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

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 …

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 …

Child welfare services are intended to protect children who have been abused or neglected or are at risk of maltreatment. These services take various forms, ranging from counseling and other supports for parents — which are intended to improve child well-being and prevent child abuse and neglect — to removal of the children from their homes. At the most extreme, these services include termination of parental rights and placement of the children for adoption. This report describes child welfare legislative issues in the 108th Congress.

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.

Cuba under Fidel Castro remains a hard-line communist state with a poor record on human rights that has deteriorated significantly since 2003. With the cutoff of assistance from the former Soviet Union, Cuba experienced severe economic deterioration from 1989 to 1993. While there has been some improvement since 1994, as Cuba has implemented limited reforms, the economy remains in poor shape. This report discusses the most recent development in Cuba, including political and economic conditions and the U.S. policy towards Cuba. It also considers the issues in U.S.-Cuban Relations.

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.

News release about the suspension of the "Cowboy Flyer," a DART bus service to Dallas Cowboy home football games, due to low revenues the previous year.

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Among the current issues in U.S.-Egyptian relations are the shared concerns over the terrorist attacks against Egyptian police, religious, government, and tourist facilities, and what those attacks maysignal for Egypt’s domestic stability. The two nations may disagree over Egypt’s interpretation of applying human rights practices to Islamic terrorists. The two countries disagree over the speed and depth, but not the need for some of Egypt’s economic reforms. Egypt and the United States agree on the importance of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the need to continue current Arab-Israel peace talks, and the need for regional stability. The two nations agree on Egypt’s determination to introduce democratic reforms to Egypt.

The 108th Congress has acted on a variety of disparate environmental measures; some of these represent proposals or issues that had been under consideration in the 107th Congress and earlier. Environmental issues considered by Congress tend to fall into several major categories: (1) funding issues — whether funding levels are adequate and focused on appropriate priorities; (2) expanding, renewing, or refocusing specific environment programs; (3) environmental issues that are important “subsets” of other major areas of concern, such as energy, defense, or transportation programs; and more recently, (4) terrorism and infrastructure protection in areas such as wastewater and chemical facilities.

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

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."

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 …

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.

This report summarizes the federal role in historic preservation. It provides descriptions of and funding information for some of the major preservation programs, including the Historic Preservation Fund (HPF), the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the National Register for Historic Places.

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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.

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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