignorable events. To model systems with arbitrary collisonality, it is necessary to start with a model that is fully capable of capturing collisionless, kinetic behavior. It is also necessary to build strategies to provide the essential economies into the scheme as collisions become more frequent. The desired model should progress smoothly and continuously from collisionless particle dynamics to collision-dominated fluid. We are developing a new approach [Hewett, JCP 2003; Larson, JCP 2003] to recover the physics of this partially collisional regime. Our approach, called CPK (for Collisional Particle Kinetics) is basically a ''smart particle'' PIC scheme with particles that have internal parameters representing internal ''fluid'' behavior as the CPK particles become large via merging. In the collisionless limit, the individual macro particles become numerous, small and cold through fragmentation--leading naturally to the traditional PIC limit. The new ''smart'' particle is a Gaussian distribution in all phase space directions. An arbitrary distribution of real particles can be made as a superposition of these ''particles''. One of the key capabilities is the ability to fragment each particle in a way that will not introduce new physics. With this procedure we can replace …

The study of the electrochemical behavior of wrought and welded Alloy 22 was carried out in 5 M CaCl{sub 2} between 45 and 120 C. Comparisons were made between the electrochemical behaviors of the wrought and welded forms of Alloy 22 Multiple Crevice Assembly (MCA) specimens. The susceptibility to corrosion was found to increase with increase in temperature in both the wrought and the welded forms of the alloy. The weld metal was found to be less susceptible to localized corrosion under the conditions tested.

We report recent results from our effort to develop ''smart'' particle methods. Unlike traditional PIC particles, the CPK (Complex Particle Kinetics) algorithm [1] allows particles with a Gaussian spatial profile and a Maxwellian velocity distribution to evolve self-consistently. These particles are then split spatially and/or in velocity to probe for emerging features as the simulation progresses. Aggressive merging is employed to control the number of simulation particles. An algorithm for modeling collisional plasmas using point particles with Maxwellian velocity distributions has been developed and reproduces known Monte-Carlo PIC results with less noise and significantly fewer particles [2]. The combination of the CPK algorithm with our new collision algorithm should allow simulation of plasmas in the previously cost-prohibitive partially-collisional regime. Results from one-dimensional simulations will be compared to experimental data and 2 and 3-D results will be discussed.

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A new radiation phantom with humanoid shape and adjustable thickness (RPHAT) has been developed. Unlike the RANDO{reg_sign} Phantom which is a fixed thickness, this newly designed phantom has adjustable thickness to address the variable thickness of real-world patients. RPHAT allows adjustment of the body thickness by being sliced in the coronal direction (as opposed to axial). Center slices are designed such that more sections can be added or removed while maintaining the anthropomorphic shape. A prototype of the new phantom has been successfully used in a study investigating peripheral dose delivery, where the amount of scatter within the patient, and therefore the patient thickness, plays a critical role in dose deposition. This newly designed phantom is an important tool to improve the quality of radiation therapy.

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

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

Daily newspaper from Sapulpa, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.