Semiweekly newspaper from Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas that includes local, national, and campus news along with advertising.

Weekly student newspaper from the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas that includes campus news and commentaries along with advertising.

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether the Railroad Commission of Texas may promulgate a rule imposing standards of conduct on its members in a contested case hearing (RQ-0374-JC)

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Applicability of section 43.0761, Local Government Code, to business users of water and sanitary sewer system services that have paid taxes to a water district (RQ-0373-JC)

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether the City of Lubbock may pay the Lubbock Fire Department to provide First Responder services inside the Lubbock County Hospital District (RQ-0377-JC)

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, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether a veterinarian may refuse to return an animal if its owner is unable or unwilling to pay for the veterinary medical services rendered, and related questions (RQ-0378-JC)

This paper introduces the DesignersWorkbench, a semi-immersive virtual environment for two-handed modeling, sculpting and analysis tasks. The paper outlines the fundamental tools, design metaphors and hardware components required for an intuitive real-time modeling system. As companies focus on streamlining productivity to cope with global competition, the migration to computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), and computer-aided engineering (CAE) systems has established a new backbone of modern industrial product development. However, traditionally a product design frequently originates from a clay model that, after digitization, forms the basis for the numerical description of CAD primitives. The DesignersWorkbench aims at closing this technology or ''digital gap'' experienced by design and CAD engineers by transforming the classical design paradigm into its filly integrated digital and virtual analog allowing collaborative development in a semi-immersive virtual environment. This project emphasizes two key components from the classical product design cycle: freeform modeling and analysis. In the freeform modeling stage, content creation in the form of two-handed sculpting of arbitrary objects using polygonal, volumetric or mathematically defined primitives is emphasized, whereas the analysis component provides the tools required for pre- and post-processing steps for finite element analysis tasks applied to the created models.

In FY-2000, Engineering at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory faced significant pressures to meet critical project milestones, and immediate demands to facilitate the reassignment of employees as the National Ignition Facility (the 600-TW laser facility being designed and built at Livermore, and one of the largest R&D construction projects in the world) was in the process of re-baselining its plan while executing full-speed its technology development efforts. This drive for change occurred as an unprecedented level of management and program changes were occurring within LLNL. I am pleased to report that we met many key milestones and achieved numerous technological breakthroughs. This report summarizes our efforts to perform feasibility and reduce-to-practice studies, demonstrations, and/or techniques--as structured through our technology centers. Whether using computational engineering to predict how giant structures like suspension bridges will respond to massive earthquakes or devising a suitcase-sized microtool to detect chemical and biological agents used by terrorists, we have made solid technical progress. Five Centers focus and guide longer-term investments within Engineering, as well as impact all of LLNL. Each Center is responsible for the vitality and growth of the core technologies it represents. My goal is that each Center will be recognized on an international scale …

B-roll footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story.

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

Semi-weekly newspaper from Seminole, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with extensive advertising.

Home page for the National Bioethics Advisory Commission.

This report summarizes the complete research findings of the PI. Included are titles and places of publication of all journal, book, and conference papers, and abstracts. A listing of major conferences and meetings where these research results were reported is also provided.

We have carried out a series of in situ liquid-release experiments in conjunction with a numerical modeling study to examine the effect of the rock matrix on liquid flow and transport occurring primarily through the fracture network. Field experiments were conducted in the highly fractured Topopah Spring welded tuff at a site accessed from the Exploratory Studies Facility (ESFS), an underground laboratory in the unsaturated zone at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. During the experiment, wetting-front movement, flow-field evolution, and drainage of fracture flow paths were evaluated. Modeling was used to aid in experimental design, predict experimental results, and study the physical processes accompanying liquid flow through unsaturated fractured welded tuff. Field experiments and modeling suggest that it may not be sufficient to conceptualize the fractured tuff as consisting of a single network of high-permeability fractures embedded in a low-permeability matrix. The need to include a secondary fracture network is demonstrated by comparison to the liquid flow observed in the field.

This quarterly report focuses on the two specific topics: (1) Reversibility of CO{sub 2} affinity of hydrotalcite materials; and (2)In-situ crystallization of hydrotalcite on commercial tubular ceramic membrane as substrate. The former relates to the foundation of the use of the hydrotalcite material as a membrane. The later addresses the first step of the membrane synthesis we propose. Our study concludes that the CO{sub 2} affinity of the hydrotalcite material is reversible at 150 C and in the presence of water using TG/MS. Additional study at a high pressure and/or high temperature will be performed to scope the operating range of the membrane. On the other hand, the in-situ crystallization is proven to be an effective first step for the hydrotalcite membrane synthesis. Our result indicates that about hydrotalcite covers about 50% of the porosity of the substrate, ideal as a seed for the 2nd step involving in-situ crystal growth. Our next quarterly report will report the result from the study on the 2nd step.

In FY-2000, Engineering at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory faced significant pressures to meet critical project milestones, and immediate demands to facilitate the reassignment of employees as the National Ignition Facility (the 600-TW laser facility being designed and built at Livermore, and one of the largest R&D construction projects in the world) was in the process of re-baselining its plan while executing full-speed its technology development efforts. This drive for change occurred as an unprecedented level of management and program changes were occurring within LLNL. I am pleased to report that we met many key milestones and achieved numerous technological breakthroughs. This report summarizes our efforts to perform feasibility and reduce-to-practice studies, demonstrations, and/or techniques--as structured through our technology centers. Whether using computational engineering to predict how giant structures like suspension bridges will respond to massive earthquakes or devising a suitcase-sized microtool to detect chemical and biological agents used by terrorists, we have made solid technical progress. Five Centers focus and guide longer-term investments within Engineering, as well as impact all of LLNL. Each Center is responsible for the vitality and growth of the core technologies it represents. My goal is that each Center will be recognized on an international scale …

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

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

Many scientific applications are I/O-intensive, which makes optimization and scaling difficult, especially on parallel architectures. The I/O requirements of computational biology applications are different from other scientific applications. The main difference is that many computational biology applications are embarrassingly parallel and require repeated read-only access to a large global database. In this paper we examine the scalability of an embarrassingly parallel computational biology application: psLayout, which played a crucial role in the mapping of the human genome. This study was carried out on three architecture: the native UCSC Linux cluster, a Linux cluster at Lawrence Livermore National Labs with a faster interconnect and NFS server, and the ASCI Blue-Pacific supercomputer. We show that a cluster equipped with a fast network and parallel file system or a scalable NFS server has reasonable I/O scalability. We believe that replication is an important issue when scaling to larger numbers of processors, and we introduce the design of a library for automatic data replication to address this issue.

We present a new method for simplifying large data sets that contain material interfaces. Material interfaces embedded in the meshes of computational data sets are often a source of error for simplification algorithms because they represent discontinuities in the scalar or vector fields over a cell. By representing material interfaces explicitly in a data simplification process, we are able to provide separate field representations for each material over a single cell and, thus, to represent the fields much more accurately. Our algorithm uses a multiresolution tetrahedral mesh supporting fast coarsening and refinement capabilities and error bounds for feature preservation. We represent a material interface or other surface of discontinuity as the zero set of a signed distance function. This representation makes it possible to maintain continuity of the surface across cell boundaries. It also makes it possible to represent more complex interface structures within a cell, such as T-intersections. Within a cell, a field is represented on either side of the surface of discontinuity by separate linear functions. These functions are determined by true and ''ghost'' values of the field at the vertices of the cell. By requiring that each vertex have only one ghost value for a given field …

We present a multiresolution technique for interactive texture based rendering of arbitrarily oriented cutting planes for very large data sets. This method uses an adaptive scheme that renders the data along a cutting plane at different resolutions: higher resolution near the point-of-interest and lower resolution away from the point-of-interest. The algorithm is based on the segmentation of texture space into an octree, where the leaves of the tree define the original data and the internal nodes define lower-resolution versions. Rendering is done adaptively by selecting high-resolution cells close to a center of attention and low-resolution cells away from it. We limit the artifacts introduced by this method by blending between different levels of resolution to produce a smooth image. This technique can be used to produce viewpoint-dependent renderings.

Complex surfaces and solids are produced by large-scale modeling and simulation activities in a variety of disciplines. Productive interaction with these simulations requires that these surfaces or solids be viewable at interactive rates--yet many of these surfaced solids can contain hundreds of millions of polygondpolyhedra. Interactive display of these objects requires compression techniques to minimize storage, and fast view-dependent triangulation techniques to drive the graphics hardware. In this paper, we review recent advances in subdivision-surface wavelet compression and optimization that can be used to provide a framework for both compression and triangulation. These techniques can be used to produce suitable approximations of complex surfaces of arbitrary topology, and can be used to determine suitable triangulations for display. The techniques can be used in a variety of applications in computer graphics, computer animation and visualization.

Virtual Environments (VEs) have the potential to revolutionize traditional product design by enabling the transition from conventional CAD to fully digital product development. The presented prototype system targets closing the ''digital gap'' as introduced by the need for physical models such as clay models or mockups in the traditional product design and evaluation cycle. We describe a design environment that provides an intuitive human-machine interface for the creation and manipulation of three-dimensional (3D) models in a semi-immersive design space, focusing on ease of use and increased productivity for both designer and CAD engineers.

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an oral interview with Leon Bruce. Bruce was born in Sayre, Oklahoma and joined the Merchant Marine Service in 1943. He was sent to Catalina Island, California for training. When he completed training he reported aboard the SS Schuyler Colfax (1943) a Liberty ship tanker. Bruce tells of his experiences while aboard the ship. In 1945 he went aboard the SS Mission San Rafael (1944). He relates the experience of being aboard as the ship carried high octane fuel to Biak, New Guinea where the fuel was off-loaded directly into vehicles of the 41st Infantry. The ship was later subjected to a torpedo attack and he recounts the actions taken to avoid being hit. After the war, Bruce became a minister and school teacher.