The Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program offers extended unemployment benefits and job training to workers left jobless by the impact of foreign trade. A similar program was begun with the adoption of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This Transitional Adjustment Assistance Program (NAFTA-TAAP) not only aids trade-affected workers but also helps those who lose jobs because their firms have relocated production to Canada or Mexico.

Ensemble performance at the UNT College of Music.

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: Which county is responsible for mental health services proceeding costs under section 571.018 of the Texas Health and Safety Code and related question (RQ-0227-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: Authority of a commissioners court to contract to repair roads within a municipality that belong to a property owners association (RQ-02350-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 protective order may permit a perpetrator of family violence to collect his personal property from the residence he shared with his victim: Clarification of Attorney General Opinion JC-0112 (1999) (RQ-0231-JC)

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) needs comprehensive and accurate data to manage its programs more effectively. In reports going back to 1988, GAO has identified many long-standing problems in the agency's efforts to collect and use environmental data. This report summarizes GAO's findings on: (1) EPA's need to set risk-based priorities for its programs, and (2) develop outcome-oriented measures of its programs' results. EPA's ability to assess risks and establish risk-based priorities has been hampered by data quality problems, including critical data gaps, databases that do not operate compatibly with one another, and persistent concerns about the accuracy of the data in many of EPA's data systems. To ensure future success in developing outcome measures, however, EPA will need to make a long-term commitment to overcome major challenges to obtaining the data needed to show the results of environmental programs."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses the Department of Labor's Office of Workers' Compensation Programs (OWCP). GAO reviewed how OWCP communicates with injured federal workers, agencies who employ these persons, and medical and other service providers who treat them. To evaluate OWCP's system, GAO used criteria suggested by the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR). This report summarizes GAO's findings on NPR's study of private sector practices for providing telephone customer service, which included: (1) setting challenging goals for meeting callers' needs for timely and accurate information; (2) collecting credible performance data to measure progress in attaining those goals; and (3) improving telephone service by using the performance data and results to periodic surveys of customers and stakeholders to determine levels of satisfaction. GAO found that OWCP provided consistent customer service regardless of where injured workers live. GAO made 2,400 telephone calls to OWCP's 12 district offices. To compare OWCP's goals and practices for telephone communication with those of model organizations, GAO surveyed three agencies that have won awards for their telephone communication practices: the Social Security Administration, the Department of Veterans Affairs' Benefits Administration, and Ohio's Bureau of Workers' Compensation."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony focuses on the District of Columbia's progress and challenges in performance management. GAO discusses whether the District: (1) met the 29 performance goals that it scheduled for completion by the end of fiscal year 2000 that Congress chose from the more than 400 performance measures contained in the Mayor's fiscal year 2001 budget request, and (2) provided evidence that the performance data are sufficiently reliable for measuring progress toward goals. Mayor Williams' performance management system contains many--but not all--of the elements used successfully by leading organizations. The District could improve the usefulness of its mandated annual performance plans and reports by ensuring that the District government's most significant performance goals are included in both the annual performance plan and the annual performance report that federal law requires the Mayor to send to Congress every year."

Newspaper from Panola College in Carthage, Texas that includes news of interest to the college community along with advertising.

We have clearly shown that the film morphology dictates the anti-stiction properties of FDTS coatings. Release stiction is not observed when ideal monolayer films are present but can be extensive when thicker aggregate structures are present. This finding is significant because it indicates that agglomerate formation during processing is a major source of irreproducible behavior when FDTS coatings are used to release micromachined parts. The results could also help explain why coatings that are aged at high. humidity start to stick to each other. (AFM results show that humid environments promote the formation of aggregates from monolayer films.) The reason why aggregate structures promote stiction is currently unknown. However, it appears that aggregates interfere with the ability of FDTS to form dense, well-ordered coatings under microstructures, leading to surfaces that are sufficiently hydrophilic to allow for release stiction via an attractive Laplace force during drying.

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For the last ten years, the Japanese High-Level Nuclear Waste (HLW) repository program has focused on assessing the feasibility of a basic repository concept, which resulted in the recently published H12 Report. As Japan enters the implementation phase, a new organization must identify, screen and choose potential repository sites. Thus, a rapid mechanism for determining the likelihood of site suitability is critical. The threshold approach, described here, is a simple mechanism for defining the likelihood that a site is suitable given estimates of several critical parameters. We rely on the results of a companion paper, which described a probabilistic performance assessment simulation of the HLW reference case in the H12 report. The most critical two or three input parameters are plotted against each other and treated as spatial variables. Geostatistics is used to interpret the spatial correlation, which in turn is used to simulate multiple realizations of the parameter value maps. By combining an array of realizations, we can look at the probability that a given site, as represented by estimates of this combination of parameters, would be good host for a repository site.

Photovoltaic (PV) power systems, like other electrical systems, may be subject to unexpected ground faults. Installed PV systems always have invisible elements other than those indicated by their electrical schematics. Stray inductance, capacitance and resistance are distributed throughout the system. Leakage currents associated with the PV modules, the interconnected array, wires, surge protection devices and conduit add up and can become large enough to look like a ground-fault. PV systems are frequently connected to other sources of power or energy storage such as batteries, standby generators, and the utility grid. This complex arrangement of distributed power and energy sources, distributed impedance and proximity to other sources of power requires sensing of ground faults and proper reaction by the ground-fault protection devices. The different dc grounding requirements (country to country) often add more confusion to the situation. This paper discusses the ground-fault issues associated with both the dc and ac side of PV systems and presents test results and operational impacts of backfeeding commercially available ac ground-fault protection devices under various modes of operation. Further, the measured effects of backfeeding the tripped ground-fault devices for periods of time comparable to anti-islanding allowances for utility interconnection of PV inverters in the United …

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